Friday, November 10, 2006

Thomson continued

Chris is absolutely right to praise Judith Jarvis Thomson's rightly famous abortion paper. I thought I would add a note on what makes it so important and, as Chris says, rhetorically brilliant.

Many abortion supporters have argued against the personhood and moral significance of the fetus, claiming that a fetus is clearly not a child. An acorn isn't an oak tree; a blueprint is not a building, etc. (Moral philosopher Thomas Nagel: "It cannot be said that not to be born is a misfortune.") A critical, almost fatal problem with this approach is that it begs the question in the abortion debate, because pro-lifers just argue or assume the exact opposite -- that a fetus is just like a child, morally speaking. And one is hardly likely to convince a devout member of the Catholic Church that life doesn't begin till after birth (or late in pregnancy) just by saying so loudly. (Similarly, the contention that gays are not sinners is a nonstarter in an argument with a hard-line Catholic.)

But Thomson's brilliant move was this: let's just assume the fetus does have a right to life. Couldn't it be, she asks, that abortion is still permissible? What about the competing claims of the mother -- her rights to certain freedoms, including the risk of harm, etc. In fact, Thomson goes a step further. Her argument reconceives the fetus as a famous violinist -- i.e., you might think, a particularly socially valuable human being. And yet she questions whether a person should be required, at great personal cost, to nurse a violinist to health over a period of nine months, just because she happens to find herself in a position to do so. Sure, if she agreed to do it she'd be praiseworthy, but isn't that supererogatory, as philosophers say -- in other words, above and beyond the call of duty?

[Updated 11:27 a.m.]

Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:05 AM

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