How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Mike Schur is out now from Jonathan Ball Publishers.

‘What matters isn’t if people are good or bad. What matters is, if they’re trying to be better today than they were yesterday.’ – Michael, The Good Place

From the writer and executive producer of the award-winning Netflix series The Good Place that made moral philosophy fun: a foolproof guide to making the correct moral decision in every situation you ever encounter, anywhere on earth, forever.

How can we live a more ethical life?

This question has plagued people for thousands of years, but it’s never been tougher to answer than it is now, thanks to challenges great and small that flood our day-to-day lives and threaten to overwhelm us with impossible decisions and complicated results with unintended consequences.

Plus, being anything close to an ‘ethical person’ requires daily thought and introspection and hard work; we have to think about how we can be good not, you know, once a month, but literally all the time.

To make it a little less overwhelming, this fascinating, accessible and funny book by one of our generation’s best writers and adept minds in television comedy, Michael Schur, boils down the whole confusing morass with real life dilemmas (from ‘should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?’ to ‘can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people?’), so that we know how to deal with ethical dilemmas. Much as Chidi used humour and philosophy to make Eleanor a less selfish person, Schur takes us on a journey through the 2,500-year discussion of ethics, sketching a roadmap for how we ought to act along the way.

By the time the book is done, we’ll know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. We will be perfect, and all our friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, we’ll gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day

With contributions from Professor Todd May of Clemson University, who served as an advisor on The Good Place, this is a brilliant, clever and hugely entertaining book about one of the most important topics in the world.

‘The problem is, if all you care about in the world is the velvet rope, you will always be unhappy, no matter which side you’re on.’ – Tahani Al-Jamil, The Good Place

About the author

Michael Schur is a television writer and producer who has worked on shows like The Office, Master of None, The Comeback, and Hacks, and created or co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, The Good Place, and Rutherford Falls. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jennifer, and their two kids, William and Ivy.

Categories International Non-fiction

Tags How to Be Perfect Jonathan Ball Publishers Michael Schur New books New releases