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

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. Nowthere 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,