How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (17 page)

In
How I Met Your Mother
, the fictional narrator is particularly useful: it is the entity that narrates, as a truth of the
How I Met Your Mother
world, that Ted is
lying
to his children about his (and uncle Marshall and aunt Lily's) grass-smoking days in college. In other words:
How I Met Your Mother
all but forces us to introduce the figure of the fictional narrator. More than just a neat problem case, our show is
evidence
in favor of one particular family of views.

On the other hand Currie's fictional narrator is not enough to solve the sub-versus-joint controversy, though. This guy (not Currie, the Terminator guy) is supposedly telling us about Ted's story to his children, making it true that Ted is lying to his kids in order not to encourage pot-smoking and filling in
the details that Ted cannot or will not remember: exact furniture, exact dialogues, exact positions of goats, exact Laser Tag high scores, exact brand of Lithuanian beer. One could go on, and that's precisely where things go south: exact aspect of two-feet-long sandwich, exact ingredients . . . Hey, if the fictional narrator tells us these things they must be true. That's what the fictional narrator is for. So they
were
eating subs after all. Case closed. Everyone please go home. Take that goat with you. Leave the Lithuanian beer, though.

Yeah, not so quick. The fictional narrator is simply a methodological fiction designed to help us reconstruct what counts as true in the show. And we are pretty (make this a very long “y”) certain that they were smoking, not eating—indeed, the fictional narrator was supposed to make
this
fictionally true. Smokitty smoke, fictional narrator, you are not fooling us with the lavish detail of those subs.

One could maybe go all Currie on this, and postulate the existence of
yet another
narrator, one that is telling us about the other Currie-fictional narrator who is in turn telling us about older Ted (who is in turn . . .). Some philosophers (one of us, but not the other, for example) enjoy this kind of complicated theoretical construction with a lot of fictional narrators, and narrators-in-the-fiction, and real narrators, each nested inside one another. But one cannot shake the impression that describing how come that certain things are true in
How I Met Your Mother
should not turn into an exercise in near-Medieval near-theology.

And the Moral Is . . . Okay, There's No Moral

We're all more or less clear about what's true in
How I Met Your Mother
and what's not true.

It's fictionally true that Robin is Canadian, Ted's children's mother has a face, Barney's disappearing-girl dream is just a dream, and Lily, Marshal, and Ted used to smoke dope while in college.

It's not true (nor is it false) in
How I Met Your Mother
that at three in the morning on the Third of November 2008 there was no one eating gazpacho in Brighton Beach, nor that there is a god. More tricky, as we have seen, is to get clear about
why
it's the case that those things are, or are not, truth in the fiction.

This is one of the situations that make philosophy fascinating: we have this mostly unproblematic, fun, enjoyable thing that is
How I Met Your Mother
. We
know
how to watch it, what it means, what events transpire about its fictional universe. And we, quite reasonably, assume that explaining how come that we know these things should be equally simple.
Yeah, not so quick
. When it comes to theory, we need to make all sorts of strange moves, invent all sorts of weird entities that somehow or other must be there, if the way in which we describe our everyday experience with shows such as
How I Met Your Mother
is even approximately accurate.

In fact,
How I Met Your Mother
is pretty (short “y” this time) great in that this mismatch between experience and theory is particularly striking. So, hey, if you do philosophy you get double the fun out of the same show. Sort of like a sub doubling as a joint. Not that we know anything about subs.

9

Telling Each Other
Everything

J
ORDAN
P
ASCOE

K
ids, in the Season Eight episode “The Lobster Crawl,” Marshall reveals that he knows all about Robin's attempt to seduce Barney—he knows about the purple and black lingerie and everything. “Lil, feel free to disregard that ‘Don't tell anyone, ever,'” Robin says. And Robin is right to feel betrayed: she made Lily
promise
that she would keep her secret, and Lily told Marshall.

Did Lily break her promise to Robin when she told Marshall about it? The answer depends on whether we think Lily
can
promise to keep secrets from Marshall, given that Lily has already promised to tell Marshall everything. Marshall and Lily's relationship involves a level of truth-telling that few of us achieve in our relationships, and one that often poses problems for members of their group. “In a real relationship, you share everything,” Lily says. “That's why Marshall and I don't keep any secrets.”

But of course, Marshall and Lily don't always meet the standards of honesty they set for themselves. Lily, it turns out, has a shopping problem and racks up thousands of dollars worth of credit card debt, and she keeps this from Marshall for over a year after their marriage. This lie seems like an obvious betrayal—but we sympathize with Lily's reticence in coming clean about it: no good can come from Marshall knowing about her mistakes.

One way of understanding Lily's and Marshall's promise to tell each other everything is to say that they have promised never to lie to one another. And this, most philosophers would
argue, is a commendable promise. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant is particularly strict about the duty to tell the truth we
never
have the right to lie—even when the lie is for good reasons. “By a lie,” Kant says, “a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a human being.” And while Barney willingly “annihilates his dignity as a human being” on an almost nightly basis in his quest to sleep with as many women as possible, Marshall and Lily generally hold themselves to high standards of honesty—standards that even Kant might agree with.

Even Kant, however, might have issues with the level of honesty Lily and Marshall require of each other. Lily and Marshall, Ted reminds us, tell each other
everything
: they tell each other the minute details of what they do each day, even down to what they have eaten that day. “They don't just tell each other
everything
. They want to
know
everything,” Ted tells Barney, and flashes back to sitting on the couch while Marshall tells Lily about his day. “So after the shower I was brushing my teeth and I was like, Oh man I wanted to have some orange juice I should've done that first! But I already had the toothpaste on the toothbrush so I just went ahead a brushed them anyway,” Marshall says. And Lily, clearly in suspense, asks anxiously, “What happened next?”

Though Kant is rigid in his requirement that we not lie to one another, there is reason to believe that he would think Marshall and Lily tell each other
too much
for a healthy relationship.

So what's a good level of honesty for a marriage like Lily's and Marshall's?

Adventures in Dowisetrepla

Kant tells us that lying is wrong for a number of reasons, all of which come back to his conception of the moral law—the universe's supreme Bro Code. First, the moral law requires us to never treat ourselves as exceptions to the rule: if we think that telling the truth is generally the right thing to do, and that everyone ought to tell the truth, then it's not okay for us to lie.

In the same way, if we would prefer that people not litter, we shouldn't litter ourselves, even occasionally. It's hypocritical for me to say that I value not littering, to hold others to that, and
then to litter myself. And so, similarly, it's hypocritical for me to say I value truth telling, and to then decide that it's okay for me to lie—even if I'm lying for what seems like a really good reason. So, when Lily lies to Marshall about her credit card debt, she's wrong in part because she's violating a more general rule of their marriage: Marshall and Lily tell each other the truth. (In fact, they tell each other everything). It's hypocritical for Lily to expect Marshall to abide by their shared rule to tell one another the truth, and then to break it herself. (And Lily, of course, knows this—she feels epically guilty about lying to Marshall. And about racking up incredible credit card debt. So guilty, in fact, that it's all she can do to not go on a crazy shopping spree).

From Kant's perspective, though, Lily is wrong to lie to Marshall about her credit card debt for a second, more serious reason: when Lily lies to Marshall in this way, she fails to treat him as an end in himself. Kant tells us that morality consists largely in the basic requirement that we treat others as “ends in themselves” rather than “as means to an end,” and this really just means that we have to respect others and not use them as a means to our own ends. So we probably shouldn't, as Barney does, construct entire fake identities in order to get women into bed and then abandon them freely the next morning.

Part of respecting someone as an “end in themselves” is respecting their right to choose their own actions, goals, and projects. And when we lie to someone, Kant argues, we fail to fully inform them of their options, and we deny their right to make these choices freely. So, if Robin asks Ted to lend her $100, and she promises to pay him back, knowing all along that she'll never actually pay him back, Robin does more than lie to Ted: she denies him the right to decide, on his own, whether he wants to give Robin $100. It's entirely possible that, if Robin really needed the $100, Ted would just give it to her, no questions asked. And he'd get to feel good about it, too—he'd be helping a friend in need. But when Robin lies to him, and says she'll pay him back, she takes away his opportunity to choose for himself, and to do a good deed for a friend in need. By lying to Ted, Robin treats Ted as less than a fully rational, independent person. She's making his choice for him, and denying him the space in which to think for himself.

We see this play out pretty clearly in the episode “Dowisetrepla,” where Lily lies to Marshall about her credit card debt. Marshall and Lily are looking into buying a home, and Lily knows that her bad credit is going to get in the way of their application for a mortgage. Marshall is weighing whether or not to buy a place—he's taking into account the cost of real estate, the burden of his student loans, and his and Lily's shared income. Without the piece of information Lily is hiding from him—the amount of her debt, and the fact of her shopping problem—he's not able to make a fully informed decision.

Marshall and Lily's apartment hunting adventures are shaped by another kind of lie. The apartment they're looking at is in the “trendy, new” Dowisetrepla neighborhood, which no one has ever heard of, but which the real estate agent assures them is “
the
up-and-coming neighborhood.” But the real estate agent only shows them the apartment on a Sunday, while extolling the virtues of the neighborhood. It's not until Marshall and Lily have bought the place that they discover the true meaning of “dowisetrepla”: downwind from the sewage treatment plant. The real estate agent has purposely omitted this fact from her description of the neighborhood, and in doing so, has led Lily and Marshall to make a poorly-informed (and quite smelly) decision about buying their new home. The real estate agent has treated Lily and Marshall as a means to her end (selling the apartment) rather than as ends in themselves, capable of making reasoned choices.

We tend to expect this sort of betrayal from real estate agents and others whose livelihood depends on selling things to people, and who benefit from selling those things for more than they're worth. And it's hard to fault the real estate agent too much for her deception, since Lily and Marshall asked her frighteningly few questions, and never bothered to check the accuracy of her description. (“It should have gone like this,” Ted tells us in voiceover, showing Marshall asking canny questions about the place. But instead we see only Marshall's childlike enthusiasm—“We love it! Sell it to us! We will give you
so much money
!”) It's harder to excuse using lies to manipulate people in interpersonal relationships—something Barney does with alarming frequency.

In the same episode, Barney uses the empty apartment Lily and Marshall are trying to buy in order to deceive his latest
conquest about his interest in commitment. His lies, in this encounter, are many: he lies about his name and his address, to lure Meg, the girl in question, back to the apartment and into bed; he falsely tells her that he's looking for a committed relationship and a “woman's touch” around his “home,” and he even tells her—blatantly falsely—that he's falling in love with her. In the morning, he offers to make her waffles, only to abandon her alone in the apartment, where she will discover that nothing that she'd learned over the last twelve hours was true.

Barney lies to get girls into bed all the time, but the extent of this lie—involving, as it does, an entirely fake set, fake self, and fake proclamation of love—is especially troubling. It offers us a particularly clear example of how lies are an instance of treating someone else as a means to one's end (in this case, getting Meg into bed), and how, in doing so, we block the other person's capacity to achieve their own ends. Meg can't possibly make an informed decision about her interaction with Barney, because she knows nothing at all about the decision she's making. By presenting her with such a well-constructed deception, Barney lulls her into believing that she's choosing for herself, all the while drawing her into a situation from which she would likely have run screaming. Barney treats Meg as if she were a thing not because he wants to sleep with her once and never see her again—lots of women would willingly sleep with Barney, or at least, Neil Patrick Harris, and then never see him again—but because he refuses to give her the choice to do so.