How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (30 page)

        
G
EORGE
:
Thanks Jim, for helping my argument get underway. Basically you're asking “Is being good the same as being conducive to fulfilling our natural human desires?” This seems like a sensible question, but how could this be, if our definition of ‘good' is on the money? For if that definition is correct shouldn't the question be as senseless as asking whether a cougar is an attractive, sex-crazed, middle-aged woman, usually found prowling airport bars and smoky pool halls in search of nubile flesh? Someone who knows what a word means should know whether a definition we give of the word is correct or not and there should be no further questions to ask. This applies to all terms. If you know what a term means, then you ought to know immediately whether a definition of that term is correct. As I like to put it: the question of a correct definition should not be
open
. You know what ‘good' means Jim, because I remember you hooking me up with those Super Bowl tickets just to say “thanks.” You're a stand-up kind of bro. So because the question about the correct definition of ‘good' is still open for you, there must be something wrong with it. To my mind this will happen with any definition of ‘good'. So there is simply no defining this elusive term. This is my
open question argument
, and I think Bill's going to have a hard time refuting it.

        
J
IM
:
It's George and Dave versus Bill. Is he going to be the Goliath of this match, or can his logic refute this tag team of thinkers?

        
B
ILL
:
I can take them, Jim. George assumes that if a definition of ‘good' is true, it will be true in virtue of meaning. For it is the meaning of ‘good' that a competent speaker is supposed to have access to and that will allow her to identify the truth of the definition. Notice that this is a rather odd way for a sentence to be true. Take a sentence like “Ted is an architecture professor.” That sentence is true as a result of the meaning of the sentence and Ted's current occupation. A couple of years ago the sentence was false, but now it's true. So sentences are generally true because of their meaning and the state of the world. When giving a definition we appear to leave out the world. And this is as it should be, because definitions are only about the relations between meanings.

                  
However this split between meaning and the world is not that easily made. In the episode “The Possimpible,” Barney and Robin concoct words like ‘linkativity', ‘connectitude' and ‘transformitation'. These words are meaningless, simply because they get blurted out without any apparent use other than sounding confident. This is in sharp contrast to words like ‘architect', ‘bro', or ‘under-carriage'. They are meaningful words and their meaning derives from the way we use them, for example, to refer to Ted's private parts. But the way we use words is a matter of fact. So, even the truth of a definition, like the definition that we have provided of ‘good' is in part a matter of fact, a matter of the world being a certain way. For we have to consider the way that ‘good' is used in order to answer the question whether ‘good' means what we think it does. No wonder that it may not be evident, even to someone who is comfortable speaking of ‘good', whether a proposed definition of it is correct.

        
J
IM
:
So if I think ‘good' means ‘being yellow', somehow anything not yellow, like friendship, won't count as good anymore?

        
B
ILL
:
You keep asking some sensible questions, Jim. There is of course significant disagreement about what's good.
So we cannot just make an inventory of the different ways in which people use good. We need some sort of theory of the good, to separate the sensible from the stupid uses of ‘good'. A proper evolutionary ethics is just this kind of theory; aimed precisely at telling us what is good in a way that meshes with part of what we previously thought of as good, and probably your views will not be part of those it meshes with Jim. This gives us what we are after when seeking a proper perspective on ‘good'. However we have already seen that BEES cannot do justice to all the important things we think are good. So it's time we consider a different kind of ethics, mine.

Taking the Game to a New Level

        
B
ILL
:
Barney's plays seem right to the BEES-bro's because they help fulfill a desire that is part of our universal human nature. To ascertain whether such a desire existed we considered the time at which this nature was formed, but of course much has changed since twelve thousand years ago. This difference explains why many of the things we desire aren't really all that good for us. Replay how fat Barney got during his first relationship with Robin, because he was now his own “wingman”, eating wings by the bucket-loads. Devouring this much meat makes a lot of sense if your chances of finding food are relatively small and if you burn a lot of calories as you go out hunting cougars (of the non-human variety). Yet it just makes you fat if all you do is sit around the office shredding paper or calling Korean companies to close obscure deals.

        
J
IM
:
So what if we don't judge what is good with reference to the desires that are part of human nature as formed during the Pleistocene? What if we consider what is good by determining whether it ultimately contributes to reproductive success in our present-day environment?

        
B
ILL
:
That's a great suggestion, Jim. As this alternative demands that we think about what is really good for us, let's call this way of thinking about evolutionary ethics
Behavior is reflectively determined stupid
or BIRDS for
short. If you're into BIRDS, then it is good to follow your human nature only insofar as it contributes
in the present
to the reproduction of your genome. Of course Barney's habitat is urban New York. In this sort of environment you're never going to reproduce if you don't commit. Women may be willing to sleep with you, but they will use all manners of contraceptive devices unless there is some long-term prospect. Barney's behavior therefore contributes to a lot of copulation, but it does not contribute to procreation. So it makes sense for Barney to ultimately commit to one woman if he is to do the right thing according to BIRDS. And this is exactly what we have seen him do recently. It's almost like he knows my work. I am one proud Bill.

        
J
IM
:
Perhaps Barney would have to commit someday, but what's wrong with trying out a couple of teams, before you sign that life-long deal? In fact won't it have made him a better player, because he knows how to please a woman and because he's now certain that commitment is what he wants?

        
B
ILL
:
This may very well be, but we still have to consider the lying and bamboozling, which I think is wrong. Cooperative activity has been tremendously important to our development as a species and lying sucks the fun out of working together. We need a degree of mutual trust to sustain a functioning government, if only because the costs of checking that everybody pays there taxes would otherwise be too high. There would be no businesses if we could not trust each other because no business owner could rely on people to pay their bills or to deliver ordered goods. In short we would have none of the modern conveniences, like suits, fine scotch, or artisanal porn. But more importantly, from the perspective of evolutionary ethics, our future would be very insecure and the ability of our children to procreate would be flushed down the drain. As these conveniences are what allows us to live in relative prosperity and peace, which in turn give us the opportunity to raise our children, to feed them, to allow them to develop, and to create healthy babies for themselves. Therefore in a world in which everybody lied our reproductive
success as a species, and thereby the success of each individual member of our species, would be significantly diminished. So it's wrong to lie.

        
J
IM
:
And this night's fair play award goes to Bill Casebeer. Friends, I hear we have another objection from Bart coming in.

        
B
ART
:
Bill talks as if lying is an all or nothing matter, but of course we may sometimes choose to lie, while refraining from lying on other occasions. Doing so may be conducive in many ways to present reproductive success. Through lying it may be possible for you to get two wives to have children with. Talk about playing the spread. Hence lying may be good on the face of it, even in today's environment. In no way does this isolated bit of behavior have to lead to a breakdown of the sort of mutual trust that is necessary for a well-organized and complex modern society.

                  
Furthermore even though through procreation this two-wived man will get more offspring, and his children may be more likely to lie, there is no reason to suppose that lying will spread through society in the long run, which would be bad for genome reproduction given the societal effects described by Bill. For it's likely that in a society in which trust is less prevalent, more time will be spent on weeding out those who can't be trusted, which will lead to fewer opportunities for liars to take advantage of their dishonesty. To the extent that dishonesty plays a role in their strategies for achieving reproductive success, liars will thereby loose much of the advantages they previously had and honest humans will get a bigger chance of putting more people like them on this planet. So, there doesn't seem to be a general prohibition of lying inherent in evolutionary ethics. In fact lying may well be justified on occasion, and the lies perpetrated by Barney are a case in point.

                  
If you're into the BIRDS and the BEES, you're bound to agree with Barney's behavior. Evolutionary ethics supports the Bro code. Whether it's worth supporting? That's a whole different ball-game.

¹
Larry Arnhart,
Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature
(State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 17.

²
Edward Osborne Wilson,
On Human Nature
(Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 125.

³
Barney Stinson and Matt Kuhn,
The Bro Code
(Simon and Schuster, 2008).

⁴
E. Somanathan and Paul H. Rubin, “The Evolution of Honesty,”
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
54:1 (2004).

⁵
George Edward Moore,
Principia Ethica
(Cambridge University Press, 1903).

16

Telling Your Life Story

E
LIZE DE
M
UL

K
ids, at some point in our lives we're all confronted with the expansive question “So, what's your story?” Giving an answer can prove troublesome. Where would you begin your life story? Where should it end? Which people should be included in the plot? What situations matter enough to recount? What fragments of experiences shape and define who you are? What anecdotes would you never even consider sharing?

Telling stories is an important part of our lives. We may find ourselves sitting with people in an apartment or bar, just like Ted and his friends, telling each other about our days. In doing so, we present ourselves to them and we put together our own life story. The things that we do, the way we look at things, the people we meet, the friends we love, as well as the stories we tell about each other are all part of this story-telling.

How we tell the stories of our lives is the theme of
How I Met Your Mother
. Season after season the mother of Ted's children fails to make an appearance, yet we learn, together with Ted's children, a whole lot about the lives of Ted and his friends. A voice-over of an older Ted, leads the way through stories of his past, from his own perspective as well as those of his friends. As these characters tell their tales, their identities take shape.

How I Met Your Mother
can be a cultural fun-house mirror, not only telling us a story about some young New York architect and his friends, but also telling us a story about our own modern identities and how they are constructed. Sit down and let me tell you a story.