In this paper, l will present and explain Judith Jarvis Thomson's Violinist case as a defense of abortion and why Thomson's defense is unsuccessful. Judith Thomson's Violinist case your wake up in a bed with a famous unconscious violinist, who is diagnosed with a fatal kidney ailment. The Society of Music Lovers has kidnapped you and plugged the violinist circulatory system into yours after finding out you alone have the correct blood type available to help. The director of the hospital tells you unplugging the violinist would kill him, and he has to stay plugged in for nine months in order to recover. In this case, you were kidnapped and did not give your consent to the operation, yet because the violinist right to life outweighed your right …show more content…
to control what happens with your body the only option left is to allow the violinist continues of your body until he heals. Thomson's Violinist case counts on our sense of justice and addresses the belief all persons have a right to life but a right to life does not grant one the right to be given the use of or continues use of another person's body. Thomson's Violinist case is unsuccessful because it tries to establish a connection between pregnancies due to rape and does not depict the situation of abortions and responsibility well enough. Judith Thomson uses the Violinist case to establish a connection between pregnancies because of rape and the deathly ill violinist. Thomson starts her case with admitting for the sake of the argument that a fetus is a person the moment of conception. Thomson presents these two cases as morally equal cases by creating a parallel between the person kidnapped being used against their will unplugging from the violinist and a mother receiving an abortion. Both the unborn child and violinist needs the body for nine months in order to survive and unplugging and receiving an abortion will lead to the death of a person. She presents the argument neither the mother or the person kidnapped owes the child or the unconscious violinist life support, and to allow the continuous use of your body would be considered a kindness on your part. Thomson's Violinist case use of a kidnapped person forced to support some stranger appeals to the reader's sense of justice, when considering the situation, the person has been put into. Thomson reasons the person kidnapped did not freely choose to host the violinist and as such should that person decide to unplug from the violinist then that person is not morally wrong. In Thomson's Violinist case a logical slippery slope fallacy is created when comparing the kidnapping to pregnancy.
The first major concern is the way the violinist and baby are connected to a person. The violinist is attached through machinery, while a baby is developed and produced biologically. The key difference between the two is the violinist is only connected in an artificial way in comparison to the baby being produced naturally in the mother's body. Thomson views the child has an alien figure invading her body twisting the union between a mother and her child into a parasitic relationship. The womb is a baby's rightful place of development, yet Thomson's view the baby as an invader. Thomson's Violinist case ignore another major difference in the Violinist case and pregnancy. In the violinist case, it is possible for the person to justify stopping the treatment the violinist is given, due to the circumstances and factors involved. Thomson compares unplugging the violinist to abortion. Abortion is not stopping a treatment but ending another person's, Thomson stated before for the sake of argument the fetus is considered a person, life. The ways to perform an abortion varies from suction aspiration, dilation, and curettage. The previous ways listed result in the dismemberment of the baby as the cause of death. Thomson comparison of the violinist life ending due to not receiving the support needed in comparison to actively killing through dismemberment or poison is not …show more content…
similar. To make this more accurate Thomson's case would have the violinist poisoned or cut into then killed to create a more accurate parallel between the two. Thomson's Violinist case fails as a defense to abortion does not illustrate the situation of abortions well enough.
In Thomson's Violinist case the violinist is depicted as a total stranger. In the case of abortions, mothers have an assumed parental obligation. Thomson argues there is no "special responsibility" unless it is assumed. The problem with this is the responsibility a mother has for her child is seen as no more than the responsibility someone has for a stranger. It can be argued if the mother allows the pregnancy to progress for a certain amount of time, say the first trimester for example then can it not be argued she has assumed responsibility. For example, using Thomson's Violinist case general scenario, imagine if you were to wake up connected to an unconscious stranger and needed his body to survive an injury that occurred because of the said stranger. The stranger did not give his consent to allow the use of their body and decides to not help you and take responsibility for their actions making the stranger actions immoral. The stranger has a moral obligation to take responsibility for their
actions. One might object here that the Violinist case separates being responsible for someone that is in need of your body and someone that is in need of your body because you are responsible for them being needy, to begin with. In the case of the Violinist, the stranger is someone that is in a needy state that is not caused by you. However, Thomson's Violinist case fails to comprehend the process that is needed to create a child. It takes both the man and woman involved in the act to create the child. From the start of sex to the moment the embryo embeds inside the womb the woman and man were responsible for the creation of the child. The Violinist case has a very narrow connection to pregnancy due to rape. The situation of having a stranger artificially attached to an unwilling host for their continued existence is one of the few key points that can be connected in parallel with pregnancy. The cause of death for the violinist shall you refuse to stay plugged in and the natural way a child is connected to its mother are two important reasons why Thomson's Violinist case is unsuccessful. In conclusion, I have presented explained why Judith Thomson's Violinist case is unsuccessful as a defense to abortion.
According to Thomson, unjust killing comes from the result of depriving someone from a right that they own. In the Henry Fonda case, Fonda was given the magical ability to cure a sickness with just one touch over a fevered brow. So, Fonda has the right to volunteer in touching the fevered brow, but is not obligated to do so because the sick person does not own the right of Henry Fonda’s hand. This analogy is very significant in comparison to Thomson’s argument on justified abortion because it shows that the mother should not be held to any constraints because she has the freedom to her body. Given the fact that the mother has the authority to make any decisions she wants; abortion will always be justified because she is not obligated to give
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
Caplan, A., & Arp, R. (2014). The deliberately induced abortion of a human pregnancy is not justifiable. Contemporary debates in bioethics (pp. 122). Oxford, West Sussex: Wiley.
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.
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.
The mother-son case illustrates that there are more factors in play than just the two that Thomson presents in her thesis. Thomson’s conditions by themselves cannot explain every situation. The relationship between the people involved can also affect whether a decision is morally permissible or not. If that relationship entails that one person is emotionally bound and ethically responsible for the security and well-being of the other, the first cannot knowingly contribute to the death of the second. Thomson’s thesis must be modified to include this condition as well.
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.
Another basic argument she claims is that the mother also has a right to decide what happens in and to her body but the fetus 's right to live outweighs the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body. Therefore, Thomson opposes abortion and claims that a fetus may not be killed unjustly and an abortion may not be performed. Whether the unborn person uses of its mother’s body, because the un-born person has a right to live and use its mother’s body, abortion is unjust killing per Thomson.
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”.
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
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
Over the duration of the last century, abortion in the Western hemisphere has become a largely controversial topic that affects every human being. In the United States, at current rates, one in three women will have had an abortion by the time they reach the age of 45. The questions surrounding the laws are of moral, social, and medical dilemmas that rely upon the most fundamental principles of ethics and philosophy. At the center of the argument is the not so clear cut lines dictating what life is, or is not, and where a fetus finds itself amongst its meaning. In an effort to answer the question, lawmakers are establishing public policies dictating what a woman may or may not do with consideration to her reproductive rights. The drawback, however, is that there is no agreement upon when life begins and at which point one crosses the line from unalienable rights to murder.
Abortion may appear ethical or unethical depending on various viewpoints and circumstances. The fetus is considered a person and bringing it to term may be unethical as the act is considered as murder. In some situations, the mother may require to terminate a pregnancy for her bodily autonomy (Johnston, 2003). In such positions, the resolution to terminate a pregnancy may be argued as the most ethical choice. The mother is also considered to having a reasonable level of ethical responsibility to the fetus, because she did not take enough precaution to ensure avoiding conception (Cline, 2014). The mother’s ethical responsibility to the fetus may not be enough to deprive her choice of abortion; it...