Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  Wonder and the Doctor’s Companions

  In the wake of the events that led to the destruction of his home planet, the Doctor comes to Earth and meets Rose Tyler. He’s recently experienced a considerable trauma, and it’s taking him some time to reestablish his ethical bearings. On their first adventure in time, he decides to impress her by taking her to the Earth’s last moments, essentially a tourist event, wonder as a commodity. This isn’t a thoughtful choice, as Rose finds the idea quite upsetting. Perhaps the Doctor is on some level seeking empathy for the loss of his own home, and out of sympathy for his loss she agrees to continue travelling with him. She finds herself fascinated—not only can the Doctor visit other times, but he has an entirely different perspective on time. As she remarks on their next adventure, “Think about it, though. Christmas. 1860. Happens once. Just once, and it’s gone. It’s finished. It’ll never happen again. Except for you. You can go back and see days that are dead and gone and a hundred thousand sunsets ago ... no wonder you never stay still” (“The Unquiet Dead,” 2005). For Rose, the ability to re-experience time is a source of wonder, and this wonder infuses her relationship with the Doctor.

  Later in the same adventure, Rose realizes that the Doctor’s ethical sense has gone askew. He wants to let the Gelth inhabit a few of the bodies of Cardiff’s dead, and to use a young woman, Gwyneth, as their portal. Rose protests, and he responds, “It’s a different morality. Get used to it.” Of course, he does come to realize that Gwyneth isn’t a thing to be used, especially when she heroically sacrifices herself to save the Earth from the Gelth invasion. Finally, by “Dalek,” Rose succeeds in recalibrating (healing?) the Doctor’s ethical sensibilities, insisting he show mercy to the last of the Daleks, to treat it as an individual. He resumes his characteristic sensitivity to relationships and circumstances, sparing the life of the Slitheen posing as Margaret Blaine (in “Boom Town,” 2005) and intending to spare the Sycorax leader (“The Christmas Invasion”) until the latter double-crosses him.

  At the time of their meeting, Rose had not yet begun to act in the interests of people beyond her immediate circle. In a broader moral sense, it was as if her life had not yet begun. The Doctor serves as a catalyst for the development of Rose’s imperative to act, but more importantly, he’s also its foremost focus. True to her I-Thou orientation, when he regenerates she can recognize and accept him for who he is, not being distracted by the superficials of his appearance (though she does appreciate them).

  Martha Jones, by contrast, is a medical student when she first meets the Doctor. Her motivation for action in the wider world is established, and she’s already committed to a universally oriented ethics of service. Martha appreciates beauty and novelty, and her eager suggestion that they visit the Doctor’s home world (“Gridlock,” 2007) hints at her capacity for wonder, but she doesn’t need wonder to inspire her to act. The Doctor values Martha’s enthusiasm, skills, and dedication, but he can’t make the empathetic connection with her that he had with Rose, probably in part because Martha doesn’t find wonder energizing in the way that Rose did.

  The Doctor’s relationship with Donna Noble is, yet again, different. Donna sees herself as a very ordinary person, an office temp from Chiswick, a view reinforced by her calculating mother, Sylvia. Donna’s grandfather, Wilfred Mott, has a much different influence on Donna, spending each night gazing at the skies through his telescope, speculating hopefully about the existence of aliens.

  Donna is initially eager to join the Doctor and see the glories of time and space, but their early travels disappoint her. First she’s disheartened by the tragedy of Pompeii, and then she’s so distressed by the plight of the Ood that she begs to go home until she finds that it’s actually possible to help them. Donna, however, has a virtue that Rose and Martha lacked. Her ethics focus on the particular, as do the Doctor’s and Rose’s, but Donna can respond to the needs she encounters without the inspiration of wonder and beauty, even (as we saw so poignantly in “Turn Left,” 2008) when the person asking is a stranger and the path is frightening, even when responding means that she must die. Donna is, indeed, noble. It’s not that she’s selfless: It’s vitally important to her to be special. Donna’s deepest motivation is to be able to believe that others might feel wonder in their encounters with her.

  The value the Doctor finds in his relationships with ordinary humans becomes all the more apparent when contrasted with how he interacts with the Time Lord Romana, a companion of his Fourth incarnation, as well as with Captain Jack Harkness, an experienced human time traveler. When the Doctor first met Romana, they bickered and attempted to assert dominance over each other, until she diagnosed their problem as “a negative empathy” (“The Ribos Operation,” 1978). Jack, of course, he mistrusted. The Doctor couldn’t respect a self-described con man (“The Empty Child,” 2005), especially one so interested in flirting with Rose. In “Utopia” (2007), Jack complained, “You abandoned me,” the Doctor replied indifferently, “Did I? Busy life. Move on.” Not until “Journey’s End” does the Doctor treat Jack as a trusted friend.

  The centrality of wonder in the Doctor Who ethos is further shown in the relationship of Sarah Jane Smith and Maria Jackson, in The Sarah Jane Adventures. Sarah Jane kept her neighbors at a distance, until Maria saw her with an alien one night in the garden. Both were entranced by the beauty of the star poet from Arcateen V, and their shared wonder at the fairy-like alien made them kindred spirits.

  The importance of wonder is also illustrated by what the loss of the Doctor does to each of the companions. Sarah Jane had a difficult adjustment at first, as she tells him when they meet again (“School Reunion”): “You took me to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, you showed me supernovas, intergalactic battles and then you just dropped me back on Earth. How could anything compare to that?” Once she reconciles herself to life without the Doctor, however, she creates her own career that balances sustaining her sense of wonder with a commitment to investigation and action, emulating the Doctor in her Earth-based life. Martha misses the Doctor as a person and regrets the relationship she wishes they could’ve had, but her life resumes right where she left off. She completes her medical training and becomes a doctor herself. As for Donna, although Wilfred laments that she’s lost “all those wonderful things she did” (“Journey’s End”), the Doctor knows she’ll be fine—she never needed him, or wonder, but only to value herself.

  Rose, on the other hand, is completely lost without the wonder. Her world goes grey; she can no longer connect to it. For her, life on Earth would now be “Get up—catch the bus—go to work—come back home—eat chips and go to bed” (“The Parting of the Ways”). She’d never learned to focus on the big picture, to find meaning in an abstract commitment to service as Martha did. Although in the ethos of the series, the personal is always sufficient grounds for motivation, in Rose’s case the personal imperative was fused with the identity of the person who awakened her to its call, and without him, life lost its meaning.

  After the conclusion of “Journey’s End,” Rose has regained her Doctor but lost her access to the grandeur of the cosmos. Rose and the “human Doctor” will have to learn together how to find a sustaining sense of wonder in the human scale and in the intimacy of their I-Thou relationships. This will itself be something new and strange for him—never before has the Doctor opened himself up to being someone else’s Thou. Now they’ll have time to explore a genuine mutuality and the possibilities of love.

  A Better Way of Living Your Life

  As possessors of vast knowledge and considerable power, Time Lords might do whatever they please, pursuing grand schemes and ruling over lesser mortals to gain their own selfish ends. Our Doctor chooses a different path. He serves as a fine example for how to make the most of our more modest existences. Through an empathetic sensitivity to particulars and individuals, by being responsive to the needs of persons, not abstractions, each of us can have a life that’s meaningful.

  If we’re open to
wonder, we can each be, as the Doctor would say, “brilliant.”67

  14

  Doctor, Who Cares?

  J.J. SYLVIA

  DOCTOR: I have one thing to say to you.... You know what it is.

  MASTER: (hurriedly) Oh, no you don’t!

  —(“Last of the Time Lords,” 2007)

  The Doctor is unique among Time Lords because he involves himself in the affairs of the universe despite this being prohibited by Time Lord policy. It’s precisely this involvement that’s so important about him. Although his personality can differ somewhat from one incarnation to another, the Doctor is essentially a compassionate and caring being—he cares for the particular individuals he meets as well as the universe as a whole. It’s precisely this penchant for caring which leads the Doctor to involving himself in the universe—and undoubtedly he makes the universe a better place for it.

  The ethics of caring, a relatively new philosophic development, is a system expressed by feminists who believe that traditional ethical systems are male-biased and don’t account for the way women experience the world. Of course, most who support a feminist ethics don’t believe the differences this system reflect can be split right down the gender line—it’s simply an easy generalization to make. The Doctor, then, is all the more interesting because he, as a man, represents an ideal example of the ethics of caring.

  The Sanctimonious Doctor

  MASTER: Doctor.

  DOCTOR: Master.

  MASTER: I like it when you use my name.

  DOCTOR: You chose it. Psychiatrists’ field day.

  MASTER: As you chose yours. The man who makes people better. How sanctimonious is that?

  —(“The Sound of Drums,” 2007)

  Both men were able to choose their own names and as the Doctor points out, there’s clearly some significance to these choices. A master rules over people while a doctor typically cares for people—and we see this in the Doctor—he struggles and works to make people better time and again. Rita Manning, in Speaking from the Heart, explains that caring involves: “acting in some appropriate way to respond to the needs of persons and animals, but can also be extended to responding to the needs of communities, values, or objects” (p. 62). A concrete example of this action is found in parenting. Parents must consistently respond to the needs of their children in order to help them grow and later, hopefully, flourish. Although it’s possible for a doctor not to care at all about his patients—one just has to think of Dr. Gregory House—this is another relationship that can typically be understood as one exemplary of caring.

  But what exactly does an ethics of caring entail? Carol Gilligan pioneered the movement in her book In a Different Voice. Prior moral theories have reflected what Gilligan calls theories of justice, which generate strict systems or rules which can be used impartially to direct a person to the right action. In analyzing the responses of people to moral scenarios with which they were presented, Gilligan began to notice a divide between the responses of men and women. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg ranked different levels of moral development, and this divide tended to put most women in a category of lower moral development than most men.

  Gilligan asserts that the problem lies not with women, but with the classification system used by Kohlberg. Kohlberg’s system relies entirely on what Gilligan deems an ethics of justice. This ethics of justice has some merit, but it’s incomplete without also including an ethics of care. In essence, she believes any complete moral theory will include both an ethics of justice and care.

  Just as parents need children in order to actually be considered to be parents, a doctor needs patients to be a doctor. A relationship between the care-giver and the cared for develops, and it’s this relationship that’s of utmost importance for an ethic of care. Consider the following example: the Doctor is forced to decide between saving one of his companions or a random stranger he’s never met. Obviously he’d try to save both if at all possible, but imagine that simply were not possible. Who ought he to save in that situation? A traditional system of justice, such as utilitarianism, would have a difficult time giving advice as to which he would be obligated to save. Utilitarianism, developed by Jeremy Bentham and elaborated by John Stuart Mill, suggests that the correct action is the one which promotes the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Every person, including oneself, carries the same amount of ethical weight in this system. Because utilitarianism is impartial, the Doctor couldn’t use its system of rules to distinguish between his companion and the stranger. On the other hand, an ethics of care would acknowledge that the most prominent moral feature of this scenario is the relationship between the Doctor and his companion. His most important obligation is specifically to care for his companion, and thus the decision of which to save is by no means arbitrary. In that situation an ethics of care would suggest that he save his companion.

  On the Necessity of Companions

  Of course, this all poses somewhat of a problem for a lone traveler—a being mostly unnoticed by the majority of the population of earth. How can the Doctor consistently manage to care for so many people with whom he has no relationship at all? We all know that one of the most interesting things about the Doctor is that he has companions on his travels. Producer Russell T Davies notes in an interview, “What’s the point of seeing the whole of the cosmos and all of history if there’s no one to share it with, no one to join in with the wonder and awe, no one’s hand to hold when it gets terrifying? Underneath all the Doctor’s wit and vigor, I think there’s quite a lonely man, the last of his kind, wandering inside the only TARDIS in existence. He needs companionship.”68

  The Doctor has a tendency to develop these “companionships” where the role of care-giver and cared for frequently flips back and forth. We don’t have to understand the Doctor as simply a caregiver to fit him within the framework of an ethics of care. We’re all sometimes care-givers and sometimes cared for, possibly even simultaneously on different levels of interaction. Sometimes the Doctor saves the companions, but sometimes they save him, and certainly he seems to learn from them. Billie Piper, the actress who plays Rose, comments, “Rose and the Doctor teach each other. She’s quite closed off from the world, but she could, potentially, be someone brilliant. He shows her how to do that. And equally, she shows him how to be sympathetic, how to have morals and show and express his emotions.”69 The real question is how the Doctor can care for so many people—the whole human race and more—without a relationship to each of those he cares for.

  Perhaps because the Doctor is able to develop these relationships with his companions in a one-on-one basis, he can apply that ethics of care, that understanding of the relationship, to the larger population and others in need. As Manning puts it, “although we do not know the sufferer, we can assume that the sufferer shares essential characteristics with someone who is close to us” (p. 68). Perhaps it’s through his companions that the Doctor learns to care for the world at large. Manning argues that we have a prima facie obligation to help a creature in need that can’t help itself. The Doctor certainly seems to be meeting this obligation—just how many times has he saved our world?

  Manning’s explanation seems to match up to the way we normally experience things. We experience the problems of those who are close to us, and through those relations we feel sympathy for others who are in plight whether we’ve met them or know anything about them. Although there may be more reasoning involved in the overall analysis, this might also explain why we feel more upset by harm done to animals like dogs or cats than, say, lobsters. We care for dogs and cats as our pets and develop a relationship there. We’d likely cringe at dropping a dog into a pot of boiling water, but doing the same with a lobster might only cause us to salivate in anticipation of a meal. Perhaps part of the explanation for those divergent reactions is that we have a care relationship with one but not the other. Seen through this lens, the Doctor’s relationships with his companions would be a vital element in his caring for humanity o
n a larger scale.

  Sad Is Happy for Deep People

  I absorbed all the energy of the Time Vortex, and no one’s meant to do that! Every cell in my body’s dying.

  —NINTH DOCTOR (“The Parting of the Ways,” 2005)

  Is sacrifice required in order to care for others? Is the process of caring itself a sacrifice? Certainly the Doctor is no stranger to the notion of sacrifice. In “The Parting of the Ways,” he takes the energy of the Time Vortex from Rose, which kills him and causes him to regenerate. He’s made similar gestures in the past as well. In “The Caves of Androzani” (1984) there’s only enough spectrox toxæmia antidote to save one person, so the Doctor gives it to his companion Peri, causing himself to die and regenerate. Of course, this may be easier for the Doctor to do than most others, because he knows he will be able to regenerate. Yet, in “Mawdryn Undead” (1983), the Doctor is willing to give up his very regeneration energy in order to save companions Tegan and Nyssa. Does an ethics of care require sacrifice this great?

  There can be no straightforward rule to answer this question, because it’ll depend in large part upon the relationships involved in the particular situation. Manning argues that “where the need is great and the ability to meet it sufficient, we are required to sacrifice” (p. 73), but she doesn’t think this must be a form of life. We could continually donate money to needy children in Africa until we were as poor as they, and this would seem to meet Manning’s requirements. However, in continually donating all the money we make, we’d be taking on this sacrifice as a way of life, which isn’t what would be intended. In fact, this could cause “caring burnout” which would deter or even prevent us from being able to care in the future. We must make our own decision about sacrifice in the moment, taking into full considerations the relationships this sacrifice will affect.