How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (29 page)

        
J
IM
:
Our natural endowment plus all the effort we put in at practice time ultimately pays off on the field. But Larry and James, what exactly has this got to do with the good life?

        
L
ARRY AND
J
AMES
:
To truly understand this complex aspect of the game, we have to look at desires. Desires motivate us to act, to live the life we lead. So if a particular kind of life is good, then the desires that lead us to live that kind of life are also good. Thus if it is good to correct everybody's pronunciation, like Ted does, and not just completely annoying, then whatever drives you to comment on their diction is also a good thing. So if living a life according to our nature is good, as Ari rightly claims, then “the good is the naturally desirable.”
¹
Both our desire to have sex and our intelligence are relatively universal and can therefore be seen as part of our evolutionarily constituted human nature. Therefore the desire to have sex is good, as is our intelligence as a means of getting what is desirable.

        
B
ART
:
Given that this view on the relation between ethics and evolution is about not overthinking things, but about accepting our natural desires as they are, I've dubbed it
Barney's evolutionary ethics style
, or ‘BEES' for short. If you're into BEES, you'll define ‘good' as naturally desirable.

        
J
IM
:
How can we tell if a desire is natural or not? After all no caveman had any desire for an impeccably furnished loft, so not all desires can be natural desires.

        
L
ARRY AND
J
AMES
:
Well, we just have to see through all the suits, cell phones and satin sheets and look to the sort of behavior that used to contribute to reproductive success at the time our human nature was shaped. As a species we developed during the Pleistocene era (starting between one and a half and two and a half million years ago and ending at around twelve thousand years ago). So any desire that it was possible to have back then that spurned the continued spread of genetic material throughout this period will be a natural desire. Therefore by examining what sort of plays led to reproductive success over the course of our evolutionary history, we can find out about these desires.

                  
To do this, we need to consider the fact that the process of natural selection has been going on for a long period of time. So there has been generation after generation of
Homo sapiens sapiens
and each generation has passed on its genome the next. To achieve this feat not only did each previous generation have to procreate, but they also had to ensure that their offspring would live long enough to score for themselves. Basically there are two strategies for making this happen: the
Stinson
and the
Eriksen
. Let's go to an in-depth analysis of these plays to see which one works best. If the Stinson is our winning play, then Barney is clearly acting on a natural desire and doing the right thing.

Stinson vs. Eriksen

        
L
ARRY AND
J
AMES
:
The Stinson works as follows: you go to your local cave, hut, tavern or barn after a hard day of hunting, or doing whatever it is that Barney does for a living. You chat up some random girl and every once in a while you score. If you're Barney you get down to business almost every time you play and if you're Mitch, the Naked Man, you score two out of three times. Now if you do this often enough, then you are bound to get a lot of women pregnant.

        
J
IM
:
What about Article 63 of the Bro Code stipulating that your bros have to provide you with protection in your time of need?

        
L
ARRY AND
J
AMES
:
It was a very different game back then, Jim. Unless you fashioned something out of woolly mammoth gut there was no preventing pregnancy. With all the little Barneys around you would neither have had the time nor the resources to take care of them. And back in the day when you had to hunt for your own meat, if a bro didn't go out spearing bears, then his children could very well starve to death. Luckily when using the Stinson there is so much offspring that even if only a very small percentage gets to do it, at least some children will survive long enough to pass on your genetic material. Certainly nowadays we only need to look at Barney, the son of a single mother, to see how fantastic a player a son with an absentee dad can be.

                  
Those using the Eriksen stick with one woman and have at most a couple of children with her. They may even throw the occasional elaborate birthday party for their chicks, and treat them with kindness and respect. Of course they won't get nearly as much progeny, but because they care, every Marvin has a chance of finding his own chicks. This means that children of dads using the Eriksen get to pass on their genes as well. So both strategies have something going for them.

        
J
IM
:
What was the best mating strategy in the Pleistocene season? Let's turn to our mating specialist, Ed Wilson, for some in-depth insight.

        
E
D
:
At the time our species developed it was the Stinson. For during the period between fertilization and actually having a baby, there's simply no way to put another bun in the oven. However a man can simply leave one oven on and poke up the fire in the next woman, and another woman, and yet another woman. As long as he beats the other guys to the women, he will have created enough offspring to feed a small town and he will have spread his genome far and wide.
²

        
L
ARRY AND
J
AMES
:
This bodes well for grounding the right to pursue tail in evolution. For if going after a women, having sex with her, and quickly moving on to the next target used to be a bro's best bet to ensure the survival of his genetic material, then a desire to do so is likely to be part of his human nature. For this human nature was formed over the course of an evolutionary history in which that was the best strategy. So Barney is going about his life in exactly the right way. From where we're standing the Bro Code contains some sane advice on doing the right thing.

        
J
IM
:
Viewers, we have a protest coming in, let's listen to what Bart has to say.

        
B
ART
:
But what about Barney's targets? How are the women he's playing doing? Perhaps they want to be at the receiving end of an Eriksen, perhaps they don't, but they certainly don't want to be lied to. And a play like the Lorenzo von Matterhorn is clearly a brilliantly elaborate lie, but a lie nonetheless. What's even more ethically objectionable is the fact that this lying seems sanctioned by the way Barney views women. They are, as the Bro Code describes them, “ho's” that are supposed to be hunted like wild game.
³
Is this sort of action, lying to women in an effort to score, to be tolerated on the field if you're a BEES-lover?

                  
This is a tough nut to crack, because we really don't know whether we are natural born liars. For appearing trustworthy makes others more willing to engage in cooperative activity with you, and perhaps appearing trustworthy is best achieved through actually being honest. But in a situation of general expectancy of honesty it pays to be a liar, because people won't invest much effort in finding out whether you can in fact be trusted. So perhaps there really is no such thing as an evolutionarily determined human nature when it comes to lying, as both lying and not lying may have worked to a person's advantage over the course of our history as a species.
⁴
This means that lying is neither particularly good, nor particularly bad from the perspective of an ethical framework that judges actions by the extent to which they fit this evolutionarily constituted nature.

                  
Given that all the lying helps to get Barney laid however, and given that getting laid is good, it does seem that in this particular case lying is a good thing. This appears to pose a dilemma for the BEES-boys: either BEES is right, we and commit ourselves to a slew of clearly morally objectionable prescripts, or BEES is wrong, but then what can evolution tell us about how we are to behave? I think that any ethical theory telling us that lying is perfectly okay is simply a bad theory. So we have to reject BEES and consider how evolutionary insights may influence our ethical views in a better way. Any form of evolutionary ethics presupposes that this kind of influence is perfectly possible, but is that really so? Back to you Jim.

The Game as It Once Was

        
J
IM
:
Thanks, Bart. Now for a bit of history. In the past there has been many an outstanding player in our sport. In the eighteenth century the Scottish philosopher Dave Hume was known for hanging out at the
salons
of Paris and hooking up with one countess after the other. Of course in those days the rules were very different so you didn't just score by nailing chicks; perhaps you simply had a pleasant conversation. Still this bro had game. Dave's in our Paris studio to talk about his exploits.

        
D
AVE
:
Hume here, live from Paris, the city of “love.” At the height of my career playing women I always used to say that you can't derive what you ought to do from the way things are. You simply can't derive ought from is. Oddly enough there was no countess who could resist those words. Yet this isn't just a piece of history; it's a piece of bad news for all sorts of evolutionary ethics, and I mean Robin-as-a-reporter-for-Channel-22-in-Red-Deer-bad. For these ethicists argue that Barney
ought
to nail numerous women, because doing it is part of the way he
is
. So if I'm right, then they're wrong.

                  
Notice that I'm definitely on to something. For example, from the fact that it's true that Barney and Robin cheated on Nora and Kevin, you cannot derive that it ought to be true that they cheated on Nora and Kevin. In fact they themselves feel truly guilty about their behavior. So there are certainly sentences in which we cannot replace ‘is' with ‘ought', and still say something true. It's essentially like substituting ‘loves' for ‘kicks', or ‘hates' for ‘paints', taking words that express completely different and unrelated concepts and replacing one with the other. That's just silly. Therefore such substitutions are never justified.

        
J
IM
:
I'm going to have to stop you there Dave, because we have some recent developments; let's switch over to Bill Casebeer.

        
B
ILL
:
Dave's wrong, his argument's really just a piece of history. Let's suppose that statements telling us what someone ought to do simply are statements about what's the case, so that ‘is' and ‘ought' express intimately related concepts. Then there is really no problem of substituting ‘ought' for ‘is'. For it would be like substituting talk of Lily with talk of Lilypad or Justice Aldrin. And of course this is exactly what evolutionary ethicists, like me, think they're doing. As they say that someone ought to do something because it'll help fulfill a desire that's part of her human nature. So the challenge is merely to find the right definition of what we ought to do in terms of what's the case, not to stop before we've even begun.

All Talk and No Action

        
J
IM
:
Bill, as you know we've got a packed show tonight. George Moore is in the studio with David and he questions your take on things.

        
G
EORGE
:
Bill, you couldn't be more wrong if you tried. It's simply impossible to give a definition of what we ought to do in terms of what is the case.
⁵
For if we define what
people ought to do in terms of their nature we're implicitly doing the following. We say that this person ought to do something, for example, follow the Platinum rule. Of course it seems only right to ask why this person should respect that rule. If we are a BEES-boy we will answer as follows. You have to respect the rule, because the only good way to live your life is to never, ever, ever, ever “love” thy neighbor, and this is good, because it is helps to fulfill the desires that are part of your human nature. In so doing we have provided a definition of ‘good' in terms of human nature, we have judged the merits of an action on the basis of this definition and we have answered the original question.

        
J
IM
:
It doesn't feel quite right to me George, I just don't know if the definition is any good. What's really so important about a desire being natural? I guess I'm just not buying into the whole BEES thing.