The virtue of discussing popular culture in philosophical contexts is that it provides an accessible way for anyone to challenge dominant paradigms of thinking. The Doctor’s proclivity for seeing his companions and adventures through the lenses of Romanticism and existentialism is itself a challenge to the dominant ways of talking about ethics in schools, universities, and the professions because all too often, morality is treated as something distinct from the social, biological, and cultural conditions from which it emerges.
When we talk about what’s valuable, the difference between good versus evil, or what a flourishing life would look like, we’re aided by alliances not only with popular culture, but also other, non-philosophical disciplines like anthropology and cognitive science. These bodies of knowledge help put flesh on the all-too-thin bones of ethical rules and standards—they make our exploration of morality concrete. And because Doctor Who’s unique narrative twist is the juxtaposition of the familiar and the otherworldly (Jon Pertwee was quoted as saying that Daleks aren’t scary, but finding a Yeti on your loo in Tooting Beck would be), we shouldn’t overlook the likelihood that such juxtapositions may be hidden in the most unassuming of guises. As the show’s first story editor David Whitaker tells us, “Everyone expects ... to see large, gleaming spaceships orbiting planets. But what if the spaceships were here already, disguised as ordinary artifacts? And what if their occupants were already walking among us, keeping cautiously in the background to avoid notice and suspicion?”54 The Doctor’s ethics are inspiring to us primarily because he often treats us better than we deserve, realizing, as we must force ourselves to realize, that humans are bigger on the inside than on the outside.55
13
Empathy, Ethics, and Wonder
LAURA GEUY AKERS
I know what it’s like—everything you’re feeling right now. The fear, the joy, the wonder—I get that!
—TENTH DOCTOR (“Planet of the Ood,” 2008)
It was a better life. And I—I don’t mean all the travelling and ... seeing aliens and spaceships and things—that don’t matter. The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life.
—ROSE TYLER (“The Parting of the Ways,” 2005)
For those who are, in effect, immortal, questions of ends and means must be especially acute. When you’ve already seen “all that is ... all that was ... all that ever could be” (“The Parting of the Ways,” 2005), how can you keep your life fresh and meaningful? And how should you interact with those whose lives are almost as ephemeral to you as mayflies are to ordinary humans?
Philosophers have long considered the question of how to make one’s life fulfilling. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle taught that the good life is one of engagement in activities that accord with virtue, and others have emphasized the pursuit of justice, honor, and other ideal ends. Psychologists like Edward Deci and Richard Ryan propose three basic human needs: competence in one’s actions, relatedness (connections with others), and autonomy (feeling we’re acting without pressure from others).56 An extensive body of cross-cultural research confirms that meeting these three needs is important to individuals’ well-being.
Earlier in his long life, the Doctor hardly seemed to face this issue. Bored with his home planet and something of a rebel among the Time Lords, the Doctor always seemed content with himself. Since the final Time War, however, which destroyed Gallifrey and (almost) all of the other Time Lords, these existential issues have become especially pressing. The Doctor is now fully self-directed and painfully alone. How then should he live his life?
Paths Not Taken
The Doctor strongly rejects the worldviews of his opponents. He condemns the Daleks for their genocidal belief that “Human beings are different, and anything different is wrong” (“Dalek,” 2005). He’s likewise appalled by the Cybermen, who believe that “upgrading” from humanity must involve removing all emotion and differences, in the interest of “Everlasting peace—and unity—and uniformity” (“Age of Steel,” 2006). The Doctor cherishes creativity, even eccentricity, and abhors blind conformity and schemes that treat living beings as means toward others’ ends.
In “School Reunion” (2006), the Doctor encounters the Krillitanes, who are using British schoolchildren to help them solve the Skasis Paradigm so that they can “shape the universe and improve it.” The Doctor understands the temptation but refuses to help them. He doesn’t believe it’s appropriate to act on such a scale, to engineer solutions and impose them on others.
Even more germane to the question of Time-Lord ethics is the Master, a rival Time Lord whose way of life is diametrically opposed to the Doctor’s. As his name implies, the Master seeks to conquer and dominate, while the Doctor, like a good physician, responds to needs, works to restore situations to a state of well-being, and then moves on.
This isn’t to say that the Doctor has been entirely consistent in his approach to life. In his First incarnation, he was “rude, angry, dangerous, and malevolent,” and in his Second, “puckish, quixotic” and “slyly self-deprecating.”57 The Third was gentlemanly, and the Fourth, downright cavalier. Even in his Tenth incarnation, he can still succumb to the temptation to make godlike judgments, as when he condemned The Family of Blood to eternal imprisonment (“The Family of Blood,” 2007) As Donna Noble said when he destroyed the Racnoss in “The Runaway Bride” (2006), “Sometimes, I think you need someone to stop you.” Overall, however, he seems much more cautious than in his earlier days. Perhaps he’s more realistic about his wisdom, or perhaps the Great Time War has caused him to fear his own power.
Our Doctor and Ethics
One key to understanding the Doctor’s personality is his ethical stance. The Doctor’s sense of right and wrong shapes how he spends his time, how he treats his companions, and how he uses and limits his use of his vast powers.
One of the most prominent approaches to ethics today is rule deontology. This approach says that people can know what’s right by reference to principles: universally valid rules to ensure that everyone acts fairly and impartially, regardless of feelings or special circumstances. The Doctor seems to live by some rules, such as not carrying a weapon, but he doesn’t require others to follow the same rules, and his interpretation of those rules depends on context (for instance, he uses a satsuma tangerine to cause an enemy to fall to its death in “The Christmas Invasion,” 2005).
Another approach to ethics focuses on consequences, where actions aren’t inherently right or wrong; only their results determine whether they’re good or bad. In this utilitarian perspective, the aim is to maximize that which is “good,” whether this is pleasure, well-being, or some other valued end. The Doctor, however, doesn’t seem comfortable with this sort of moral calculation, and a person with his privileged perspective might find both good and bad consequences from any action. As the Fourth Doctor says, after declining to destroy the Daleks at their moment of creation, “I know also, that out of their evil, must come something good” (“Genesis of the Daleks,” 1975).
A third approach, virtue ethics, focuses on each person’s moral character. In this view, a well-lived life involves developing one’s virtues to the utmost. The Doctor, however, lives his life at such a pace that introspective reflection isn’t practical. He also doesn’t seem interested in contemplating the coherence of his long-term identity, preferring to live in the moment. Early in their acquaintance, in “The End of the World” (2005), Rose Tyler asks the Doctor who he is, and the question makes him angry. He responds, “This is who I am, right here, right now, all right? All that counts is here and now, and this is me!” Clearly, each moral decision the Doctor makes must feel right at the moment he makes it, because he doesn’t seem to concern himself with improving his character.
Rather than a rule-based ethic of abstract principles, a calculated cost-benefit approach, or a virtue ethics of concern for optimizing his personal integrity, the Doctor’s ethics are focused on particular others; that is, on being responsive to the needs of others in w
hatever situation he finds himself. He responds to individuals, not abstractions, and for the Doctor, emotion is the very key to appropriate moral response.
The Doctor’s ethical stance can be characterized as relational ethics, an ethics of care. As originally developed by Nel Noddings and other feminist scholars, care ethics finds its roots not in impartial and abstract principles but in how we are moved to act by our feelings in real-world situations. Noddings explains:Many persons who live moral lives do not approach moral problems formally. Women, in particular, seem to approach moral problems by placing themselves as nearly as possible in concrete situations and assuming personal responsibility for the choices to be made. They define themselves in terms of caring and work their way through moral problems from the position of [one who cares].58
Care ethicists assert that it’s both natural and reasonable to show a greater sensitivity to the relationships in which one is embedded. As Michael Slote59 explains, it’s our empathic response to the needs we see in those near to us that leads us to prioritize them over those we merely hear about, although empathic concern may be expanded to provide a foundation even for policies of social justice. The Doctor shows us that an ethics of care can apply to any relationship, however brief, in which one makes a personal connection.
In other words, an ethics of care is an approach that involves meeting others in what Martin Buber calls an “I-Thou” stance, a mode of direct, intersubjective encounter. As Buber describes it: If I face a human being as my Thou ... he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things. Thus human being is not a He or She, bounded from every other He or She, a specific point in space and time within the net of the world; nor is he a nature able to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. But with no neighbor, and whole in himself, he is Thou and fills the heavens. This does not mean that nothing exists except himself. But all else lives in his light.60
In contrast, there’s also the “I-It” stance, the mode in which we can think about people and things. We can experience them, describe them, consider their qualities. Without the I-It perspective, we can’t survive in the world, but this stance also underlies instrumental thinking, the perspective from which we manipulate, manage, and use. When we’re in I-It mode, we have no openness to the reality of others’ subjective worlds; the world is a world of things.
The Doctor rejects instrumentalism; people are not “things” to him. When he and Donna find an enslaved Ood half-dead in a snowbank, he makes sure she understands the Ood is “a ‘he,’ not an ‘it’” (“Planet of the Ood”). He always tries to be attentive to the feelings and uniqueness of others. Even in a moment of considerable stress, about to surrender to Daleks waiting outside the TARDIS (in “Journey’s End,” 2008), he treats those with him as individuals, not a group, addressing each in turn with his full attention. He speaks first to Donna: “You were brilliant.” He then turns to Jack Harkness: “And you were brilliant.” Last, he speaks to Rose: “And you were brilliant.” This mindful awareness of each person, each relationship, is the essence of the Doctor’s ethical self-expression.
Some of the Doctor’s most painful dilemmas have also arisen from his ethical stance. These issues illustrate some of the concerns that philosophers have raised about an ethics of care. Sarah Lucia Hoagland notes that when the intimate is not expected to care for the carer in return, the relationship can be oppressive.61 Although the Doctor treats his companions as Thou, he maintains a distance and doesn’t encourage them to reciprocate, and there’s always an imbalance of power between them. In an ultimate exercise of power over another, he erases Donna’s memory of their adventures, just as earlier Time Lords did with the companions of the Second Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot (“The War Games,” 1969). He does this for Donna’s own good, but would she agree?
Many critics have felt, too, that practicing care ethics can leave people vulnerable to abusive relationships, or as Barbara Houston puts it, “we feel responsible for the moral goodness of those who abuse us, exploit us, harm us.”62 In “Last of the Time Lords” (2007), the Doctor chooses not to kill the Master, his long-time nemesis, who has just kept him imprisoned for more than a year. Rather, he tells him, “Now I’ll have someone to care for.” Only the action of Lucy Saxon, the Master’s human wife, spares the Doctor from a commitment to keep the Master permanently within the TARDIS, to forever safeguard the rest of creation.
Ethics and Wonder
The Doctor’s I-Thou stance toward his companions is closely related to his stance toward the universe in general, a non-instrumental approach to life and beauty that can be best characterized as a highly developed sense of wonder. As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, wonder is “the emotion excited by the perception of something novel and unexpected, or inexplicable; astonishment mingled with perplexity or bewildered curiosity.”
Moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum believes that experiencing wonder helps us expand our scope of ethical concern. Wonder, as she puts it, “helps move distant objects within the circle of a person’s scheme of ends.”63 If something engages us with wonder, we open ourselves to experiencing that phenomenon in all its immediacy, and we approve. Just as an I-Thou sensibility reflects an openness to particular humans in all their depth and individuality, an openness to wonder implies an openness to—and appreciation of—phenomena as they fully are, whether a rainbow, a snowflake, or the grandeur of the Sapphire Waterfall, which the Doctor tries to visit on “Midnight” (2008).
In general, we experience wonder when our expectations are violated in a positive and aesthetically compelling way. We might feel wonder when we see something that doesn’t fit into known categories, like a new form of art or a hitherto unimagined creature, or when an experience is better than one could possibly expect. Very often, too, wonder happens when we come across things that don’t fit our usual sense of scale, when we step out of our ordinary perspective to encounter the reality of the vast or the infinitesimal, the eternal or the ephemeral.
Another source of wonderment is the appreciation of complexity. As the Scottish philosopher Ronald Hepburn notes, “The wonder aroused by the discerning of intelligible patterns in nature has ... been one main motivation in scientific inquiry.”64 Wonder can be compatible with science, if by science we mean the activity connected with curiosity and a desire to understand, rather than a drive to reduce everything to propositions and equations, to render the universe predictable and tamed. Science doesn’t necessarily sustain wonder: Categorization, manipulation, and a striving for objectivity often mean treating phenomena as things, not individuals. For the Doctor, however, science involves curiosity, caring, and respect for the phenomena he discovers. He’s an ethical scientist, a scientist who prioritizes the unpredictable vitality of wonder over the firm possession of dry knowledge.
Wonder is not the only emotion associated with encountering the unexpected. A creature that doesn’t fit within our taxonomy might be judged to be monstrous, and the idea of an entire ecosystem living in a drop of water might fill us with dread or horror. Our cultural and personal predispositions may lead us not into wonder but anxiety. The anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that cultures often condemn “any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications, ”65 treating them as anathema, even dangerous, and needing to be restrained and purified. Immanuel Kant had such a bias. He felt that although we may feel respect for the very large, we also feel “a kind of contempt” for “the level of the infinitely little.”66 Seeing wonder instead of the monstrous, frightening, or degraded requires the right attitude, an enthusiasm and openness that the Doctor has and shares with others.
In his Critique of Judgment and earlier writings, Kant concerned himself not with wonder itself but with a closely related concept especially relevant to the Doctor, the sublime. This compelling emotional state, very much like awe, can arise in two kinds of situations: when we encounter the raw force of nature while knowing ourselves to be safe and secure
(the “dynamic sublime”), and when we realize that our imagination is insufficient to take in the scope of something that our intuition perceives as a whole (the “mathematical sublime”). As Kant put it, “where the size of a natural object is such that the imagination spends its whole faculty of comprehension upon it in vain, it must carry our concept of nature to a supersensible substrate (underlying both nature and our faculty of thought) which is great beyond every standard of the senses.” In other words, the phenomenon is too great for us to understand. All we can do is stop in amazement and realize that this is the case.
The Doctor, however, is a Time Lord. He’s lived for many human lifetimes, and his brain contains a far greater capacity for understanding than any human could endure (as Donna discovers to her despair in “Journey’s End”). Many phenomena that would leave humans bewildered are comprehensible to him. To the extent that he can, in fact, grasp things that for us would “strain the imagination to the utmost,” the experience of the sublime would elude the Doctor. To him, much of the universe could simply be ordinary.
The Doctor’s ability to resist this outlook reveals one of the most important benefits he gains from human companionship. His mortal friends aren’t just a buffer against loneliness—they are, as he would say, “so much more,” giving him access to the human scale as a reference point. By seeing the fabulous beings and places of the cosmos through human eyes, he can renew his own sense of wonder, his fascination and engagement with the infinite possibilities of existence in the universe as he encounters it. The Doctor’s companions, in a very important sense, give his life meaning.
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