The Curious Quirks of Isabel’s Ethics

Dr Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher, a graduate of Cambridge University, and the editor of the quarterly Review of Applied Ethics. She is perhaps the most famous philosopher in the world at the present time. Her philosophical ruminations are read by tens of millions of people all over the globe. I suspect that many people are guided by her moral precepts and, like me, are besotted with her honest, fair and charming personality. She lives a life of independent means—thanks to a substantial inheritance—in Edinburgh with her husband Jamie, a bassoonist, and their infant son Charlie. Isabel, Jamie and Charlie are fictional characters in Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie series of novels.

Given the immense popularity of this series, Isabel’s ethics deserve to be examined. Her moral philosophy has strong affinities with Personalism: Isabel seems to oppose relativism, with her firm belief in a class of Absolutes; she also stands opposed to philosophies that subjugate the individual to the collective—and there’s cause for rejoicing just in those two merits. Further, Isabel champions the primacy of love; she maintains not only that actions must be fair and gentle, but thoughts must be too; she is sensitive to the relationship between the individual and their particular locality and community; and she believes that moral knowledge is both universal and connatural but can be refined or distorted by upbringing.

All this appeals to McCall Smith’s massive readership because, I suspect, it resonates with what many people believe but don’t often articulate. Isabel is a more contemplative and intense version of ourselves, or so many of us may imagine. Of course, Isabel is a character in a novel expressing herself spontaneously in a type of stream-of-consciousness or, in her case, a stream-of-conscientiousness. So what we have is drama, alive and entertaining. The moral questions pondered by Isabel and the answers she arrives at add vibrancy of the novels. However, while honouring the integrity of the art form in which they are framed—narrative fiction—it is still possible to sift and evaluate Isabel’s thoughts. And one discovers that they are filled with quirks; her philosophy and her ethics are inconsistent. This is one characteristic that makes Isabel seem so alive: all credit to Alexander McCall Smith as master of the novelist’s art.

Personalism is not mentioned in the series, but Isabel’s ethics seem to have been deeply influenced by Personalism—a movement almost forgotten now but which was influential in Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and at some United States universities in the decades immediately after the Second World War. Personalism directly informed the axioms of human dignity enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In addition, the teaching of Personalist philosophers at US universities was a key component of the thinking of many people who were later active in the Civil Rights movement, including Martin Luther King.

Although a broad movement with roots in the work of Augustine, Aquinas and Kant, modern Personalism was largely a development of the thinking of philosophers such as Nicholas Berdayev, Jacques Maritain, Karol Wojtyla (later, John Paul II), Jean Mouroux and Denis de Rougemont. Their core beliefs are religious in nature: that ultimate reality was personal, the universe a product of and imbued with divine love; that humanity existed for and by love with meaning and purpose found or discarded as each individual responded or failed to respond to the call of love; that the individual had an inviolable personal dignity and should be free from coercion, belittlement and privation, yet the individual also had responsibilities to the community and indeed would not be able to find fulfilment if these communal responsibilities were neglected.

Isabel Dalhousie appears to agree with these major tenets of Personalism, except for the basis on which they all stand: that the universe is the product of divine purpose and love. In other words, she values the fruit but disregards the root. It’s a common quirk, not just one of Isabel’s. On one occasion, she meditates on the absence of large-scale corruption in Scotland and acknowledges that the probity that exists is built on the ethics and influence of Scotland’s Presbyterian Kirk, but that in no way leads her to make a pious commitment herself.

In The Meaning of Man Jean Mouroux states, “What is at stake in our civilisation is whether man shall remain—or re-become—a sacred thing.” I doubt that Isabel would agree. She acknowledges that the universe is a marvel, and that beauty and artistic creativity suggest the divine, but she is not religious. She is pleased when her fiancé, Jamie, reveals that he is not religious either, although she is equally pleased that he is not a hard-hearted, mocking type of sceptic. Isabel thinks that a life without the spiritual is a shallow life, but she is agnostic about life after death, a Divine person, and revelation—although she fondly imagines how helpful it would be to have a Rulebook for Life. For her as for many people, spirituality has therapeutic value, offering a vague sort of hope and a measure of consolation, but it is not vital to epistemology or ethics.

Jacques Maritain observed that most theoretical agnostics are practical atheists. This seems to be the case with Isabel: irreligious, with her own heart and mind determining what is right and wrong, she seeks her happiness only in this life. Yet she is aware of the tenuousness of life’s fleeting joys, and despair is ever lurking. When she buys Jamie an engagement ring, she wonders what to have engraved on it. She converses with the jeweller, who says to Isabel:

“I was worried you were going to write Eternal Love.”

“I couldn’t,” Isabel said. “Because it isn’t. Nothing’s eternal.”

Isabel is fond of poetry; it is one of the things that helps keep despair from overwhelming her. In The Comfort of Saturdays, McCall Smith says of her:

They were ridiculous and frequently trite, but these stories, these little snatches of poetry, provided their modicum of comfort, their islands of meaning that we all need to keep the nothingness at bay; or at least Isabel felt that she needed them.

Like many in the Western world, Isabel’s thinking seems to be an uneasy admixture of existentialism and essentialism, and she switches between the two presuppositions as it suits her. She believes in a purposeless, impersonal universe—the faith of atheistic existentialism—but this is in contrast with her Personalistic traits, such as her belief in the inviolable dignity of the individual and the primacy of love: articles of faith which are essentialist in character. Chesterton, in his essay The Revival of Philosophy—Why? observed that if people don’t have a conscious and complete philosophy then they have an unconscious and incomplete philosophy. They take bits and pieces of contradictory and discredited ideas—for example, a bit from Jesus, a chunk from Hugh Hefner, a thought from the Dalai Lama, a little from Sartre, and a lot from Darwin or Marx—mash them together and trust in the inchoate but self-gratifying result. Isabel is not free from this tendency. She, too, believes in ideas and values that stand in opposition to each other, but at least she is often weighing her ideas and the ideas of others, so her thought has a self-critical element.

Isabel gently but repeatedly discounts the over-arching claims of religious or metaphysical truths, yet she maintains that some values are absolute; for example, there is an imperative to forgive, to love, to be honest, to resist corruption. However, when a metaphysical framework is dismissed, these values are revealed as arbitrary because they can only ever be subjective. In The Charming Quirks of Others, Isabel is irritated by her philosophical nemesis Professor Christopher Dove and she contemplates, but rejects, taking vengeance against him because vengeance is absolutely wrong and love is absolutely right. The emphasis is hers:

she could not let herself experience the pleasure of getting her own back because it was, quite simply, always wrong to get one’s own back on another. It was her duty to forgive Dove and, if she were to be really serious about it, to go further than that and to love him.

A little further in the story, Isabel considers those subsets of society she dislikes, and again love and personhood provide the crucial guiding and correcting values.

She shuddered. Certain groups of people made her shudder: extremists, with their ideologies of hate; the proud; the arrogant; the narcissistic socialites of celebrity culture. And yet all of these were people, and one should love people, or try to …

But why is a person (assuming for the moment that the freedom to choose and the personhood are real rather than nothing more than semantic masks for a deterministic bio-chemical entity) confronted by this “should”? Simply because it’s important to Isabel? Who gave her this authority? Kierkegaard could affirm the absolute that a person should place their faith in God because as an essentialist he believed in a personal, loving God who created personal individual human beings and that a relationship of love therefore had a teleological, ontological and moral basis. But Isabel has no basis for her absolutes: she doggedly maintains them as imperatives, but a critic could say that they are merely her preferences.

One of Isabel’s absolutes is her notion of moral proximity: a person close to another in need is obliged to help the needy. McCall Smith is clever here: Isabel’s desire to help causes most of the action in the novels; moral proximity leads Isabel to situations of mystery and tension and these propel the story. But moral proximity is another of Isabel’s arbitrary absolutes. It’s as if she believes that the parable of the Good Samaritan could have been formulated by Camus rather than by Christ; however, without the religious dimension, the parable may have sentimental appeal, but it has no real authority. Jamie tells Isabel that her notion of moral proximity is akin to outright meddling, but he tolerates her involvement in the lives of others because he knows it reflects Isabel’s desire to be kind and helpful and he loves those qualities in her. Isabel is herself aware that it asks an unrealistic amount of good and self-sacrifice from people if there is no religious imperative. In The Comfort of Saturdays, she meditates on this exact point:

What if we really did kill God, what then? Would we all be rationally committed to the greater good or would savagery be the norm? To kill God: the idea was absurd. If God existed, then he should be above being killed, by definition.

Denis de Rougemont, in his book The Christian Opportunity, asks this question about the popular belief that God is dead: if it is supposed to be an ontological reality, then it is an unprecedented event of the greatest possible cosmic consequence, and if this is the case, how was it that news of God’s death was vouchsafed, not to the majority of mankind, but only to a few atheist philosophers who don’t believe in special revelation? On the other hand, if it is a moral reality, if God must die so man can be solely responsible for his life, then why should responsibility be man’s supreme moral value? It’s another arbitrary absolute: why not power, or pleasure, or status? And why may everything and everyone else be negated to permit that fanatical passion for responsibility for oneself? Isabel, her moral instincts being kind and generous, would not agree to that misanthropic possibility.

In The Lost Art of Gratitude another of Isabel’s ethical quirks is revealed. She has lamented the widespread contemporary absence of a moral sense—at one point even calling babies psychopaths in their self-centredness—but the lament is at odds with her faith in the individual’s innate, connatural knowledge of right and wrong. In a conversation with a shop assistant there is this exchange:

“People are odd,” said Isabel, adding, “but generally they mean well.”

The jeweller seemed intrigued by this. “Do you really think so?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Most people know what’s right. Most people understand the needs of others. They know what we should do.” 

Isabel is delighted when a deal with a fellow Edinburgher is ratified by a simple handshake. Thankful for the trust still evident in Scottish society, Isabel ponders the value of goodwill in communal life. Her thoughts on mutual obligation and community, and her distaste for anonymity and the heavy-handed regulation of life by remote, impersonal governments echo Personalism’s affirmations and concerns. This is from The Lost Art of Gratitude, but it sounds as if Isabel is an amanuensis for the ghost of Simone Weil:

every city, no matter how large, relied on the fact that people would know one another and act well towards their fellow citizens. What was wrong with that? Only those who believed in chaos would want it otherwise; or those who believed that we should have no sense of who we are, of where we are placed, and of what we owe to those with whom we have bonds of fellow feeling. There were of course many such people: many who hated the local, who hated the sense of identity that people had, who wanted us all reduced to the servitude of anonymity, living in vast impersonal states, governed from a distance by people whose faces we never saw, whose names we would never find out. They thought this somehow better. Let them think that: she would not. She would not be ashamed of loving her place, her city, and of doing her utmost to ensure that the things that gave it a sense of itself, the small, personal things that bound its people together would survive. No, she would not.

Mouroux wrote, “The notion of a person is at the centre of all our human problems. Every philosophy, every religion, every culture has to take some position here.” Isabel’s intellectual position is ambivalent: she is uncertain if man is free to choose the good or whether notions of the good are a result of deterministic processes. In The Charming Quirks of Others, Isabel considers the possibility that goodness is like gravity—an intrinsic part of the universe: pure theological Personalism. For a moment she exults in this edifying thought. Then, she faces the possibility that her response to this view of goodness might be just the result of the pleasant firing of bio-chemicals in her brain. She can’t decide which perspective is true, although she leans towards the idea that goodness is a force that is latent but vital in reality. Isabel’s notion of the person has inconsistencies, and her cerebral ethical determinations lag behind her healthy moral instincts and her tender conscience; they, rather than her intellect, point her towards love, forgiveness and gentleness. They provide her with the affinities she has with Personalism.

Alexander McCall Smith has a long acquaintance with ethical deliberations. A professor of medical law, he has also been a member of national and international medical ethics boards. He has much greater formal qualifications in this area than I do. I offer this inadequate assessment of Isabel Dalhousie’s ethics based on an invitation to philosophise that she extended to her postman in The Comfort of Saturdays. The postman asks Isabel what she does and she replies that she is a philosopher. The postie doubts he’d understand much about that subject. Isabel encourages him; she welcomes his participation in the project of thinking about life. She says:

“You’d understand philosophy perfectly well, Billy,” she said. “Everybody’s a philosopher. You have views, don’t you?”

“Aye, I have my views.”

“Well, there you are then: you do philosophy.”

Isabel might not agree with this essay, but she would give it her full attention and welcome the engagement with her thought, even as it criticises her position. Moreover, she would be polite in her rebuttal—a good indicator of her winsome decency. It’s one more reason I look forward to each new book in the series.

Gary Furnell, a regular contributor, wrote on Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana novels in the July-August 2015 issue.