Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

us inhabit.”

Isabel drew herself away from the lawn. She had been thinking about weeds. But weeds, and what to do about them, were very much a part of everyday life, and everyday life was exactly what philosophy was about. We were rooted in it, inevitably, and how we reacted to it—our customs, our obser-vances—was the very stuff of moral philosophy. Hume had called them, these little conventions, a kind of lesser morality, and in her view he had been right.

“It’s much more mundane and everyday than you would imagine,” she began. And then she stopped. One could easily simplify too much, and discussions about social convention could give him the wrong idea. How you drank your coffee was not what it was about, but the fact that you drank coffee together was of tremendous significance. But she could not say that, because that statement could be made only after a great deal of earlier ground had been covered and understood.

Ian nodded. “I see. Well, that’s a little bit disappointing. I imagined that you spent all your time pacing about trying to work out the nature of reality—wondering whether the world outside is real enough to take a walk in. That sort of thing.”

Isabel laughed. “Sorry to disabuse you of such amusing notions. No. But I must admit that my calling—if I can call it that—sometimes makes life a little difficult for me.”

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This interested him. “In what way?”

“Well, it’s mostly a question of duty,” Isabel said. She sighed, thinking of her demons; moral obligation was the real problem. This was the cross she bore, the rack on which she was obliged to lie—even the metaphors were uncomfortable.

“I find myself thinking very carefully about what I should do in any given situation,” she went on. “And it can get a little bit burdensome for me. In fact, sometimes I feel rather like those unfortunate people with OCD—you know, obsessive-compulsive disorder; of course you know that, you’re a clinical psychologist—but I sometimes think I’m like those people who have to check ten times that they’ve turned the oven off or who have to wash their hands again and again to get rid of germs. I think I can understand how they feel.”

“Now you’re on familiar ground,” he said. “I had quite a few patients with OCD. One woman I knew had a thing about doorhandles. She had to cover the doorhandle with a handker-chief before she could open it. Tricky, sometimes. And public washrooms were a real agony for her. She had to use her foot to flush. She lifted a foot and pushed the lever down by stepping on it.”

Isabel thought for a moment. “Very wise,” she said with a smile. “Imagine what results you’d get if you took a swab from one of those handles and cultured it. Imagine.”

“Maybe,” said Ian. “But we need to be exposed to germs, don’t we? All this hygiene and refined foods—what’s the result?

Allergies galore. Everyone will eventually have asthma.” He paused. “But back to philosophy. Those papers over there—are they submissions for that journal of yours?”

Isabel glanced at the pile of manuscripts and suppressed a shudder. Guilt, she thought, can sometimes be measured in 1 5 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h physical quantities. A heavy drinker might measure his guilt in gallons or litres; a glutton in inches round the waist; and the editor of a journal in terms of the height of the stack of manuscripts awaiting her attention. This was almost eighteen inches of guilt.

“I should be reading those,” she said. “And I will. But, as Saint Augustine said about chastity, not just yet.”

“You don’t want to read them?” Ian asked.

“I do and I don’t,” said Isabel. “I don’t want to read them in one sense, but in another sense I want to read them and get them finished.” She looked again at the pile. “Most of those are for a special issue we’re bringing out. It’s on friendship.”

Ian looked puzzled. “What has philosophy got to do with that?” he asked.

“A great deal,” Isabel replied. “It’s one of the great topics.

What is the nature of friendship? How are we to treat our friends? Can we prefer our friends to others who are not our friends?”

“Of course we can,” said Ian. “Isn’t that why they’re our friends in the first place?”

Isabel shook her head. She arose from her chair and went to stand by the window, looking out on the lawn, but averting her gaze from the weeds. Weeds had a closer relationship with guilt than did grass.

“There are some philosophers who say that we shouldn’t do that at all,” she said. “They say that we have a moral duty to treat others equally. We shouldn’t discriminate among people who need our help. We should allocate such help as we can give absolutely even-handedly.”

“But that’s inhuman!” Ian protested.

“I think so,” said Isabel. “But it’s not all that easy to make a sound case for preferring the claims of your friends. I think F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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one can do it, but you’re up against some powerful counter-arguments.”

“Do philosophers tend to have many friends?” asked Ian. “If that’s the way they think . . .”

“It depends on the extent to which they possess the virtues that make friendship thrive,” Isabel answered. “A virtuous person will have friends in the true sense. A person whose character is afflicted with vices won’t.”

She turned away from the window and faced Ian. “We can return to this topic, if you like, Ian, but I’m afraid this is not why I invited you for coffee today. It’s something else altogether—”