How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (19 page)

So this seems to leave us with the notion that Marshall and Lily should keep secrets for their friends, and should, if necessary, lie to one another about them.

But this solution poses another problem, one thrown into particularly sharp relief by the radical forms of honesty and intimacy that Marshall and Lily more regularly engage in. Marshall and Lily have, after all, promised to tell each other
everything
, and so any promise they make to a friend to keep a secret from each other, is a violation of that first promise. And this leads to all sorts of tricky moral calculations. In “Slap Bet,” Marshall finds himself caught between his specific promise to Ted that he will keep Robin's secret, and his more general promise to Lily to tell her everything.

We might say here that the specific promise outweighs the general promise, since the terms of the specific promise (to keep Robin's secret) are clear and limited, while the terms of the general promise (to tell Lily everything) are somewhat
fuzzier. (What is “everything,” anyway? If Marshall tells Lily that he had a bagel for breakfast, but not that he almost had chicken salad on it and then wound up with scallion cream cheese, is he failing to tell her “everything”?) In other words, if Marshall was going to “lawyer” us about this promise, he might be able to get away with the claim that he met the terms of both promises by keeping his promise to Ted, since telling Lily “everything” is a vague promise to make.

Marshall might even take this a step further, arguing that telling Lily “everything” isn't a promise he's qualified to make (I mean, who has the time to actually tell someone
everything
?) And, if keeping the promise isn't
possible
, then we might say that it's not a permissible promise to make. We make promises like this all the time, and no one expects us to keep them. So, if Marshall were to promise Lily that he would give her the sun, moon, and stars, we don't seem to think Lily has the right to hold him to it: giving her the sun, moon, and stars isn't actually possible. It's a sort of metaphorical promise, and he might find himself bound by the “spirit” of the promise, without being held to the specific terms it dictates.

So maybe Marshall is bound by the “spirit” of the promise to tell Lily everything, without actually being required to tell her every single thing that happens in a day. And so, maybe he can abide by the spirit of his promise while not telling her Ted's secret about Robin.

It seems, however, that Lily really does expect Marshall to tell her everything, or at least everything important. When Barney challenges this, she's able to cite multiple cases of Marshall telling her things Barney assumes he's kept secret—like the time Marshall was in Trenton and a donkey ate his pants. So it seems unlikely that Marshall can keep Robin's secret from Lily while still holding to the spirit of their promise. Instead, I think that Marshall might not be able to promise Ted that he'll keep a secret from Lily: to do so would be to violate a prior agreement. It's also practically impossible, since Marshall can't walk Lily through the normal adventures of his day without letting the secret slip.

Kant's account of the distinction between marriage and friendship may be useful in understanding why Marshall's promise to tell Lily everything outweighs his promise to Ted. From a Kantian perspective, as a married couple, Marshall and
Lily share ends. And this means not only that crazy monkey sex is okay, but that they operate within a kind of moral bubble. From an outside perspective, Marshall and Lily are sort of like one person.

Lily gets a taste of this in “Dowisetrepla,” when she and Marshall apply for a mortgage, and the loan officer demands her social security number along with Marshall's. Lily, still trying to keep her credit card debt a secret, resists, arguing that Marshall's financial information must be enough, since “he's the breadwinner” and “can women even own property, anyway?” And of course, once upon a time (Kant's time, in fact), this argument would totally hold up: one way in which married couples operated as a single unit was in the fact that married women couldn't independently own property, and so all marital property was owned jointly by the couple. And though Lily, in the twenty-first century, totally
can
own property independently, neither she nor Marshall can apply for a loan without taking the other's financial well-being into account.

Lily tries to protect Marshall from her financial failings, going so far as to suggest that they get a divorce “on paper.” But Marshall refuses, arguing that when he married her, he married her problems, too. Her problems became his problems, just as his ends became her ends. There's no other sort of relationship (except, possibly, parenthood) where we so completely join our selves, our problems, and our interests to another persons'.

This joining together, says Kant, creates a new sort of moral space. In this moral space, we're allowed to do all sorts of things we aren't allowed to do outside it—including (and maybe especially) crazy monkey sex. We aren't in danger of using one another in unacceptable ways in marriage, because we've fused our ends together. We're like one person, and so the things we owe each other are no different from the things we owe ourselves, honesty included.

So, in marriage, respect doesn't require us to be reticent the way that friendship does (and, Barney, let's hope you've already had the “Oh” moment with the girl you marry). Intimacy and frankness are okay—they are maybe even required. So Marshall and Lily are supposed to tell each other everything, not just because the “Oh” moment is long past, but because they need to be informed of each other's wishes, needs, and credit card debt in order to successfully share ends.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Marshall and Lily can't keep secrets from each other. There are good secrets, like Christmas presents, surprise birthday parties, and sexy lingerie (as long as it's not Robin's lingerie). And there are harmless secrets, like Robin's crush on Ted. But it seems as though Marshall and Lily can't be
required
to keep secrets from each other: any secret that threatens to undermine their capacity to share ends must be shared. And Barney, Ted, and Robin come to expect this: over time, they learn that to tell Lily something is to tell Marshall, and vice versa.

III

Wait for It . . .

10

Why You Should Never, Never Love Thy Neighbor

R
ADU
U
SZKAI AND
E
MANUEL
S
OCACIU

K
ids, there are many neat, well-rounded, and inspiring stories about morality out there. Great thinkers in the history of philosophy have taught us that morality is about timeless principles, or about developing the virtues of a beautiful character, or about bringing as much happiness as possible to as many people as possible.

And then there are a few messier stories told by equally great thinkers who just couldn't swallow any of those elegant formulas. Among these eccentric few we find two of the most intellectually engaging thinkers of modern times, whose doctrines show remarkable, if sometimes disturbing similarities: David Hume and . . . wait for it . . . Barney Stinson.

Hume's Awesome Approach to Morality

David Hume tries to explain the task of the moral philosopher via a metaphor. Approaching the topic of morality (or, more generally, that of human nature), one could proceed “either as an anatomist or as a painter; either to discover its most secret springs and principles or to describe the grace and beauty of its actions” (letter to his bro Francis Hutcheson in 1739).

Or, to update the metaphor, we might choose either Barney's approach, or Ted's. While the job of the painter is surely important and not to be dismissed, it has to rest upon the foundations carefully laid down by the anatomist: even using the richest colors and conveying the most appealing attitudes, we couldn't do justice to the beauty of a Helen or Venus without
paying attention to the structures and proportions of the human body. Because it is impossible to employ both perspectives at the same time, the moral philosopher would have to choose the more fundamental, anatomist approach to morality. In other words the philosopher should be a keen observer of human realities and, as far as possible, an experimenter.

Still, Hume sees that doing that can be painful: “The anatomist presents to the eye the most hideous and disagreeable objects” (
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
, Introduction). We might not like what we stumble upon. And Hume himself found out quite a few things using his method. In a much-quoted place he relegates Reason, arguably the flag-ship of almost any philosophical armada, to the role of a shabby little fishing boat anchored in the shallower part of the harbor.

Starting with Plato, philosophers usually teach us that moral action is always guided by reason, and its goal is to overcome passions, viewed as obstacles. Shockingly, for Hume it's the other way round: reason alone can never be effective in motivating actions. It always has to be guided and ruled. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (
A Treatise of Human Nature
, Book 2, Part 3, Section 3). Kinky!

This disconcerting and rather BDSM picture of the interaction between reason and passions is the first of the two major hallmarks of Humeanism in moral philosophy. It fits the bill that the title of a wonderful book written by one of the most well-known Humean moral philosophers of our time (other than Barney Stinson, that is), is
Ruling Passions
.
¹
But to argue that Barney is a Humean in this sense is a bit too easy, as obviously his world is ruled by passions.

The second, and less discussed major hallmark of a Humean approach to moral philosophy concerns the theory of norms. It wasn't terribly new, even for his time, to just say that moral norms govern, at least partly, our social behavior. But usually philosophers who focus on norms tend to regard them as displaying some sort of objective or intrinsic quality that lends
them special value. In religious ethics, norms are God's commandments; for Immanuel Kant, norms are deduced from a supreme principle of morality which is universal and discovered by pure reason, independently of any particular context or experience; utilitarians think that the moral norms are the ones conducing to the greatest amount of overall happiness; and so on. In all such typical cases, norms are out there waiting to be
discovered
: through revelation, or pure reason, or calculus.

Well, not for David Hume! Norms are just human conventions, like money or language. They are
invented
, rather than discovered. But wait, does this mean that Hume was a relativist? Not quite. In an important passage in the
Treatise of Human Nature
, he tries to answer this possible objection. Moral norms might be artificial, but they are by no means arbitrary. “Mankind is an inventive species; and where an invention is obvious and absolutely necessary, it may as properly be said to be natural as any thing that proceeds immediately from original principles” (
Treatise
, 3.2.1.19)

Okay, how does the story go then? How do norms arise? Why would they be necessary and how could we avoid relativism? Instead of imagining a social contract through which everybody agrees to establish a bunch of rules to be followed, Hume gives a strikingly original explanation, framed in evolutionary terms. Norms, although invented, are
not designed
. Just like his great bro Adam Smith did with economics, Hume gives an invisible-hand explanation to social morality.

The argument starts from identifying the function of norms. They are around to facilitate co-operation between humans. We all know co-operation is mutually beneficial. At least, we become painfully aware of that when we encounter non-co-operators (that is, when we get crossed). But in order for co-operation to be even possible, there has to be a reasonable degree of predictability concerning the future behavior of others.

Would you take as wingman a dude that always behaves randomly, with a fifty-fifty chance of denying that you are a SNASA astronaut who just returned after climbing the Everest for fun, without an oxygen mask, during the Thanksgiving holiday? Neither would we and, for that matter, probably anybody (except when the dude is the only available option and the lady you want
to mix it up with is really, really hot). So humans need some kind of a problem-solving device in their social interactions to make co-operation more likely, and this is the job of norms.