How to Be Perfect

How to Be Perfect

2022 • 304 pages

Ratings52

Average rating4.3

15

The pursuit of perfection is an impossible one, and that's something How To Be Perfect acknowledges: no matter how we strive for it, we will never achieve perfection.

We can, however, strive to be better. We can make better decisions that are grounded in moral philosophy and that bring us closer to being good people, however you may define that status.

As a primer on moral philosophy, How To Be Perfect can't be beat: it takes grand ideas and distills them into easily-understandable concepts. It compares and contrasts these philosophies helping us understand that our desire to be “good” can be interpreted in many ways and can lead to a multitude of oft-contrasting decisions.

In the end, being good—being perfect—relies both on circumstance and choices, and according to existentialism, choices are all we have in a meaningless world. I try to make the right choices every day, but I know I often fail. We all do.

All we can do is continue to make choices based our own philosophy of the world—guided by the moral philosophy that came before us—and hope that the decisions we make are good. Not perfect, but at least in its pursuit.

February 20, 2023