Isabel opened a letter with a neatly typed envelope. “My friend, Julian,” she said. She read the brief letter, laughing aloud at its conclusion.
“I believe he’s serious,” she said, passing the letter to Grace.
“An offer of a paper on the ethics of the buffet bar.”
Grace read the letter and passed it back to Isabel. “Of course it’s theft,” she said. “Helping oneself to bread rolls like that. Surely he can see that.”
“Julian Baggini is a subtle man,” said Isabel. “And his question is a serious one. Is it ethical to take extra bread rolls from the hotel buffet? And use them for your picnic lunch?”
“Really,” Grace snorted. “Is that what your readers want to read about?”
Isabel thought for a moment. “We could do a special issue on the ethics of food,” she mused. “We could use Julian’s paper there.”
“The ethics of food?”
Isabel picked up her paper-knife and stroked the edge.
“Food is a more complex subject than one might think, you know. There is every reason why a philosopher should think about food.”
“One of them being hunger,” retorted Grace.
Isabel conceded the point. “Philosophers are no different from anybody else. Philosophers have their needs.” She looked at the letter again. “Buffet bars. Yes. I can just imagine the problems.”
“Theft,” repeated Grace. “You shouldn’t take what’s not yours. Is there anything more you can say about it?”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel put her hands behind her head and looked up at the ceiling. Grace was in some matters, though not in others, a reductionist, a consummate wielder of Occam’s razor; which was a good thing, in a way.
“But it’s not always clear what’s yours and what isn’t yours,”
Isabel countered. “You may think that you’re entitled to that extra bread roll, but what if you’re not? What if the hotel intends that you should take only one?”
“Then you’ve taken something that you think is yours, but which isn’t,” said Grace. “And that isn’t theft—at least it’s not theft in my book.”
Isabel contemplated this for a moment. Two people go to a party, she thought, both with similar-looking umbrellas. One person leaves the party early. He takes an umbrella which he thinks is his, but he discovers when he gets home that it is the wrong one. That, she imagined, was not theft, in the moral sense at least, and surely it would not be theft in the legal sense.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered a discussion with a lawyer about that, a sharp-nosed advocate who spoke in a deliberate, pedantic way but who had a mind like . . . well, Occam’s razor. He had said something about how the law allowed a defence of error, as long as one’s error was reasonable; which in itself seemed reasonable enough.
“The law uses tests of reasonableness,” he had said, and he had proceeded to give her examples which had stuck in her mind.
“Take causation,” he went on. “You’re responsible for those consequences of your acts which a reasonable person would foresee. You aren’t responsible for anything outside that. So let me tell you about a real case. A had assaulted B and B was lying F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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on the ground, bleeding from a head wound. Along came C, who had attended a first-aid course. He had been taught about tourniquets and so he applied a tourniquet.”
“To the neck?”
“Unfortunately, yes. And the question was whether A was responsible for B’s death—which of course was by asphyxiation rather than loss of blood. What do you do about an unreasonable rescuer?”
Isabel had managed to keep a straight face, but only just.
This was, after all, a tragedy. “And was he?” she asked.
The lawyer frowned. “Sorry,” he replied. “I can’t for the life of me remember the outcome. But here’s another one. A has a fight with B, who pushes him out of the window. A doesn’t fall very far as he’s wearing braces, or suspenders, as the Americans rather more accurately call them. These get caught on the balcony and he ends up suspended. A crowd gathers down below and a rescuer appears on the balcony. ‘Get him down,’ the crowd shouts. Whereupon the helpful rescuer cuts the elastic.”
“That’s very sad,” said Isabel. “Poor man.”
The lawyer had remembered the outcome of that case, and had told her. But now Isabel had forgotten what he said it was.
She looked at Grace.
“But do you think that the person who takes the extra roll thinks that he’s entitled to it?” she asked.
“He may,” said Grace. “If I leave something on a table and say Help yourself, then surely you’re entitled to do just that.”
“But what if I took everything?” objected Isabel. “What if I brought my suitcase down and filled it with food? Enough for a week?”
“That would be selfish,” said Grace.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel nodded her agreement. “Very selfish,” she said. “And is selfishness wrong, or is it something which the virtuous person should merely avoid?” She thought for a moment. “Perhaps the solution is that the invitation to help yourself is subject to an implied limitation. What it means is Help yourself to what you need. ”
“For breakfast,” added Grace. “Help yourself to what you need for breakfast. ”
“Exactly,” said Isabel. “I’m not sure how far we can get with the ethics of the buffet bar, but there are some rather interesting problems there. Shall I write to Julian, or would you like to do that?”
Grace laughed. “You, I think. Nobody would listen to me.”
“They would listen to you,” Isabel said.
Grace shuffled through the letters. “I don’t think so. And why should they? I’m just the cleaning lady to them.”
“You’re not,” said Isabel stoutly. “You’re the housekeeper.
And there’s a distinction.”
“They wouldn’t think so,” said Grace.
“There have been some very talented, very famous housekeepers,” said Isabel.
Grace’s interest was aroused. “Oh yes? Such as?”
Isabel looked at the ceiling for inspiration. “Oh well,” she said. And then she said “Well” again. She had made the comment without thinking, and now, when she put her mind to it, she could not come up with any. Who were the mute, unsung hero-ines? There must have been many, but now she could think only of the woman who had put Carlyle’s manuscript in the fire. She was a maid, was she not, or was she a housekeeper? Was there a distinction? She thought about it briefly and then decided that she was getting nowhere with anything, and the pile of mail was F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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effectively as high as it had been before she had started to think about buffet bars, and bread rolls, and housekeepers.
She looked at the next letter, but put it down again before opening it. Her mind had returned to the possible special issue on the ethics of food. There would have to be a paper on the moral issues raised by chocolate; the more she thought of it, the richer became the philosophical dimensions of chocolate. It brought akrasia, weakness of the will, into sharp focus. If we know that chocolate is bad for us (and in some respects chocolate is bad for us, in the sense that it makes us put on weight), then how is it that we end up eating too much of it? That suggests that our will is weak. But if we eat chocolate, then it must be that we think that it is in our best interests to do so; our will moves us to do what we know we will like. So our will is not weak—it is actually quite strong, and prompts us to do that which we really want to do (to eat chocolate). Chocolate was not simple.