Chapter 4
Hume’s Moral Philosophy and Thomas’s Moral Corruption
Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
—David Hume1
Despite airing on the BBC and PBS’s Masterpiece, Downton Abbey fits the soap opera tradition. In fact, the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, has said that he doesn’t mind the series “being labeled a ‘posh soap’,” and clearly he has employed the twists and turns associated with that genre.2
One of the most prominent soap opera tropes that Downton Abbey deploys is a bevy of villainous characters. Yet in a series with a wicked wife, a seductive soldier, a subversive chauffeur, a philandering farmer, and a manipulative media mogul, two characters come immediately to mind as villains: Thomas and O’Brien. These two have been so identified with villainy that when comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, an avid fan of Downton Abbey, was asked during a red carpet interview to choose his favorite villain from the series, he was only given the choice between Thomas and O’Brien.3
Thomas, a footman in the first season and a soldier in the second, and O’Brien, Lady Grantham’s lady’s maid, are regularly shown scheming and plotting together. Often there is villainous cigarette smoke swirling about them—they are the only two characters regularly shown smoking, and their smoke breaks provide an ideal separation from the people against whom they are plotting. Both characters are worthy of analysis, but to provide focus this chapter will concentrate on Thomas, using the moral philosophy of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) to examine Thomas’s actions as well as the reactions of other characters and the audience.4
In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume contended that it is sentiment or passion, not reason, that most often motivates actions, especially moral actions.5 He allowed that reason can override the passions at times, but he insisted that sentiments are the key driver of our choices. Hume’s philosophy broke from a long tradition that believed passions were “irrational and unnatural animal elements that, given their head, would undermine humankind’s true, rational nature.”6 Hume was responding to moral rationalists, who argued that “right and wrong are determined by a permanent structure in the universe that all rational beings can understand.”7 Hume saw the traditional view of our motivations and the way we judge actions as deficient in its account of human nature:
Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows that they cannot be derived from reason. . . . Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.8
Not only are our actions influenced by our passions, our moral judgments are as well. Deciding whether a character trait is a virtue or a vice does not depend solely on reason; it also depends on our sentiments.9
Hume distinguished between artificial virtues and natural virtues. Artificial virtues are those that are “contrived solely for society,” such as “justice with respect to property, allegiance to government, and dispositions to obey the laws of nations and the rules of modesty and good manners.”10 Natural virtues are those that exist independently of social norms, such as broad concepts including greatness of mind or general goodness. Both types of virtue benefit society. Our positive feelings toward virtues and negative feelings toward vices may, according to Hume, be connected to our recognition that virtues (both artificial and natural) benefit society as a whole. We are pleased by actions that serve the greater good and are displeased by actions that lessen it.
Thomas’s actions violate both artificial and natural virtues. Thomas is motivated not by the welfare of society at large but by selfish concerns. As such, his actions are viewed unfavorably by those who discern his selfishness, including the staff and nobility at Downton and the fans at home. Hume scholar Rachel Cohon explains:
We reach a moral judgment by feeling approval or disapproval upon contemplating someone’s trait in a disinterested way from the common point of view. So moral approval is a favorable sentiment in the observer elicited by the observed person’s disposition to have certain motivating sentiments.11
It is important to note that moral approval may stem from observing a person’s “motivating sentiments,” not simply the actions themselves. For the viewers of Downton Abbey, Thomas’s selfish motivation is made abundantly clear, so our reaction may be highly negative even if the actions themselves appear admirable.
For example, when Thomas asks Daisy to go to a fair with him, the action is not, in and of itself, malicious. We can imagine any number of motivations that might have made his invitation palatable or even praiseworthy. If Thomas had been at all interested in Daisy, or if he was just recognizing her fawning interest in him and giving her a pleasant night, our reaction would not have been negative. However, because we as viewers know that he is asking Daisy out only to spite William, who is in love with Daisy, we view the action as reprehensible. While Daisy is overjoyed that Thomas has asked her out, the viewers’ sentiments are more likely to align with those of another character, Bates, who understands Thomas’s motivations and is furious with him.12
The different responses that Daisy and Bates have to Thomas’s behavior help to illustrate another aspect of Hume’s philosophy. Hume argued that virtue results in pleasure in the audience that perceives it, whereas vice elicits a negative feeling. How, then, can the same action result in two responses? Contemporary philosopher Julia Driver argues that Hume’s philosophy allows for pleasure to be “appropriate or inappropriate (or ‘true’ or ‘false’).”13 In other words, a person can have an incorrect understanding of the situation and therefore feel pleasure with someone’s actions, whereas another person with better information will have a negative reaction to them. Daisy’s pleasure is false, since she doesn’t see (and doesn’t want to see) Thomas’s true motives. She perceives only his actions, which align with many of her fondest hopes. Bates and the viewer, whose eyes are open to Thomas’s motives, recognize that his behavior represents a vice, so they experience the appropriate displeasure at his actions.
When the audience meets Thomas in the first episode of the series, the camera is following him through a long tracking shot that simultaneously introduces us to several characters and provides a view of Downton Abbey. When Thomas passes by William, he asks, “Where have you been?” William replies, calmly but perhaps defensively, “I’m not late, am I?” Thomas snidely retorts, “You’re late when I say you’re late.” After that brief exchange, the audience knows that this character is controlling and unconcerned with the feelings of others, traits that will be reinforced as the series progresses.
Later in the same episode it is revealed that Thomas is also ambitious and manipulative. Upset that he has been passed over for the position of Lord Grantham’s valet, Thomas attempts to undermine the new man, Bates, who was given the position. In addition, Thomas’s efforts to improve his position in the servants’ hierarchy by relying on a former lover, the Duke of Crowborough, backfire when the duke retrieves and burns the love letters the two had exchanged.
How has Thomas become such a villainous individual? When so many of the reactions to him are negative, why does he choose to act that way? The pressures surrounding Thomas’s homosexual relationship with the duke—not just socially frowned on but also illegal at the time—may serve as a clue to some of the character’s motivations. Fellowes says the following of Thomas:
It’s hard to be gay in 1912. . . . It’s illegal. If anyone finds out, you go to prison. So for me, him being gay means you slightly stay your hand. He’s not just horrible. To get any kind of emotional life going, he’s got to take his life in his hands every time. That seems to me to be a sympathetic thing. . . . I don’t believe that most people wake up and think, How can I be horrible today. In their brain it is a legitimate response to the bad treatment they have received or some bad situation they perceive.14
Thomas had turned to a former partner for help and was not only rebuffed but mocked. The duke’s actions may have been motivated as much by class differences and the legal threats that loomed as any change in his emotions. These social constructions, including class and law, undoubtedly would have been on Thomas’s mind as he considered this turn of events.
Later, Thomas makes a romantic advance toward the Turkish attaché, Kemal Pamuk, and is rebuffed. Mr. Pamuk seduces Lady Mary that night, and to gain access to her room he has blackmailed Thomas, who once again finds himself manipulated after neglecting to consider his rank when attempting to establish a romantic connection.15 And in perhaps the most revealing and intimate moment the character is afforded, Thomas opens up to a recently blinded soldier, telling him, “You’re not a victim, don’t let them make you into one. . . . All my life, they’ve pushed me around, just ’cause I’m different. . . . I don’t know if you’re going to see again or not. But I do know you have to fight back.”16 After this conversation, in which Thomas feels a real connection, the soldier commits suicide.
In three attempts at emotional closeness with another man, Thomas is rejected every time. As a result, his sense of what produces positive emotions is going to be markedly different from the “general point of view,” which, according to Hume scholar William Edward Morris, Hume considered to be the “proper perspective of morality.”17 This point of view would ideally remove bias that results from personal opinions, lack of information, or adverse personal experiences. On this basis, we can imagine that Thomas’s moral comprehension and appreciation of his own behavior would be somewhat skewed. This is not to excuse his behavior—that would require an entirely different chapter!—but it may help us to understand it better.
When Thomas Is Good—and Denies It
Hume maintained that one reason we experience pleasure when viewing acts that conform to artificial virtues is “solely for their tendency to benefit the whole society of that time or place.”18 Many of the actions that have caused Thomas to be perceived as a villain, such as his flouting of customs and laws, defy artificial virtues. In a sense, the man who feels pushed around by society has simply been fighting back. Thomas is motivated purely by his own self-interest and is not bothered by many of the social mores that define proper behavior. Thomas does not find the pleasure that signifies virtue in the same actions that most of the other characters do—not only because his homosexuality is socially and legally unacceptable but also because of how he has been treated by those with whom he has tried to find happiness.
The list of Thomas’s offenses is certainly enough to raise eyebrows. In addition to the examples we’ve discussed so far, Thomas is shown stealing wine from the house, attempting to frame Bates for his crime, stealing a wallet, mocking a man for mourning his mother’s death, self-inflicting a nonfatal wound in order to leave the battlefront, mocking his former colleagues, and attempting to navigate the black market of rationed goods. Through it all, Thomas rarely defends himself. If anyone is to hear him explain his motives, it is generally O’Brien, while she and Thomas enjoy one of their sequestered smoking breaks. There is one instance, however, when Thomas defends himself against the judgment of others, and this time his “transgression” is not in violating social mores.
In the following dialogue, the staff is expressing disgust that William, a former footman who has been injured in the war, is not allowed to recover at Downton Abbey, which has been converted to a convalescent home for officers, because he is not an officer. Instead, he’s forced to stay at a distant hospital.
O’Brien: Any news?
Daisy: Only that the doctor won’t let William come to the village.
O’Brien: He never!
Daisy: It’s for officers only, he said.
Mrs. Patmore: And [William’s] poor father staying there with him. Spending money he’s not got and traveling miles to do it.
Daisy: It’s not right.
Thomas: No, it bloody well isn’t. [The staff stops working and stares incredulously at Thomas.] Well, I’m a working-class lad and so is he. And I get fed up seeing how our lot always get shafted.19
The staff finds it hard to believe that Thomas has pure motives in his sympathy for William’s plight—and Thomas shares their feeling! He is uncomfortable being viewed in a selfless or empathetic light, so he tries to reclaim a self-centered basis for his statements, asserting that his motive is not one of care for William but is in his own self-interest only.
In essence, Thomas has created his own morality, in which motives and actions that serve him are preferred to ones that serve the greater good. Since he feels rejected by society, he doesn’t find pleasure in its artificial virtues. Instead, his pleasure is found in securing his own station in the world. Thomas doesn’t see the methods he uses as morally questionable, even if those looking on from an ideal “general point of view” would disagree. Thomas makes no effort to step back to this general point of view because he has felt attacked and betrayed by society. He has become insular and focused on himself, leaving concerns for the greater good of society to others.
In addition to the staff, the television audience provides an excellent opportunity to view actions from Hume’s general point of view. Television critics have referred to Thomas in a variety of ways, including “dashing but evil,” “ambitious and conniving,” “completely self-serving,” and “the perfect embodiment of characters you love to hate.”20 In the words of one critic, “he’s so slippery that even when he appears to be acting out of genuine kindness, as when he offered comfort to the handsome officer blinded in a gas attack, I can’t help wondering if he’s working an angle.”21 This universal rejection of Thomas stems from the portrayal of a man unconcerned with the general good of society and motivated solely by his own interests. As Hume argued, such actions generate negative emotions in a viewer who can see them from the general point of view.
As we’ve seen, Hume’s moral philosophy can help us to understand Thomas’s character as well as the strong reactions to him on the part of the staff, the Crawleys, and the viewers. At the end of the second season, he has won (illicitly) the trust of Lord Grantham and the job of his valet. It will be interesting to see if this change in position helps Thomas appreciate the artificial virtues more or if he remains the same devious plotter we “love to hate.”
Notes
1 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), 2.3.3., Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4705.
2 Gareth McLean, “The Draw of Downton,” BBC News, September 15, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14634362.
3 Oswalt answered that with the depth that was added to these two characters in the second season, they were becoming somewhat less evil in his eyes (while the marriage-wrecking Lady Edith Grantham was beginning to show villainous promise!). Kate Spencer, “Patton Oswalt Picks His Favorite Downton Abbey Villain over a Sip of Scotch,” The Fab Life, January 13, 2012, http://www.thefablife.com/2012-01-13/patton-oswalt-picks-his-favorite-downton-abbey-villain-over-a-sip-of-scotch/.
4 See chapter 5 in this book for a discussion of O’Brien’s misdeeds.
5 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4320.
6 David Fate Norton, “Hume, David,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 344.
7 Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff, and Anand Jayprakash Vaidya (eds), Late Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 267. For a related topic, moral realism, see chapter 5 in this book.
8 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.
9 For the opposing view of reason’s relationship to the passions, courtesy of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), see chapter 1 in this book.
10 Rachel Cohon, “Hume’s Moral Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/.
11 Ibid.
12 Season 1, episode 4. For more on Daisy and William, see chapter 2 in this book.
13 Julia Driver, “Pleasure as the Standard of Virtue in Hume’s Moral Philosophy,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (2004): 181.
14 Alex Witchel, “Behind the Scenes with the Creator of ‘Downton Abbey’,” New York Times, September 8, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/magazine/julian-fellowes-the-creator-of-downton-abbey.html?pagewanted=all.
15 Season 1, episode 3.
16 Season 2, episode 1.
17 William Edward Morris, “David Hume,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/.
18 Cohon, “Hume’s Moral Philosophy.”
19 Season 2, episode 5.
20 Sasha McBayer, “‘Downton Abbey’ Is Fun, British Soap Opera,” Coastal Courier, February 3, 2012, http://beta.coastalcourier.com/archives/40200/; Mary McNamara, “Aristocrats and Servants Face a Changing World in ‘Downton Abbey’,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/08/entertainment/la-et-downton-abbey-20110108; Drew Taylor, “Meet the Villains of ‘Downton Abbey’,” Yahoo! Voices, January 7, 2012, http://voices.yahoo.com/meet-villains-downton-abbey-10805963.html; and Matt Roush, “Ask Matt: Downton Abbey’s Meanies, Remakes, Touch, Grey’s Anatomy, and More!” TV Guide, January 30, 2012, http://www.tvguide.com/News/Ask-Matt-Downton-1042541.aspx.
21 June Thomas, “Downton Abbey, Season 2: The Ambitious, Slippery Thomas Stirs My Soul,” Slate, January 18, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club/features/2012/downton_abbey_season_2/week_2/let_s_listen_to_lady_mary_and_lady_cora_s_jazz_album_.html.