Michael Schur is an American television writer and producer whose list of impressive credits include Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and award-winning fantasy comedy show The Good Place.
Set in the afterlife, The Good Place deals with the two major themes of morality and redemption, leaning into Schur’s own interest in ethics which was prompted by everyday personal experiences.
That interest led Schur to write his new book How To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer To Every Moral Question, in which he dives into the world of ethical problem-solving.
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Schur told Kim Hill that the inspiration for The Good Place sprang from a very mundane source - a cup of coffee.
"I used to go to a Starbucks near my house, I bought coffee, it was $1.73, I would give the barista two dollars, get 27 cents in change, and then I would throw it in the tip jar.
"Except, that one day I realised I didn't just throw it in - I waited until the barista had gotten my coffee and turned back around and was facing me so that he could see that I threw the 27 cents in the tip jar.
"I suddenly realised, what is this? What is this behaviour, what am I doing? I had all these questions, like am I trying to make him think of me as a good person, do I want some kind of credit for doing this very small good thing?
"It set me on this quest to figure out first of all how many other people did this - which it turns out, was a lot, which made me feel better, but also why are we doing this?"
"It made me feel like there was a TV show idea in these little tiny moments in our lives where we face these little strange ethical dilemmas and do things that are strange or odd, and that's what led to the creation of The Good Place."
Schur sees a bit of himself in The Good Place character Chidi, who was often frozen with indecision over what was the "right" ethical decision.
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"From a personality standpoint, there is a lot of me that can get paralysed by fear when it comes to making the simplest choice."
Ethical considerations can affect the smallest of moments - like choosing whether or not to tip at a coffee shop, or something as large as the Covid-19 pandemic.
For instance, an issue that has been particularly heated in New Zealand of late — is someone who refuses a vaccination making a selfish choice, or a brave moral stand for freedom?
"I believe that person is being selfish," he said. "It's not often that I like to tell people how I live their lives, this book notwithstanding."
"The issue with the pandemic to me is that every single human being on Earth, for probably the first time in recorded human history, was going through the exact same thing. The exact same threat existed to every single one of us, because of the way the world is interconnected."
America famously loves freedom, he said.
"The problem with this is that freedoms are not all the same."
You don't have the freedom to randomly yell fire in a crowded cinema, as the US Supreme Court famously decided, he said.
"The idea that freedom is actually limitless is absurd. People in my opinion who used freedom as a rallying cry to avoid getting this overwhelmingly effective and extremely safe vaccine were using an argument that I don't think is real, which is, we all deserve maximum freedom all the time. I don't think that's right. I don't think that's ever been the case.
"Even the most freedom-obsessed cultures have all put limits on every single freedom that we have. The most basic freedoms we have all have a ceiling.
"Your freedom to not take this vaccine and arguing that this is about freedom, it has a limit, and that limit is where it starts to affect other people in a really scary way."
Schur said he is sympathetic to the concerns and ideals of vaccine protesters, to a point.
"When that freedom begins to sicken and/or kill other people, then maybe there's a way that we should limit the amount of freedom that we indulge in."
But when it comes to ethical concerns, there is always a moving target, Schur said.
His book explores ideas such as "The Trolley Problem," a thought experiment where one imagines that they have to make a choice to pull a lever and divert a runaway trolley to save five people, but diverting the trolley will kill one single person.
There are many different ways you can consider that scenario, Schur said, ranging from who the people are to how you save them to when you make the choice.
"The Trolley Problem is wonderful in part because it's a very, very simple binary choice, pull the level or don't, but the way that you go about teasing the right answer can have a lot of ramifications and can lead you to some really interesting discussion as to what are and what aren't allowable actions."
Although the somewhat satirical title of his book is How To Be Perfect, Schur admits that the idea is to keep striving.
"I think the answer is that you should remove perfection as any kind of reasonable goal and instead focus on the idea that there are usually better and worse kinds of decisions you can make at any moment in your life, and the journey is to try to find those slightly better decisions and try to focus on making those instead of the slightly worse ones."
