How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (7 page)

There's no denying that Barney displays unusual generosity towards his friends, even buying them lavish gifts such as lap dances at the Lusty Leopard. It's possible that his kindness is purely selfish. No man is an island, and it is perfectly compatible with egoism that the egoist help others, provided that he does so only as a means to his own happiness. Barney needs friends, and you can't expect to have friends, at least not ones worth having, unless you're nice to them occasionally. One may feel, however, that in his behavior towards his friends Barney goes beyond what one would expect from a true egoist, who is only interested in friends in so far as they contribute to his own good. He certainly seems to care about their interests as well, even when they are irrelevant to, or (mildly) in conflict with, his own. If he didn't, he would hardly be such a sympathetic and popular character. He even elevates his attitude towards friends into a sort of personal moral system, in the form of the Bro Code, and then feels guilty when he breaches it to sleep with Robin, Ted's ex. (“Article 150: No sex with your Bro's ex. It is never ever permissible for a Bro to sleep with his Bro's ex. Violating this code is worse than killing a Bro”—“The Goat”).

If we treat friends as other people, helping friends will imply at best an imperfect dedication to egoism. However, if we adopt Aristotle's view about friends, no such conclusion will be necessary. Aristotle tells us that “a friend is another self.”
²
What he means by this is that you should treat what's good for your friend as you treat what's good for you, as an end in itself. If we expand the ego to include friends, then being nice to friends still counts as selfish behavior. Of course, if everyone were your friend, egoism would then collapse into altruism, but Aristotle is adamant that no one could possibly sustain that many true friends. How many could they sustain? Don't think of Facebook friends, but of the number of main cast members in a successful sitcom.

Psychological versus Ethical Egoists

There are really two main schools of egoism. Psychological egoists are those who deny that there's such a thing as an unselfish act. However altruistic and noble someone appears, they're really just as self-centered as everyone else. That's because everyone naturally seeks their own good or happiness. It's just that for some people happiness is achieved by helping the poor and needy or dying gloriously in battle, while for others it's enough to enjoy an ample supply of fine wines and strippers.

The psychological egoists' bitter rivals are the ethical egoists. Ethical egoists maintain that it is
not
an inevitable fact about human psychology that everyone's ultimate goal is their own happiness. Some people do indeed pursue the interests of others as an end in itself—the poor fools! Only the elite few recognise that pursuing one's own good at the expense of others is the only rational and ethically correct path. It is what we ought to do.

Given these two sorts of egoism, a pressing question naturally arises: which sort of egoist is Barney? We will begin by examining the hypothesis that he is a psychological egoist, and then look at the other possibility, that he is an ethical egoist. Apart from the friendship objection, which we have discussed, there are a couple of obstacles to attributing a doctrine of psychological egoism to Barney. A major difference between psychological and ethical egoism is that the former says that everyone in fact behaves in a selfish way, whereas the latter denies this: everyone should be selfish, but only a select few are. Ethical egoism is more elitist and thus perhaps more likely to appeal to someone of Barney's competitive sensibilities. This may not seem like a particularly strong reason to discount psychological egoism, since psychological egoism is also elitist in a second-order way: everyone is selfish, but only the select few realise the truth of psychological egoism. However, psychological egoism is not really such an elite view. After all, it's advocated by none other than Joey in
Friends
, who hardly numbers among pop culture's more brilliant philosophical minds (“The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS” from
Friends
, Season Five).

A more serious objection to attributing such a position to Barney is that psychological egoism is probably false. Now
there is nothing wrong with ascribing false philosophical views to people like Joey, but Barney is evidently a few steps above a Joey on the intellectual food chain. But why do I say that psychological egoism is false?

One reason to doubt that everyone is always ultimately selfish is the theory of evolution. If you don't believe in evolution, go read some Richard Dawkins, then return. You might initially think that evolution provides support for egoism (the selfish gene, and all that . . .) However it's the survival of the genotype, not the individual organism, that nature prioritizes. Sometimes the best way to preserve a particular genetic makeup is for parents to sacrifice themselves for their offspring, and this sort of thing happens not just among humans but also in the animal kingdom. (I'm not sure about plants . . .)

On the face of it, self-sacrificing looks like the sort of behavior that offers a counter-example to psychological egoism (as long as the beneficiaries are not friends). However, the psychological egoist will undoubtedly argue that, despite appearances, these sorts of actions are in fact selfish. Perhaps, if the parent did not sacrifice itself, it would be so wracked with guilt that life would be unbearable, or perhaps it would be ostracized by the rest of the community. The psychological egoist must maintain that these sorts of selfish reasons are the only ones motivating its action. There are three possible sorts of explanation for any instance of self-sacrificial behaviour: it could, as the psychological egoist insists, be purely selfish; it could be purely altruistic; or it could be motivated by a mixture of selfish and selfless reasons. Since a willingness to sacrifice oneself under extreme circumstances is liable to preserve the species or genotype (though not the individual), we would expect that we would have evolved to have the most reliable mechanism to ensure that we act in the requisite suicidal way. And presumably the most reliable mechanism will be the one which makes us amenable to both selfish and selfless reasons for sacrificing ourselves.

The argument from evolution may not seem totally conclusive. For it may be pointed out that nature does not always supply a back-up mechanism. For example, I have only one liver (alas!) Perhaps self-sacrificing is less important to the survival of the species than other sorts of action that would be impaired if we had these selfless instincts. However, the example of self-sacrifice
brings out another line of argument which I think is decisive against psychological egoism.

The psychological egoist is claiming that all human action is fundamentally selfish. This isn't merely the view that people are more selfish than we usually suppose. Since it is a universal claim, psychological egoism is vulnerable to a single counter-example: if any instance of unselfish motivation exists, psychological egoism is false. As we've seen, the psychological egoist will say of any purported counter-example that it's really a case of disguised selfishness. This may be plausible in some cases, but in others it does seem very hard to swallow.

Take the time when Marshall spends his Christmas Eve helping the delivery man deliver all the strangers' Christmas presents, because otherwise they won't get there in time (“How Lily Stole Christmas”). The psychological egoist claims that Marshall does this for selfish reasons. He's right that we can't prove otherwise. Maybe you can never know for sure what motivated someone else, for they might be lying. It seems harder to deny that we have reliable access to our own motivations. So those of us who think that we have acted selflessly in the past will be able to refute the psychological egoist. But even if we can't point to a counter-example that will satisfy a psychological egoist, that doesn't mean that we should accept his conclusion. Perhaps we should accept that it is
possible
that everyone is always fundamentally selfish, but plenty of things are possible. Just because a philosophical theory is consistent does not mean it is true, and we have not been given any reason to think that we are in fact mistaken in any of the apparent counter-examples, let alone in all of them.

One Ring to Rule Them All

If psychological egoism is false, then the charitable interpretation is that Barney is an ethical egoist. The contrast between psychological and ethical egoism is best drawn, as so often in philosophy, with the help of an Ancient Greek example. In Plato's most famous dialogue,
The Republic
, Plato's brother Glaucon, stressing that he is merely playing devil's advocate (always deny your egoism), takes it upon himself to argue that justice is in fact a necessary evil. It's like disgusting medicine or a ten-mile run. Committing injustice is often a lot of fun, but
being on the receiving end can be a drag (unless you're into that sort of thing . . .).

To make his point more vivid, Glaucon tells the story of the ring of Gyges.
³
You may recognize it as having been ripped off by Tolkien, or Wagner, depending on how high-brow you are. Actually the main character in the story is an ancestor of Gyges, but, following general practice, we will conveniently forget this annoying detail and call him ‘Gyges'.

Gyges was a Lydian shepherd (Lydia was a kingdom in Asia Minor, or modern Turkey.) One day, while he was tending his sheep, there was a massive deluge and an earthquake, and a gaping chasm opened at his feet. Exploring this chasm, he found, amongst other curios, a hollow bronze horse. Inside the horse was a corpse of more than mortal stature, which had a gold ring on its finger. As you would, Gyges pocketed the ring and made a swift exit. Later, at a shepherd meeting, Gyges was wearing his new ring. During a particularly dull part of the meeting, he was fiddling with it. He happened to twist the knob on it in towards his hand, and when he did so he became invisible. On turning the knob outwards again he rematerialized. Realizing what an opportunity this presented, he arranged to be sent to the Lydian king's palace as a messenger. He used the ring to insinuate his way into the presence of the king's wife, whom he quickly seduced. Plato doesn't go into details about the seduction, but no doubt he made judicious use of “The Naked Man” (this was one of the two out of three times where it worked). With the help of his wife, Gyges killed the king, and usurped the throne.

Glaucon claims that anyone in Gyges's situation, presented with the opportunity of committing injustice with guaranteed impunity, would inevitably succumb, no matter how noble and pious they might previously have appeared. If he were right, this would provide compelling support for psychological egoism. However, we have seen that there are good reasons to think that psychological egoism is probably false, and therefore to suspect that not everyone would do as Gyges does. This suspicion is amplified if we consider that Gyges's situation is not as far-fetched as it might at first appear. Certainly few of us are ever lucky enough to stumble across magic invisibility
rings, but, in a more mundane way, we are often put in a position where we could commit some minor injustice, and be almost as certain of escaping detection as if we were invisible, even in New York, where CCTV cameras are ubiquitous. Practically every day you have a chance to, for example, steal something that you would like to own, with an almost vanishingly tiny chance of being caught. It is interesting that most people do not avail themselves of most of these opportunities for apparently risk-free reward. Perhaps often it is because they believe that even if the risk seems small, the consequences of being caught far outweigh the gains to be had. But it seems unlikely that this is always the case. Our rejection of psychological egoism suggests that we should draw a different moral from the ring of Gyges story. In Gyges's situation many people would not act as he does. They would do the conventionally right thing, and hand the ring in to the proper authorities. And they would be fools. For the only reason they act in such a way is because of some vague feeling that they ought to. Once you realize that this feeling is the product of a pervasive societal fiction, you are free to pursue the correct course of action—that of the ethical egoist.

Is Ethical Egoism a Contradiction in Terms?

Unlike psychological egoism, ethical egoism cannot be refuted by pointing to counter-examples of people acting selflessly. It is not a claim about how people in fact behave but rather about how they should behave. Even if nobody is ever totally selfish, it could still be the case that they all should be.

One complaint that is sometimes brought against ethical egoism is that it is not really an ethical theory at all. In some ways it does resemble other ethical theories: it issues prescriptions about what we ought to do; and it issues the same prescriptions for people in relevantly similar situations. However, the argument goes that in other ways it diverges from what is generally thought of as an ethical theory in too radical a way: for example, it does not require that people sometimes make sacrifices without any compensation. It does not provide a single neutral ranking of scenarios that are better or worse: it is better for Smith if he gets the job, better for Jones if he gets it, but egoism says nothing about which scenario is simply better or worse.

For this reason many philosophers, who are cautious by nature, and keen on introducing new ‘isms' wherever possible, revert to rational egoism, the view that it is rational (but perhaps not ethically right) to maximize one's own good. Anyone who is an ethical egoist is very likely to be a rational egoist too: if you think it's right to act in a certain way, you presumably also think that this provides you with a reason to act that way. However not all rational egoists are ethical egoists: a rational egoist might, for example, be a moral skeptic or nihilist, who believes that morality is bunk. Such a person can still maintain that, in the absence of moral prescriptions, you should act to maximize your own self-interest, but their ‘should' does not mean what the ethical egoist's ‘should' means. It signifies a rational obligation, not a moral one. Ethical egoism is a more committal theory, but the retreat to rational egoism strikes me as too cowardly for someone like Barney. Why should the ethical egoist accept that his egoism is not an ethical theory, just because it differs from other ethical theories in some important ways? Altruists do not have a monopoly on what counts as ethical, and their stipulating that anything which fails to meet their preferred criteria falls short seems just to be unfairly begging the question against the egoist, or assuming what they are supposed to be proving.