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Critical analysis of Judith Jarvis Thomson A defense of abortion
Critical analysis of Judith Jarvis Thomson A defense of abortion
Critical analysis of Judith Jarvis Thomson A defense of abortion
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In this essay, I will hold that the strongest argument in defence of abortion was provided by Judith Jarvis Thompson. She argued that abortion is still morally permissible, regardless if one accepts the premise that the foetus is a person from the moment of conception. In what follows, I agree that abortion is permissible in the ‘extreme case’ whereby the woman’s life is threatened by the foetus. Furthermore, I agree that abortion is permissible to prevent future pain and suffering to the child. However, I do not agree that the ‘violinist’ analogy is reliable when attempting to defend abortion involving involuntary conception cases such as rape, whereby the foetus does not threaten the woman’s health. To achieve this, I will highlight the distinction …show more content…
Imagine you are enjoying a trip and you find a person dumped in your yacht by gangsters . The involuntary stow-away is coming out of a coma and is now in need of your assistance to help him survive. The trip back home is 9 months, and you only possess enough food for one person. However, you are able to share your food and other resources with the stow-away and still survive, albeit you will barely survive . The question then becomes if you are morally obliged to share your food with the stow-away? Berry argues that it would be morally impermissible to let the person accidently trapped on your yacht starve to death rather than share your food. It appears that the difference between the ‘yacht example’ and the ‘violinist’ is that it requires less effort on our part to save the stow-away on the yacht compared the violinist. This is because the violinist requires use of our body, whereas the stow-away only requires the use of our possessions. The amount of sacrifice required in each case differs and it follows that this defines the extent to one’s moral responsibility to save the person in question. If we apply Berry’s reasoning to the foetus, then it is impermissible to perform an abortion simply because the sacrifice required during pregnancy is greater than expected. It appears that Berry is arguing that one is always morally obliged to protect a …show more content…
Likewise, Thompson holds that a pregnant woman possesses the right to defend herself against her attacker. No matter if the invader is a rapist attempting to harm her from outside or a foetus that may harm her from the inside. The woman still has a moral liberty to repel her attacker by killing the intruder. Killing a person and abolishing their ‘right to life’ cannot be named as immoral when performed in self-defence. Therefore, an abortion is permissible in the ‘extreme case’ whereby continuing with the pregnancy may result in serious injury or death of the woman. However, it can be argued that although it is permissible to act in self-defence against an invader, the foetus is no such invader and should not be treated like one. Unlike the violinist who was artificially attached to you, the foetus is surviving due to the mother’s biological organs and by the natural processes of reproduction and this yields a special relationship. Therefore, this appears to be a crucial difference between the violinist and the foetus. The natural environment of the violinist is not your body, whereas the natural environment of the foetus is within the mother’s womb. Furthermore, the violinist is trespassing because your body is not their natural environment whereas a foetus cannot
Judith Jarvis Thomson makes an interesting argument on the defense of abortion. She uses a libertarian framework believing in the doctrine of free will on a rights based account that a women and the fetus that she carries have equal rights. She makes clear, that “the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception.” In her specific argument she believes that every person has a right to life, and our obligation to one another as human beings is to not interfere with the rights of others and are not obligated to intervene past that. Her specific argument is convincing.
Judith Jarvis Thomson, in "A Defense of Abortion", argues that even if we grant that fetuses have a fundamental right to life, in many cases the rights of the mother override the rights of a fetus. For the sake of argument, Thomson grants the initial contention that the fetus has a right to life at the moment of conception. However, Thomson explains, it is not self-evident that the fetus's right to life will always outweigh the mother's right to determine what goes on in her body. Thomson also contends that just because a woman voluntarily had intercourse, it does not follow that the fetus acquires special rights against the mother. Therefore, abortion is permissible even if the mother knows the risks of having sex. She makes her points with the following illustration. Imagine that you wake up one morning and find that you have been kidnapped, taken to a hospital, and a famous violist has been attached to your circulatory system. You are told that the violinist was ill and you were selected to be the host, in which the violinist will recover in nine months, but will die if disconnected from you before then. Clearly, Thomson argues, you are not morally required to continue being the host. In her essay she answers the question: what is the standard one has to have in order to be granted a right to life? She reflects on two prospects whether the right to life is being given the bare minimum to sustain life or ir the right to life is merely the right not to be killed. Thomson states that if the violinist has more of a right to life then you do, then someone should make you stay hooked up to the violinist with no exceptions. If not, then you should be free to go at a...
In the Judith Jarvis Thomson’s paper, “A Defense of Abortion”, the author argues that even though the fetus has a right to life, there are morally permissible reasons to have an abortion. Of course there are impermissible reasons to have an abortion, but she points out her reasoning why an abortion would be morally permissible. She believes that a woman should have control of her body and what is inside of her body. A person and a fetus’ right to life has a strong role in whether an abortion is okay. Thomson continuously uses the story of a violinist to get the reader to understand her point of view.
He seems a bit confused at first because he admits that in certain situations he would be willing to help somebody getting an abortion, but he would never willingly aid in murder. I think this is his realization that abortion is not actually murder. He then goes on to say there are four possible solutions to the controversy over abortion. The first is to make it completely illegal with no exceptions. He goes on to say that this would not work because it is choosing the life of an unborn child over the life of the mother and if they were both to die then this law would accomplish no good. The second possible solution is to make laws against it but make it legal in specific situations. The third is to make abortion legal, but say it’s wrong to perform one in specific situations. Berry says neither of these are the right solution because there are millions of different situations that could arise and it would be impossible for the government to decide whether each one made it morally okay for the abortion to be executed. The final possible solution that Berry suggests is allowing abortions without exception. He comes to the conclusion that this is the best choice; “I am going to take the risk, therefore, of saying that there should be no law either for or against abortion. …this one is more personal than public and would be best dealt with by the persons immediately
Thomson provides the example of being hooked up for nine months to provide dialysis to an ailing violinist to expose how a fetus’s right to life does not supersede a mother’s right to make medical decisions about her body (48-49). I find that this thought experiment especially helpful in understanding how even though a fetus does have a right to life, because the continuation of their life hinges on the consent of their mother to use her body, it falls to the mother to choose whether or not to allow the fetus to develop to term.
In conclusion, Thompson's criticisms of the Standard anti-abortion argument are false. Premise 1 stays true as life begins at conception because that is the point when the fetus starts to grow. Premise 2 stays alive because murder is both illegal and morally wrong. Why? because you are depriving them of their future and causing harm to the people who love the victim. And lastly, premise 4 remains true because there is a difference between not helping someone live and directly killing them, thereby proving the case of the unconscious violinist as not analogous. All in all, the standard anti-abortion argument remains a sound argument.
In Judith Jarvis Thompson’s article “A Defense of Abortion” she explores the different arguments against abortion presented by Pro –Life activists, and then attempts to refute these notions using different analogies or made up “for instances” to help argue her point that women do have the right to get an abortion. She explains why abortion is morally permissible using different circumstances of becoming pregnant, such as rape or unplanned pregnancy.
In the article 'A Defense of Abortion' Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that abortion is morally permissible even if the fetus is considered a person. In this paper I will give a fairly detailed description of Thomson main arguments for abortion. In particular I will take a close look at her famous 'violinist' argument. Following will be objections to the argumentative story focused on the reasoning that one person's right to life outweighs another person's right to autonomy. Then appropriate responses to these objections. Concluding the paper I will argue that Thomson's 'violinist' argument supporting the idea of a mother's right to autonomy outweighing a fetus' right to life does not make abortion permissible.
In Thomson’s article, “A Defense of Abortion,” Thomson argues that abortion is not impermis-sible because she agrees with the fact that fetus has already become a human person well before birth, from the moment of conception (Thomson, 268 & 269). Besides that, she also claims that every person has a right to live, does so a fetus, because a fetus is a person who has a right to live.
Thomson’s argument is presented in three components. The first section deals with the now famous violinist thought experiment. This experiment presents a situation in which you wake up one morning and discover you have been kidnapped and hooked up to an ailing violinist so that his body would have the use of your kidneys for the next nine months. The intuitive and instinctive reaction to this situation is that you have no moral duty to remain hooked up to the violinist, and more, that he (or the people who kidnapped you) does not have the right to demand the use of your body for this period. From a deontological point of view, it can be seen that in a conflict between the right of life of the fetus and the right to bodily integrity of the mother, the mother’s rights will trump those of the fetus. Thomson distills this by saying “the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly”.
Abortion is an important and rather popular topic in the philosophical world. On one side of the argument, pro choice, Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that abortion is permissible because the pregnancy might not have been voluntary or the mother’s life is at risk if she continues on with the pregnancy. On the opposing side of the argument, Don Marquis argues that abortion is wrong because it takes away all the potential things a fetus could value in their future life. In this paper, I will argue against Don Marquis view of abortion. I will begin by explaining that Marquis does not take into consideration the effect the pregnancy may have on the mother, and I will talk about how Thomson does take the mother into consideration. Next, I will criticize
Alternatively, one might think that having the right to life means that one has the right not to be killed. Again, though, Thomson thinks that the violinist case shows this to be false; surely one can unplug oneself from the violinist, even though doing so kills him. Pathos were included when she provided the example of the violinist. If one attempts to alter the definition by suggesting instead that having the right to life means having the right not to be killed unjustly, then one has done little to advance the debate on abortion. She states that the third party don’t have the right to have the choice of killing the person. She went with the logos and pathos way when she was trying to explain what was going to happen. It shows how Thompson agrees with how the choice of life is not up to the third party or anybody else. With pathos and logos, Thomson further argues that even if women are partially being usually responsible for the presence of the fetus, because it is a voluntarily by engaging in intercourse with the full knowledge that pregnancy might result, it does not thereby follow that they bear a special moral responsibility toward
“On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” by Mary Anne Warren is an in depth analysis of what, in Warren’s opinion, it is exactly that defines a person and human being, the moral community, fetal development and the right to life, potential personhood and the right to life, and infanticide. Warren believes that emotion and morality should be entirely separate, and that abortion should be legal for all women, as denial would be stripping women of basic human rights, the rights that a woman holds over an unborn fetus. I personally agree with her arguments on these topics as I agree that women should be allowed to have abortions on their own terms, without subjection of authority or society telling her what she can and cannot do, as well as I agree for the most part on her view of what a person is, potential personhood not outweighing the choice of abortion, and her reasoning on what defines a person of the moral community.
Thomson concludes that there are no cases where the person pregnant does not have the right to chose an abortion. Thomson considers the right to life of the pregnant person by presenting the case of a pregnant person dying as a result from their pregnancy. In this case, the right of the pregnant person to decide what happens to their body outweighs both the fetus and the pregnant person 's right to life. The right to life of the fetus is not the same as the pregnant person having to die, so as not to infringe on the right of the fetus. In the case of the violinist, their necessity for your body for life is not the same as their right over the use of your body. Thomson argues that having the right to life is not equal to having the right to use the body of another person. They argue that this is also the case, even if the the pregnant person knowingly participated in intercourse and knew of the possibility of pregnancy. In this case it would seem that abortion would not be permissible since the pregnancy was not by force. However, we are reverted back to the case of rape. If a fetus conceived voluntarily has the right not to be aborted due to how it was conceived, then the fetus conceived from rape should also have that same right. Instead of creating a distinction of cases where the fetus has a right to use the body of a pregnant person, Thomson instead makes a distinction of when abortion would be morally
In Thomson’s article, her primary argument in defense of abortion is that women have the right to life and abortion itself serves as a form of self-defense for women whose life is being harmed. It is important to note that Thomson’s concept of ‘a life in harm’ refers not necessarily to the physiological sense of harm, but also the sense that the mother’s livelihood and wellbeing might be in danger.