Abstract
I explore two thought-experiments in Judith Jarvis Thomson’s important article, “A Defense of Abortion”: the violinist example and the people-seeds example. I argue (contra Thomson) that you have a moral duty not to unplug yourself from the violinist and also a moral duty not to destroy a people-seed that has landed in your sofa. Nevertheless, I also argue that there are crucial differences between the thought-experiments and the contexts of pregnancy due to rape or to contraceptive failure. In virtue of these differences, it would not follow from my conclusions about the violinist and people-seeds cases that abortion would not be permissible in a case of rape or in a case of voluntary intercourse with contraceptive failure.
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Notes
It is interesting also to consider whether the following "change of perspective" might lead to less confidence in an initial reaction to Thomson's' violinist example to the effect that it would be permissible to unplug yourself from the violinist. Suppose you are told that everyone will have a bout of serious kidney disease, with possible kidney failure, at least once in their lives in the future. (Perhaps this is because of a newly identified environmental toxin to which we have all been exposed.) Might this sort of revelation make it less obvious that one may unplug oneself from the violinist? (I owe this point to David Hershenov.).
Mark Heller, email correspondence, August 3, 2011.
Here I am indebted to very insightful comments by Jason Michael Rourke (email correspondence, August 3, 2013).
Consider also this case, due to comments by Jason Gray (email correspondence, March 17, 2013). Suppose an unscrupulous doctor pays for eastern European or African women to come to the United States so that he can sedate them and steal their eggs, which he then sells to couples where the wife is infertile because of problems with her fallopian tubes. (We might suppose that she can carry a child to term but not conceive.) The doctor uses the husband's sperm to fertilize the egg and the embryo is implanted in the wife. Does the woman whose egg was stolen have a claim against the wife who is carrying the embryo, such that she can force her to get an abortion?
It seems not: it seems to me that the immigrant cannot legitimately force the wife to have an abortion, despite the facts that the woman's genetic property was expropriated from her against her will, combined with the genetic material of someone she did not want it combined with (by a man who violated her rights), and now a child is liable to result which will forever be a painful reminder of the violation she was subjected to.
It is perhaps especially appropriate to revisit the article insofar as we have just celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its publication.
For a thorough and systematic treatment of the literature on the violinist case, see Boonin (2003).
My main interest here is an evaluation of the logic of the argumentation, rather than the development of a critique of Thomson. That is, I am concerned with evaluating whether the people-seeds case (or similar cases) can help to establish that abortion is morally permissible in cases of voluntary intercourse with failure of contraception. If Thomson did not mean to argue for that conclusion, but only the more minimal conclusion that in cases of voluntary intercourse using contraception, the pregnant woman has not given the fetus the right to use her body, then my reflections in the current paper should not be taken as pertinent to Thomson's conclusion. Rather, I should in this instance be seen to be exploring whether one could use such examples (and Thomson's more modest conclusion) to get to the conclusion that abortion is morally permissible in cases of voluntary sexual intercourse with the use of contraception.
One might even imagine these small persons as somehow ineluctably attracted to a certain kind of music (sort of like Odysseus and the siren songs). Knowing this, if you play this sort of music (with the window open), and you thereby attract a person-seed toward the window, it would seem that your act of playing the music would be relevant to the question of what it is permissible to do about the person-sprout who manages to take root.
Kelly Sorensen, email correspondence, August 13, 2013.
Note also that a burglar would presumably not die if he were removed from your room; this points to another difference between the people-seeds scenario and the burglar example. And it obviously represents a crucial difference between the burglar case and the context of pregnancy.
Alternatively, I could imagine our modified case as follows. You have installed the screen, but for one reason or another the air is especially fresh and nice if blown in from a certain direction—in particular, a direction that lies just beyond and behind a people-seed tree. So you personally place a fan behind this people-seed tree, and then it blows the air--and the seeds-toward your screened window. One gets in through the screen. Some will perhaps find this version of the case more compelling.
Again, I wish to emphasize that nothing in my argument in the text depends on accepting that there is a (clear) distinction between a cause and a causal enabler or that this distinction has normative significance (of the sort in question). If one is skeptical here, I would fall back on the contention that the introduction of the fan is a helpful heuristic device.
David Boonin, email correspondence, March 3, 2010.
I am very grateful to David Boonin for this question: email correspondence, June 10, 2011.
There is an interesting and subtle discussion of the importance of taking into account the special norms associated with creation in Little (2003).
I am grateful to David Hershenov for this suggestion.
I owe this suggestion to David Boonin.
Thanks to David Boonin for this version of the people-seeds stories.
David Boonin presented these thoughts in his comments on a version of the current paper at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, University of Colorado, Boulder, August 2013: Boonin (2013).
Also, such an evaluation of the relevance of the various people-seeds cases to abortion should include consideration of the issue of whether the norms pertaining to the creation of a person in the specific context of the pregnant woman's body, with the associated activities of gestation, might be different from the norms pertaining to the creation of a person in some other context (such as one's house, as in the case of the half-seeds and resultant sprout). It might be that creation of a person in the specific context of a typical pregnancy has a relevantly different meaning from creation of a person, just qua creation of a person (and apart from this specific context).
Although she does not explicitly address the people-seeds example, there is a very interesting and illuminating discussion of the ethics of creation in Kamm (1992): 124–85. A full treatment of the issues would certainly need to address Francis Kamm's work here. Insofar as the focus of the current paper is Judith Thomson's people-seeds case and her classic original article, a discussion of Kamm's work on the ethics of creation is beyond the scope of this paper.
Email correspondence with Judith Jarvis Thomson, July 17, 2011.
This paper contains revised material that originally appeared in Fischer (1991, 2003). I have benefited from reading parts of previous versions of this material at: The Fourth Annual Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, Special Session in Honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Publication of J.J. Thomson's, "A Defense of Abortion," University of Colorado, Boulder (August 2011); The Sixth Annual Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, University of Colorado, Boulder (August 2013): and the Conference on Bioethics and the Philosophy of Medicine, sponsored by the PANTC Philosophy Reading Group ("Plato's Academy, North Tonawanda Campus"), State University of New York at Buffalo (August 2013). In these venues and on other occasions, I have been helped significantly by discussions of the issues raised in this paper, and comments on the paper, by: Zac Cogley, James Delaney, Neil Feit, Jason Gray, Chris Heathwood, Mark Heller, Heinrik Hellwig, John Keller, Stephen Kershnar, Coleen MacNamara, Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, Lewis Powell, Philip Reed, Jason Michael Rourke, Kelly Sorensen, Philip Swenson, Travis Timmerman, Michael Tooley, Steven Wear, and Monique Wonderly. I am especially indebted to David Hershenov, David Boonin, and Patrick Todd. David Hershenov gave me extraordinarily extensive, thoughtful, and constructive comments, some of which were collated from the PANTC Reading Group discussions, and some of which were his own. David Boonin gave me extremely insightful and helpful comments via email and also as part of both Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress sessions. Finally, I am deeply grateful to many conversations about the people-seeds cases with Patrick Todd, who helped me to see them in a new light, and whose questions and insights inspired me to write this paper.
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Fischer, J.M. Abortion and Ownership. J Ethics 17, 275–304 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-013-9152-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-013-9152-z