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24 Cards in this Set
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thought experiment
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an imagined hypothetical which seeks to isolate our (moral) intuitions regarding some specific case, usually by removing morally extraneous or distracting features that less idealized cases might exhibit
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when does thomson think that moral permissibility of abortion is at stake:
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1) pregnancy resulting due to rape
2) Pregnancy characterized by a threat to the life of the mother. 3) Pregnancy resulting from consensual sex. |
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Violinist Case
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“You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Thomson (1971), pp. 48-49.
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Thomson's Arguement
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P1)It is morally permissible to disconnect the violinist.
P2)The violinist case is analogous in all morally relevant ways to pregnancy due to rape. C)It is morally permissible to disconnect (i.e., terminate) the fetus conceived by rape. |
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Why doubt P1 of Thomson's Arguement?
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First, we might doubt P1. We might think that, even if the violinist does not have a right to the body of his host, the host should nevertheless absorb the nine months of suffering given that such suffering can save a life. Surely the suffering of sustaining the violinist (cf., fetus) for nine months is morally significant, but it is a burden that must be sustained given that, at its conclusion, the violinist/fetus will have its life to live.
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Why doubt P2 of Thomson's Arguement?
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Objection #1. Being hooked up to the violinist is worse than being pregnant because of rape. Connection to the violinist precludes movement more than pregnancy and consequently undermines one’s life activities more than pregnancy. Just because we agree that we can disconnect from the violinist and extricate ourselves from a terrible situation, it does not follow that we can abort the fetus and extricate ourselves from a situation that is less bad
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Response to the objection of P2
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Response #1. As was developed in subsequent papers to Thomson’s original essay, imagine the case of the “pocket violinist”: this case is identical to Thomson’s violinist case except that the pocket violinist is small enough to carry around in your pocket. Therefore, his connection to you does not interfere with your life any more than pregnancy. Thomson thinks that we still have the intuition that we can disconnect from this pocket violinist; the immobility conferred by her original case was not a morally deterministic feature.
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Another objection of Thomson's arguement:
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Objection #2. The natural function of a kidney is not to provide dialysis for violinist, whereas the natural function of the uterus is to house fetuses. It is morally permissible to disconnect the violinist because doing so does not interfere with anything’s natural function, but we may not abort the fetus because doing so would preclude the uterus from performing its natural function.
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Response to Objection 2
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Response #2. This objection requires the assumption that what is natural is also good; the performance of something’s natural function confers at least a prima facie reason not to interfere. However, this seems false. Many natural processes, such as aging and disease, are widely regarded as worthy of interference. If this is correct, then the fact that the uterus is performing its natural function is not, in itself, a reason not to perform an abortion. Furthermore, the whole “natural is good” position often has the corollary “unnatural is bad”. This also seems wrong; some “unnatural” processes, such as homosexuality or other non-procreative sexual practices are not thought to be immoral in most enlightened societies.
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Objection 3
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Objection #3. We have special obligations to family members: the fetus is the child of the mother, whereas the violinist is a stranger. Given that we these obligations to family members, the moral permissibility of disconnecting a stranger cannot support the moral permissibility of disconnecting a family member; disconnecting the family member is morally worse because of familial obligations.
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Response to Objection 3
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Response #3. The response here is to deny that we have special obligations to family members, or at least ones that would require mothers to carry fetuses to term. Per Warren’s arguments—and despite the fact that Thomson wants to assume that the fetus is a person—we could deny that the fetus yet has the moral status of other family members, despite its obvious biological relatedness. Or maybe we even deny special obligations to family members altogether: imagine that the violinist is an estranged and abusive parent, for example. In this case do we have the intuition that we have to support this person for nine months? If not, then mere relatedness is insufficient to ground binding obligations.
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Objection 4
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Objection #4. We can introduce a distinction between killing and letting die: killing is worse than letting someone die. Imagine that I am on a boat and that an incapacitated person is drowning in the water next to my boat. Most of us think that it would be morally worse to beat him over the head with an oar until he was dead than it would be to passively wait for him to drown. If we disconnect ourselves from the violinist, we will let him die (i.e., we introduce no new threat to his life and let his existing susceptibility to renal failure take its course). However, if we abort a fetus, we kill it (i.e., we introduce a new threat to its life). Just because we are morally permitted to let the violinist die, it does not follow that we can kill the fetus, which is worse.
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Response to Objection 4
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Response #4. There is a large literature on the distinction between killing and letting die, and some have argued that this is not a morally significant distinction. For example, imagine that Alan wants to kill his wife, Betty. Late one night and after Betty is asleep, Alan goes to the store, buys poison, and puts it in kitchen cabinet with the intention of dosing Betty’s coffee in the morning; Alan nearly always wakes up before Betty and makes her coffee. He also buys an antidote for the poison, just in case he changes his mind after Betty has swallowed it.
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Difference between Causation and Cupability
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Causation is not a moral concept, whereas culpability is. If there is not a moral distinction between the two cases—but only a metaphysical one, like causation—then there is no moral difference between killing and letting die and this objection to Thomson’s violinist case fails.
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Final Reflections on Rape
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She goes on to observe that even many anti-abortionists grant that women may abort when their pregnancy results from rape. So, at least in this case, it seems that the fetus’s right to life does not outweigh the woman’s right to choose.
Thomson thinks that it would be odd to say that a fetus created by rape has less of a right to life than a fetus created otherwise; certainly people who were created by rape have the same rights as everyone else, so why would it be different for fetuses? Given that the woman’s right to choose seems to outweigh the right to life of the fetus conceived by rape and given that the right to life should be independent of means of conception, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume that the woman’s right to choose always outweighs the fetus’s right to life? Thomson thinks so. |
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Expanding Baby Case
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. Thomson now moves on to consider the “extreme position”, which holds that abortion is impermissible under any circumstances, even when the mother’s life is in danger. This position usually proceeds by arguing that the direct killing of an innocent person is always impermissible or that, similarly, one must always let an innocent person die rather than kill another innocent person. Thomson thinks that both of these theses are false. For example, consider her expanding baby case: “Suppose you find yourself trapped in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a rapidly growing child—you are already up against the wall of the house and in a few minutes you’ll be crushed to death. The child on the other hand won’t be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop him from growing he’ll be hurt, but in the end he’ll simply burst open the house and walk out a free man.” Thomson (1971), p. 52.
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Expanding Baby Arguement
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P1) It is morally permissible to kill the expanding baby.
P2) The expanding baby case is analogous in all morally relevant ways to pregnancy when the fetus poses a serious threat to the mother’s life. C) It is morally permissible to abort the fetus when it poses a serious threat to the mother’s life. In defense of P1, Thomson thinks it “cannot seriously be said” that the mother must sit and wait for her own death and that it would be unjust for her to defend herself; she also assumes that we will have a similar intuition. Regarding P2, Thomson obviously thinks that it is true, though Objection #3 and Objection #4 from above could still be lodged against it. |
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Right to Life
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1. The right to life includes having a right to be given at least the bare minimum necessary for continued life.
2. The right to life is a right that nobody kill you. 3. The right to life is a right not to be killed unjustly. |
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Thomson's views on the Right to LIfe
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Thomson rejects (1). Consider that you are ailing and that the only thing that could save you is the touch of some famous actor’s hand upon your fevered brow. Clearly you do not have a right that the actor fly in from far away just to save you. Nor, even if the actor were across the room, does Thomson think that you have a right that he save you. In either case, it would obviously be nice if he would save you, but you do not have a right that he do so
Thomson also rejects (2); she thinks that the moral permissibility of unplugging the violinist and of killing the expanding baby both rule out this possibility. Thomson thinks that (3) might be true, but that now the anti-abortionist must change his argument: he can no longer complain that “the killing of an innocent person is wrong”, since this would not follow from a right to life. Rather, he must reformulate to: “the unjust killing of an innocent person is wrong.” Now, of course, we have to ask whether abortion is the unjust killing of the fetus. |
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Responsibilty
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Thomson thinks that the only way that abortion could be unjust killing is if the mother had given permission (either explicit or implicit) to the fetus to use her body. Clearly this condition is not met in cases of rape.
What about consensual sex? Thomson thinks that, even then, it is not clear that permission has been given; even when the woman becomes pregnant via consensual sex, it would not be accurate to say that she invited the fetus to reside within her. The most that can be said is that she voluntarily participated in the sexual act and that, because of this, she is at least partly responsible for her pregnancy. But Thomson thinks that this partial responsibility of the mother is insufficient to grant the fetus a right to stay within her body. Imagine, for example, that you leave a window to your house open and that a burglar enters your house through this open window. Though you are partially responsible for the burglar’s entrance to your house (he could not have entered had you not left the window open), the burglar does not have a right to stay. |
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Person Seed Case
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Person-Seed Case. Thomson’s person-seed case is supposed to make a similar point for pregnancies resulting from consensual sex: “Again, suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root.” Thomson (1971), p. 59. Thomson thinks that you do not have a moral obligation to let this person-seed develop in your house.
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Responsibility Redux
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Returning to the issue of responsibility, Thomson points out that even the woman who is pregnant due to rape is partially responsible for her pregnancy since she could have not left her house, hired an army to protect her, or had a hysterectomy. Surely her partial responsibility is insufficient to give the fetus a right to stay within her body.
And, as we saw in the person-seed case, Thomson thinks that even if the woman voluntarily engages in sex and is therefore partially responsible for her pregnancy, the fetus does not have a right to stay since it was never given such a right by the mother. |
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What about Decency?
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Though Thomson thinks that abortion is never unjust, she does admit that it might be, in some cases, indecent. To understand this distinction, consider the following two examples:
1. Imagine two brothers are jointly given a box of chocolates. If the older brother were to take the entire box for himself, he would be acting unjustly towards his younger brother since the younger brother had a right to half the box. 2. Imagine that the older brother is given the box of chocolates. If he eats the entire box while his younger brother watches, he is not behaving unjustly since the younger brother did not have a right to any fraction of the chocolates. He would, however, be acting indecently. |
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Her conclusion
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Analogously, Thomson thinks that abortion is never unjust since the fetus has never been given the right to the woman’s body. However, abortion may be indecent, as in the case where a woman opts for abortion late in her pregnancy to avoid the inconvenience of postponing a trip abroad. (This distinction has often been viewed with puzzlement since Thomson wants to defend the moral permissibility of abortion, though maybe this “decency” feature is supposed to be extra-moral.)
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