How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (18 page)

Barney's lie, like Lily's lie about the credit card debt and the real estate agent's lie about Dowisetrepla, is designed to make someone else do what he wants her to do, without presenting her with a full account of the choice she's making. Kant warns us that when we lie in this way, we not only fail to respect the person we're deceiving—we also make ourselves responsible for the unforeseeable consequences of the lie we're telling. We force the other person to act within the framework of our deception, which denies them the ability to take full responsibility for their choices. By lying, we become, in some sense or another, responsible for those choices. We can try to avoid this responsibility by dissolving our relationship with the person we've lied to, as Barney and the real-estate agent do, but in a marriage, like Lily and Marshall's, there is no way out. When Lily lies to Marshall about her credit card debt, and Marshall, who believes they
have more disposable income than they do, then applies for a mortgage they can't afford, it is Lily, rather than Marshall, who becomes morally liable for their terrible choices.

What Doppelganger?

Unlike Barney and the real estate agent, Lily's motive for lying to Marshall isn't vicious: she's not really trying to manipulate him for some end of her own. She's trying to protect him, and herself, from an unpleasant truth. Is it okay to lie to someone for really, really good reasons?

In “Doppelgangers,” Lily and Marshall make a deal: they will be ready to have a baby when they find Barney's doppelganger. They've found doppelgangers for the rest of the gang—Robin's is a lesbian, Lily's is a Russian stripper, Marshall's has a mustache, and Ted's is (awesomely) a Mexican wrestler. So Lily and Marshall, unable to decide whether they're ready to have a baby, agree that they'll start trying to get pregnant when they find the fifth doppelganger. (“Stands to reason,” Marshall says when Lily proposes this solution.) When Marshall finds the doppelganger—a taxi driver—Lily turns to Marshall and says, “Marshall Eriksen, put a baby in my belly.”

But Marshall discovers, shortly thereafter, that it wasn't a doppelganger at all: it was Barney himself, in disguise as part of a plot to sleep with a woman from every country in the world. (The hitch: it turns out women don't want to sleep with cab drivers.) And so he agonizes over whether to tell Lily the truth. His motives are good ones: he and Lily are genuinely overjoyed that the universe has told them it's time to make a baby, and Lily feels safe and supported in her knowledge that the appearance of the fifth doppelganger is a sign from the universe that they're ready to undertake this adventure. And it's not like anyone is harmed by this lie—they were planning to have a baby anyway, and the true identity of the doppelganger is really just a symbolic thing. But, silly as it is, it's an
awfully
big lie: if Marshall lies to Lily about this, he's lying to her about the very premise of them becoming parents.

So is it okay for Marshall to lie to Lily about something so silly and inconsequential in order to help her feel happy and secure in her decision to have a child? Kant says no—even the best motives can't make up for the fact that he's failing to treat
her as an end in herself, capable of making a fully informed decision. Kant is so strict on this point that he infamously argues that lying is
never
okay, even when you're lying to a murderer who's shown up at your door to seek the whereabouts of your friend, who's hiding in your closet. Even if you
know
the guy at the door is out to murder your friend, Kant argues that it's still not okay to lie to him.

Kant's critics thought this was crazy—surely, they argued (sagely), the murderer doesn't have a right to the truth in this case, and surely, you have an obligation (because of the Bro Code, if nothing else) to protect your friend. But Kant claimed that everyone, simply by virtue of being human, has “a right to the truth”—we can't go around distinguishing murderers from friends. And if we do, Kant says, we've already proven ourselves to be liars. If we stop and ask ourselves whether, in this case, it wouldn't just make more sense to lie to the murderer and protect our friend, if we ask “permission to think first about possible exceptions” then we are “already a liar,” according to Kant. Telling the truth is a duty, Kant says, and not something to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Although the whole telling-the-truth-to-the-murderer bit seems like a questionable piece of advice, there's something to be said for Kant's insistence that we shouldn't decide whether or not to lie on a case-by-case basis. On the night that Marshall and Lily are supposed to start making a baby, Marshall must decide whether or not to tell Lily the truth about Barney and the doppelganger. In the moment he hesitates before kissing her, we can almost imagine what's running through his head:
is there really any reason to tell her? What's the worst that could happen? We're ready to have a baby, anyway! It
could
have been a doppelganger. Baby Eriksen!
And, in the face of awesome consequences (Baby Eriksen!) and minimal downsides (
what's the worst that could happen?
), Marshall decides to go for it. And it's possible that—if Barney hadn't shown up a minute later and told the truth—he'd have gotten away with it. Because there are lies like that—lies we can get away with, lies with good consequences all around, lies that bring peace and comfort to all involved.

Except that Marshall has a duty to his relationship with Lily: they tell each other
everything
. And this thing—this silly, symbolic, the-universe-told-us-it-was-time-to-have-a-baby thing—is a pretty big betrayal of that duty. Telling Lily this lie
would mean that Marshall let his desire for a baby come before his marital obligations, and it would mean that he had taken from her the right to make this decision for herself.

Telling Each Other
Everything

But Marshall's motive for telling Lily the truth about Barney's doppelganger in the end hinges less on a concern about failing to respect her than about the damage it would do to their relationship: that lie would mean he would always know something she didn't. And that small, meaningless deception would, over time, eat away at them. For Marshall and Lily, truth telling is an important form of intimacy, and both worry about the ways in which even the smallest lies might undermine the strength and openness of their relationship.

One of the ways Marshall and Lily practice marital intimacy is by telling each other, as Ted puts it,
everything
. They end each day by telling each other what they've had to eat that day—“An everything bagel, a chicken breast, celery sticks, and a spoon of peanut butter,” Lily tells Marshall in “Three Days of Snow.” Their friends find this compulsive, detail-oriented truth telling rather bizarre. In “Slap Bet,” Barney challenges Lily's claim that Marshall tells Lily everything, quizzing her on Marshall's darkest secrets: (Barney) “Bill's bachelor party in Memphis?” (Lily) “Oh, when they had to pump out all the nickels from his stomach?”

Surprisingly, despite his insistence on the immorality of all lying, I suspect that Kant might be a bit worried about the level of truth-telling Marshall and Lily engage in. If lying prevents us from respecting others, too much truth, too, might undermine respect. For Kant, the critical ingredient in friendship is respect: moral friendship, he tells us, involves the “complete confidence of two persons in revealing their secret judgment and feelings to each other, as a far as such disclosures are consistent with mutual respect.” And this description of friendship, with its emphasis on mutual respect and confidence in one another, sounds an awful lot like Lily and Marshall's relationship.

Kant worried about what too many confidences and too much openness in relationships might do to our capacity to respect one another. In a letter written in 1792, Kant offered advice of this sort to a young woman seeking his opinion about
her romantic relationship. She had lied to her lover, and he had abandoned her; Kant, predictably, told her that the lie was wrong and that she needed to repent for it. But he then suggested that, while lying violated one sort of duty, perhaps she had nonetheless shared too much with her lover to be deserving of his respect. “We can't expect frankness of people, since everyone fears that to reveal himself completely would be to make him despised by others,” Kant wrote, assuring her that “this lack of frankness, this reticence, is very different from dishonesty.” Indeed, he suggests that reticence may in fact be a virtue of friendship: we should avoid telling friends things that may cause them to lose their respect for us.

Barney gives Ted a strikingly similar piece of advice in “Slap Bet,” when Ted agonizes over a secret Robin is keeping from him. “You should be grateful Robin has a secret,” Barney tells him. “The more you know about someone, the closer you get to hitting the fatal “Oh” moment.” But Lily, predictably, disagrees: “In a real relationship, you share everything,” she says. “That's why Marshall and I don't keep any secrets.”

Even Lily thinks that a little reticence is essential to a healthy marriage In “Zip, Zip, Zip,” Lily and Marshall find themselves trapped in the bathroom while Ted has a romantic date with Victoria. After an hour of hiding out, Lily says to Marshall, “Baby, there's something I have to do, and if I do it in front of you, it will change the entire nature of our relationship.” Lily drank a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew before they got stuck in there, and she has to pee. But Lily and Marshall have kept the bathroom door closed in their relationship: in nine years, Lily has never peed in front of Marshall. And this, she argues, is part of keeping some of the “mystery” alive in their marriage.

We might think it odd that Lily and Marshall tell each other
everything
, but still keep the bathroom door closed. But this apparent contradiction highlights the tension between respect and intimacy present in committed romantic relationships. Kant thought this tension was impossible to manage—he suggests that marriage is an intimate relationship and that in this sense it is quite different from the “mutual respect” involved in a moral friendship. And no wonder, given his concerns with reticence: sex is rarely a reticent sort of activity.

Sex, for Kant, involves an unacceptable sort of use of another person, and this use tends to undermine respect. Kant
doesn't think the respect involved in friendship is enough to overcome the disrespect that sex entails, and so he argues that sex is permissible only within marriage. In marriage, partners have a legal obligation to respect one anther, and they become, before the law, one person. And this means, Kant says, that married partners have “a right to each other akin to rights to things”: married partners can use each other
as if
they were things (crazy monkey sex). Married partners promise to
share ends
, and so when they use one another for sex, they're doing it for shared ends.

As a married couple, Marshall and Lily function, from certain perspectives, as a single moral entity, with a single set of ends. So the sort of sexual use Marshall and Lily make of each other is fundamentally different from the sort of use Barney makes of the women he sleeps with. Barney's ends are his own, and he's using these women as a means to his own ends, while Marshall and Lily have shared ends, and they can use one another however they want to to achieve those ends.

But because Marshall and Lily share ends, and use each other for those ends, they've failed at all that reticence and respect that's key to a Kantian account of friendship. So, because marriage is an intimate (and sexual) relationship (and because he didn't have terribly high opinions of women) Kant doubted that one could be friends with one's wife.

And this is, of course, ridiculous.
Of course
you can be friends with your wife. Marshall and Lily refer to one another as “best friends” all the time, and it doesn't seem as though all that sex has seriously undermined their respect for one another (although Lily does occasionally objectify Marshall when they're not having enough sex). Their friendship is, in fact, the great strength of their marriage. But this isn't to say that striking a balance between intimacy and respect is always easy, as their escapades in the bathroom suggest. Even more challenging is striking a balance between their intimacy with each other and their obligations to respect their friends' secrets.

The Canadian Mall Marriage 6000

There's another problem embedded in Lily and Marshall's practice of advanced truth-telling: sometimes they find themselves telling one another truths they've promised to keep as
secrets. So, in “Slap Bet,” while Marshall tells Lily what he's eaten that day, he also inadvertently reveals that he went to the library and discovered that Robin had never been married—a fact he'd
sworn
to Ted he'd keep secret. We've established that Marshall has an obligation to tell Lily the truth—but what is he supposed to do when he also has an obligation to keep Ted's secret? Does the general obligation to be truthful with one's spouse trump specific promises to keep secrets?

One answer is that Marshall and Lily shouldn't ever promise to keep things from one another. But, in a circle of friends as tight as theirs, this isn't going to work. Robin needs to trust Lily to keep her secrets (even though Lily is a self-admittedly
terrible
secret keeper), and Marshall sometimes needs to abide by Barney's Bro Code and not tell Lily everything the guys discuss.

A second answer is that no one should tell Lily or Marshall anything they wouldn't want the other to know—and Marshall and Lily, similarly, should refuse confidences they can't share with the other person. But this solution faces the same problem as the first: it's impractical, in a friendship circle so small, to simply refuse to hear the secrets our friends want to tell us, and these refusals would put them in danger of becoming bad friends.