In ethics and value theory, perfectionism is the persistence of will in obtaining the optimal quality of spiritual, mental, physical, and material being.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell develops the concept of moral perfectionism as the idea that there is an unattained but attainable self that one ought to strive to reach.
"[3] Cities of Words pairs chapters on major philosophers in the Western tradition, such as Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Sigmund Freud and John Rawls, endorsing Cavell's understanding of moral perfectionism and such artists as William Shakespeare, Henry James, Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, with chapters on a film, all but one (A Tale of Winter (1992) by Eric Rohmer) a member of the classical Hollywood genres; what he called "the comedy of remarriage" and "the melodrama of the unknown woman".
Kant regarded such a society as government paternalism, which he denied for the sake of a "patriotic" state (imperium non paternale, sed patrioticum).
[6] From a critical perspective, similar sentiments were expressed by Matthew Arnold in his Culture and Anarchy essays.
[7] Moreover, in the preface of that text, he wrote: The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.
Philosopher Mark Alan Walker argues that rational perfectionism is, or should be, the ethical imperative behind transhumanism.