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is not due to a relaxation of his selfish principles. In fact, we’d be disappointed if he compromised. What does become apparent is that he is no run-of-the-mill egotistical merchant banker. Part of what’s attractive about Barney is his intellectual consistency. Everything he does can be seen to flow from a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs, or what is colloquiallycalled a philosophy. And that philosophy is best captured by the sort of ethical egoism that we have described.
    It’s not just that a proper understanding of ethical egoism gives us a more profound insight into Barney’s character. The reverse is also true. Barney is no moral monster. It is not merely his cleverness that makes him so likeable. If he were so alien to our own ethical world view, we might find him amusing, but we would not care about him. Barney’s moral exemplar encourages us to revisit an ethical position that we might otherwise too quickly dismiss. Once we realize that egoism is consistent with treating the interests of friends as ends in themselves, and with recognising certain moral absolutes, the view immediately becomes more palatable.
    Of course, I would never encourage anyone else to become an egoist. However, the next time you’re considering faking a heart attack to get an ambulance to take you across town (“Subway Wars”), maybe it’s something you’ll bear in mind.

    1 Paradise Lost , Book IV, line 110.
    2 Nicomachean Ethics , Book IX, Chapter 4, lines 1166a31–2; Chapter 9, lines 1170b6–7.
    3 Republic , Book II, lines 359c7–360d9.

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    The Most Amazing, Strong, Independent Woman Barney Has Ever Banged
    A MANDA Y PMA
    K ids, you’re familiar with Dreamhouse Barbie and Career Barbie. Those are the images of women children have been presented with for generations. To this day, you can ask any seven-year-old girl and she’ll tell you the difference.
    Dreamhouse Barbie is a wife and mother. She’s caring and warm, and her home and family are the number one priorities in her life. Career Barbie is all about the workplace. She business-suits up, and her career always comes first. She’s childless and single. If she does have a Ken in her life he’s a low priority, more of an afterthought really, because she doesn’t need him anyway.
    Just like with toys, the rest of pop culture follows suit. Movies and television almost always give audiences these same two options, and at first glance it appears How I Met Your Mother is doing the same with its two lead female characters. Lily is the traditional, nurturing wife and mother. She met her husband at eighteen, has only had one sexual relationship, and just for good measure she’s also a kindergarten teacher with a shopping addiction. In other words, she could have been pulled straight from any romantic comedy. Then there’s Robin. On the surface, particularly when we first meet her, she seems like the typical feminist career women who doesn’t need a man and turns her nose up at love, but with Robin the writers throw us a curveball because the viewer soon discovers she can’t be so easily defined.
    â€œI wish you hadn’t taught me how to hunt and fish and smoke cigars and drink scotch because that’s not what girls do.And, you know, the reason I throw like a girl, Dad, is because I am a girl,” Robin laments in “Happily Ever After,” and that in a nutshell is the inner struggle facing her character. What is expected of her as a woman? Can she be free to live however she wants without the need to stick to any pre-set path? Or, as ethical psychologist Carol Gilligan contends in her book In a Different Voice , are there certain traits all women fundamentally share and therefore certain rules they all must inherently follow? 1
    Without completely Tedding-out, a ‘no’ answer to the last question in philosophy is known as non-essentialism. Non-essentialist