How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy by Lorenzo von Matterhorn Read Free Book Online

revelation of the Playbook to Lily, the seducing of the work colleague so that she would steal it, the faked break-down over Robin—were designed for the sole purpose of getting Lily and the others to tell the blonde at the bar what a great guy Barney is, and thus to make them complicit in her seduction.
    â€œHow could anyone behave in such a dastardly manner?” (I hear the more prim, or Ted-like, among you cry.) Nor is this particular example a one-off. The manipulative lows to which Barney is willing to stoop with a view to duping attractive women into sleeping with him are legen . . . wait for it . . . dary. If that weren’t bad enough, he has been known to indulge in outrageous displays of conspicuous consumption, buying diamond-encrusted suits, thousands of dollars of postage stamps, or multiple televisions just for the purpose of smashing them, when there are children in Africa dying for lack of oral rehydration salts.
    It’s not just in his personal life that Barney exhibits an unusually lax moral sense. He does, after all, work for the shady organization Goliath National Bank and is remarkably evasive when asked what precisely he does for them. Everyone would love to have near limitless funds and an endless supply of hot chicks. Practically everyone anyway. However, Barney persistently ignores the feelings and wishes of others in his relentless pursuit of a good time. His selfishness is so extreme that some philosophically ignorant viewers have questioned whether he isn’t becoming a poorly drawn caricature of an investment banker, or at least not a character with whom we can feel much sympathy. Philosophically educated members of the audience know better. Barney’s selfish behavior is best explained by one simple hypothesis: Barney Stinson is a committedegoist, the most important egoist in recent TV history. (Sorry, Chuck Bass!)
    What Egoism Is and What It Isn’t
    An egoist is not to be confused with his superficially similar cousin (dyslexics, pay particular attention!) the egotist. According to my dictionary, an egotist is “a conceited boastful person; one who thinks or talks too much of himself.” Calling someone an egotist is probably an insult. An egoist, on the other hand, is just someone who holds a certain philosophical position, and you should try not to take philosophical disagreements personally.
    What philosophical position is egoism? An egoist is typically defined as someone who believes either that everyone always aims to maximise their own self-interest, or that everyone should do so.
    An egoist may not always in fact act in a way which maximizes his own self-interest: sometimes he may accidentally do something which fails to achieve this through miscalculation, or clumsiness; and sometimes even the most committed egoists are affected by peer pressure, and, through weakness of will, end up acting in an unselfish way. To qualify as an egoist you merely have to intend to act so as to maximize your own self-interest. The point is sometimes put, equivalently, by saying that the egoist seeks his own good, or happiness, at the expense of others.
    What does it mean to maximize your own self-interest? Now there are manifold different views about what self-interest, or happiness, or the human good, consists in. Some philosophers (subjectivists) think it is having your desires satisfied, whatever your desires happen to be. (That’s something Barney achieves on a regular basis . . .) Others (objectivists) think it is acquiring certain things, such as virtue, knowledge, a wife and children, or plenty of bimbos and a hot-dog toaster, whether or not you happen to desire these things.
    Quite a lot of philosophers have (somewhat suspiciously) thought that a key component of happiness is being a philosopher. The egoist does not need to take any position on what the human good is, or whether it is the same for everyone. Indeed he is best advised to remain neutral on this point,