The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

“But this is my business,” said Isabel. “I saw the whole thing—or most of it. I was the last person that young man saw. The last person. And don’t you think that the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”
    “I’m not with you,” said Cat. “I don’t see what you mean.”
    Isabel leant back in her chair. “What I mean is this. We can’t have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbours, people we deal with, and so on.”
    Who, then, is our neighbour?
she would say to the Sunday Philosophy Club. And the members of the Sunday Philosophy Club would think very carefully about this and come to the conclusion, Isabel suspected, that the only real standard we can find for this is the concept of proximity. Our moral neighbours are those who are close to us, spatially or in some other recognised sense. Distant claims are simply not as powerful as those we can see before us. These close claims are more vivid and therefore more real.
    “Reasonable enough,” said Cat. “But you didn’t come into contact with him in that sense. He just … sorry to say this … he just passed by.”
    “He must have seen me,” said Isabel. “And I saw him—in a state of extreme vulnerability. I’m sorry to sound the philosopher, but in my view that creates a moral bond between us. We were not moral strangers.”
    “You sound like the
Review of Applied Ethics,”
said Cat dryly.
    “I
am
the
Review of Applied Ethics,”
Isabel replied.
    The remark made them both laugh, and the tension that had been growing dissipated.
    “Well,” said Cat, “there’s obviously nothing that I can do tostop you doing whatever it is you want to do. I may as well help you. What do you need?”
    “The address of his flatmates,” said Isabel. “That’s all.”
    “You want to speak to them?”
    “Yes.”
    Cat shrugged. “I can’t imagine that you’ll find out much. They weren’t there. How will they know what happened?”
    “I want some background,” said Isabel. “Information about him.”
    “All right,” said Cat. “I’ll find this out for you. It won’t be hard.”
    As she walked home after her lunch with Cat, Isabel thought about their discussion. Cat had been right to ask her about why she involved herself in these matters; it was a question she should have asked herself more often, but did not. Of course, it was simple to work out why we had a moral obligation to others, but that was really not the point. The question which she had to address was what drove her to respond as she did. And one reason for that, if she were honest with herself, might be that she simply found it intellectually exciting to become involved. She wanted to know why things happened. She wanted to know why people did the things they did. She was curious. And what, she wondered, was wrong with that?
    Curiosity killed the cat, she suddenly thought, and immediately regretted the thought. Cat was everything to her, really; the child she had never had, her parlous immortality.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    I SABEL HAD EXPECTED to spend the evening alone. Her progress with the index had encouraged her to tackle another task which she had been putting off—detailed work on an article which had returned from a reviewer accompanied by a lengthy set of comments and corrections. These had been scribbled in the margins and needed to be collated, a task which was rendered all the more difficult by the reviewer’s irritating abbreviations and spidery handwriting. That was the last time he would be used, she had decided—eminent or not.
    But Jamie arrived instead, ringing her bell shortly before six. She welcomed him warmly, and immediately invited him to stay for dinner, if he had nothing else planned, of course. She knew that he would accept, and he did, after a momentary hesitation for form’s sake. And for the sake of pride: