How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (26 page)

Why Other Things Matter Too

Now we have an idea of what it means to act irrationally if we have certain desires and beliefs. However, there are further ways in which we can be irrational, not just by refraining from maximizing our expected utility given our desires and beliefs. We could also be irrational by acting upon
false
beliefs or upon desires that are
harmful
if they are satisfied. A false belief is a belief that does not correspond to any fact in reality, such as the belief that Earth is the planet next to the sun (which is in fact Mercury). A desire is harmful if its satisfaction would be bad for us, such as the desire to jump off a bridge, which will most likely result in our death.

When giving Ted advice on whether he should attend the roof party, you should not only ask him for his subjective probabilities and utilities and do some basic math, but also analyze whether his beliefs and desires are true and harmless, respectively. You already have considerable evidence that his beliefs about the chance that the slutty pumpkin will show up are much too optimistic because of the sheer number of people living in New York and the number of Halloween parties. Although you do not know its exact value, you are justified in believing that the actual chance of the slutty pumpkin attending the roof party is much closer to zero than Ted's subjective probability of 0.1. And if you were omniscient or had a crystal ball, you would know that Ted has assigned the wrong utility to meeting the slutty pumpkin because in “The Slutty Pumpkin Returns” (Season Seven), we learn that Ted and Naomi—which is the slutty pumpkin's name – make a really bad couple.

So it's not only irrational to choose an option that doesn't lead to your expected utility; it's also irrational to maximize your expected utility if your calculation is based on false beliefs or harmful desires, at least if you could have done better. These are the two additional ways you can be irrational: first, you could assign a probability to a state of affairs that is not the same as its objective probability, and second, you could assign a utility to a state of affairs while not taking into account the harmful consequences of your desire being satisfied. Ted could have done better in regard to the first way, but is innocent with regard to the second. Overall, our philosophical considerations so far still tell us that attending the roof party was not Ted's best choice because accompanying Barney would have been more likely to hold a pleasant experience for Ted.

Is this the final verdict on Ted? Is it irrational to wait for the slutty pumpkin each and every year, and should he rather enjoy other Halloween parties with his illustrious friends? Or might there be a mistake in our rigid philosophical analysis? If you have the gut feeling that we've ignored something utterly important in our analysis, you should take this feeling seriously because gut feelings—
intuitions
, as philosophers like to call them—can be the starting shot for a race towards some deep insight.

Rationality as a Roadblock

We fast forward into the gang's future, where Ted, after many disappointments in relationships, is still single while his mom is getting married for the second time and seemingly everyone else has moved on in their lives to some extent. In “Home Wreckers” (Season Five), he realizes that even if he has not fulfilled his carefully mapped out plan for the future yet—meet a nice girl, marry her, buy a house, and have two children, a boy and a girl—as long as he has not met the right woman, there is one thing he
can
do: He decides to tackle at least one part of the plan by (quite spontaneously) buying the house of his dreams in an auction. Well, at least that's what he thinks he's doing.

His friends think he has made a huge mistake by buying such a run-down shack, not knowing whether he can afford it or whether it will ruin him financially, and whether there will be a Mrs. Mosby in the foreseeable future. So, as they usually do if they do not approve of something one of their friends does, they try to talk him out of his allegedly irrational plans. Actually, it would have been the ideal situation for staging an intervention. Well, we know the result of this remarkable episode: Even though Ted is almost convinced by his friends to give up the shack, he ultimately decides to keep it, and as we learn by a glimpse into its future, this will in fact be the very house Ted will live in with his family.

Rational behavior, as many philosophers conceive of it, would not have led to this result. If Ted had acted in a purely rational manner, he would have sold the house again, making at least some good money and avoiding possible bankruptcy. The chance to lose a huge amount of money in the course of turning the shack into a cozy home was high enough to justify selling the house. However, Ted decided to take the risk because, in philosophical terms, the utility he assigned to the state of affairs that one day he will live in this house was extremely high. He ignored the chance of becoming bankrupt, although he seemed to be well aware of this risk which implies that he did not act upon false beliefs. Therefore, he cannot be blamed for acting upon false beliefs, but he can still be blamed for assigning dubious utilities to living in exactly
this
house compared to the seriously negative utility of becoming bankrupt.

What about our gut feelings here? To our mind, Ted did the right thing here, screwing philosophy, ignoring risks, chances, and utilities, trying to make his dream come true, and we even believe that there is a solid justification for these gut feelings which many of you might share with us.

A philosophical analysis of rationality and irrationality can often be of enormous assistance when the cases are as clear-cut as possible. However, as more and more factors are involved in our decisions and actions, whole situations gain complexity at a rapid pace, and philosophy and its instruments cannot always keep up with this complexity. Imagine Ted had indeed sold the run-down shack, revisited the site a couple of years later, and discovered a lovely house inhabited by a guy like him and his little family. Philosophical analysis can probably not acknowledge the remorse Ted would have felt in this moment. But when you're forced to make a decision, you have to be prepared for the feeling of later remorse when you find you've made the wrong decision. Moreover, this story tells us that there are things we can't control but that have a clear impact on our future. If Ted had kept the house but had a really serious clash with his friends, eventually losing all of them and suffering from depression, he might have lost his joy with regard to this house. If a hurricane had hit New York and destroyed the house some weeks after the purchase, this would have been a catastrophe for Ted and his dreams. But it is impossible to consider those and a myriad of other possible scenarios, not only for Ted and other ordinary people, but also for philosophy and its instruments.

Since we're unable to know the future, and since we can only rely on our beliefs and our desires to some extent, we are sometimes forced to let our gut feelings take control of our lives. In some cases, where we know exactly which factors we have to consider when making a decision and where we know that our desires are harmless and should be satisfied if this is possible, philosophy can help us to make a good or even the best decision by showing us how to act in our best interest. But in some other cases, we should be aware that philosophy does not equal clairvoyance and that the best guide becomes more and more unreliable as the number of incalculable scenarios increases.

As soon as we're overwhelmed by future developments unbeknownst to us, our gut feelings are the only remaining
guides, and we
must
follow them in order to avoid doing nothing or becoming fatalists who refuse to take their lives into their own hands. We might still fail, but at least we do not have to blame ourselves for being irrational imbeciles, and this is more than hollow consolation. If we fail because of our own stupidity, we are responsible for our failure and deserve to be criticized or to criticize ourselves, but if we fail because a tornado hits our newly purchased house, we may still be desolate, but we can equally well be proud of ourselves because we actually made the brave decision to purchase it.

A Plea for Craziness

How should we, then, respond to the question of what we should do about seemingly irrational desires and actions? It depends—a truly philosophical answer.

On the one hand, irrationality can be harmful and should be avoided. On the other hand, if your calculations tell you to follow Barney to Victoria's Secret and ignore the slutty pumpkin while you
know
at the same time that you will not enjoy the models because of this hideous feeling of remorse, then let Barney have all the models to himself. There's nothing wrong with staying on the roof for one night, even if philosophy tells you that Barney's right. As long as you do not pitch a tent there, you do not harm yourself. It's the crazy little things that make life more fun, so acting irrationally on some occasions is nothing to worry about.

Irrationality is not that bad in itself, and irrational desires and actions should be taken as seriously as rational ones. In many cases, it's better to be rational than irrational, and in some of them, philosophy can guide us to our fortune. In others, however, the irrational desire is the desire that should be satisfied if no serious harm will be done. And sometimes, it's better to perform an irrational action instead of contemplating the alternatives for ever afterwards. When there's no guide left other than our gut feelings, we should listen to them, even if the world tells us that we're lunatics. It can be better to be a happy lunatic than a rational but unhappy sage. Or, as Ted tells us when reasoning about the decision to buy his future home: “Sometimes our best decisions are the ones that don't make any sense at all.”

IV

Hot and Crazy

14

Barney Stinson's Theory of Truth

J
OE
S
LATER

A lie is just a good story that someone ruined with the truth.

            
—B
ARNEY
S
TINSON
, 2010

K
ids, truth is a funny thing. It's one of those topics that some philosophers are interested in that rarely strikes normal people as worrying or confusing. In this respect, though maybe not many others, Barney Stinson is completely normal. He uses the word ‘true' without ever appearing to worry too much about it. Yet the way he ends a fanciful tale with the comment ‘True story' seems to be an unusual use of ‘true'.

If you're wondering why some philosophers are so concerned with ‘truth', here are a few things to think about. Everyone accepts that knowing things is important. If Ted wants a beer, it's important that he knows the way to MacLaren's, he needs to know how to order a drink and all sorts of other things. In short, we use our knowledge all the time. Knowledge is great. A whole branch of philosophy—epistemology—is dedicated to it.

On top of that, everything you
know
has to be true. If Ted knows that MacLaren's is downstairs then it's true that MacLaren's
must
be downstairs. If it wasn't, then Ted would only believe it, and be mistaken—he couldn't
know
it. For any of your beliefs to count as knowledge, they must be true, so truth must be pretty important too.

You might also wonder about value judgments. In Season Four, Marshall raves about “the best burger in New York.” What makes it true that that burger was the best? If lots of
people disagreed with him, would it still be the best burger? What makes it true that the Beatles are better than the Jonas Brothers? Some people might be relativist about such questions, and say that it's all a matter of opinion. If we accept that, does it mean that
none
of your value judgments are just true, even the most obvious ones, like that the old
Star Wars
movies are better than the new ones? If we go down that route, then it seems arguments about things like whether ducks are better than rabbits (as in the episode “Rabbit or Duck”) are meaningless.

Another problem about truth comes about when we talk about the future. If the future really is undecided, we might think that nothing about it is true or false—yet. If it's something isn't true, you can't know anything about it, so you can't know that in 2030 Ted has two children, what you'll have for dinner, or even whether the sun will come up tomorrow. If we get into talking about truth with fictional characters, things get even more complicated; there are lots of us who do like to say that things about characters in a TV series are ‘true' in a sense, that some things about the future are true and that some value-judgments are true. Those sorts of concerns, among many others, have made philosophers struggle over the topic.