Do you? (The “trolley problem” also gets an entire chapter in Schur’s book.) He dedicated an entire episode to moral philosophy’s most famous dilemma: a runaway trolley is about to hit and kill five people, but you have the power to divert it so it only hits one person. It was Schur’s way of navigating the ethical quandaries he’d been pondering in his decade of study, trying to parse what separates a “good” person’s admission to Heaven from a “bad” person’s ticket to eternal damnation.

Hoping to avoid being kicked out, she spends her time trying to learn how to be a good person. The show’s main character, played by Kristen Bell, is a person who, after spending most of her life acting selfishly and immorally, finds herself mistakenly placed in heaven. His TV writing and ethics obsession collided in 2016, when he created The Good Place. In the meantime, Schur’s career took off, writing for The Office, then co-creating both Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He wanted to learn how to live a moral life. Though the episode ended with Schur calling the Saab owner to apologize and sending him a check for the full repair (not to mention raising $27,000 for Katrina victims), it also sent Schur down a moral philosophy rabbit hole: Had his public shaming crossed the line? Was raising a boatload of money still a virtuous end if it came through unethical means? How should he have acted? He started reading books on ethics and cold-calling philosophy professors. It’s a project that Schur traces directly back to this very exchange in 2005. “We were excitedly discussing the most recent events, and pledges, and media requests and we looked at each other and instantly read on each other’s faces the same queasy feeling: there was something very wrong about what we were doing… though we couldn’t pinpoint what it was,” Schur writes in his new book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question.

Which is when Schur and his wife started to feel very guilty. More than $20,000 would go to the Red Cross if this guy agreed to not fix his bumper. In the following days, as Schur told this story, both in person and on a blog, people sharing in his moral outrage started making their own pledges. Instead of putting the $836 toward a bumper that didn’t need it, Schur, a concerned citizen, offered to donate $836 to the Red Cross’s Katrina relief efforts. At the time, Hurricane Katrina had just devastated New Orleans. A bit incensed, Schur proposed a solution. But when Schur went to examine the damage to the Saab, he found a barely discernible crease. Some days later, the couple received a claim for $836. In 2005, television writer Michael Schur’s then fiance gently rear-ended a Saab in slow-moving traffic.

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