2. A Thought Experiment by Judith
Thomson
• 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.
3. A Thought Experiment by Judith
Thomson
Is it morally necessary for you
to accept this situation? No
doubt it would be very nice of
you if you did, a great
kindness. But do you have to
accede to it?
4. Thomson’s thought experiment
• What if someone tells you:
• All persons have a right to life,
• and violinists are persons.
• Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body,
• but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to
your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.’
5. Thomson’s thought experiment
• How would you react if you were in such position? Would you unplug yourself
anyway or would you keep the violinist?
• By now you should know what we are talking about…
6. What is abortion?
• Abortion = deliberate removal (or deliberate action to
cause the expulsion) of a fetus from the womb of a human
female, at the request of or through the agency of the
mother, so as in fact to result in the death of the fetus.
7. Permissive view on abortion: Mary
Warren (1973)
• According to Warren abortion is morally permissible at any stage of
the pregnancy and under any circumstances. She considers the anti-
abortionist arguments:
1. It is wrong to kill innocent human beings.
2. Fetuses are innocent human beings.
______________________________________
3) Therefore, it is wrong to kill fetuses.
8. Warren’s argument for permissibility of
abortion
• She claims that the plausibility of the premises rest on an equivocation on the
term ‘human being’:
• Human in the genetic sense = being a member of the biological species homo
sapiens
• This includes not only functioning children and adults, but also includes fetuses
(even very early fetuses) and living human bodies without functioning brains (e.g.
those in irreversible comas).
• Human in the moral sense = being a full-fledged member of the moral community.
• Warren: The moral community is the set of beings with full moral rights, and
consists of all and only persons.
9. According to Warren the premises of anti-abortionists are
faulty
• If ‘human being’ has the same sense in both premises then one of
them is question-begging.
• Either the argument assumes that it is wrong to kill something merely
because it is homo sapiens, or the argument assumes that a fetus is a
member of the moral community.
• Both of these claims are contentious and would require further
argument.
10. “What characteristics entitle an entity to be considered a
person [in the moral sense]?”
• Warren’s list of characteristics:
• 1. Consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the
being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain;
• 2. Reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex
problems);
• 3. Self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of genetic
or direct external control).
11. “What characteristics entitle an entity to be considered a
person [in the moral sense]?”
• 4. The capacity to communicate with an indefinite number of
possible contents on indefinitely many possible topics.
• 5. The presence of self-concepts and self-awareness.
12. Warren claims that:
any being who does not possess most of 1-5 is not a human being in the
moral sense.
• the more like a person a being is, the stronger is the case for regarding it as
having a right to life, and the stronger its right to life is.
• there is no stage of fetal development at which a fetus resembles a person
enough to have a significant right to life.
• a fetus’s potential for being a person does not provide a basis for the claim
that it has a significant right to life.
13. The spaceman analogy:
• A space explorer is captured by aliens who are going to
make a thousand clones of him unless he escapes. Does
he have an obligation to stay? No, says Warren, even if
the cloning is done quickly and does not harm him. Not
even if the clones have already started to grow and will
die if he escapes.
14. Objections to warren
• Firstly, If killing fetuses is permissible because they are not full-fledged
members of the moral community, then, by the same standard, killing
newborns would be permissible as well. Moreover, killing any non-human
animal would also be permissible. But this is not the case.
• Warren’s Reply: “The deliberate killing of viable newborns is virtually never
justified...because neonates are so very close to being persons that to kill
them requires a very strong moral justification.
• Is this an adequate reply?
15. Objections against Warren’s position
• Arguably not. Take the example of a premature birth.
• A six-month “pre-mature baby” is certainly a “viable newborn”, given
modern technology.
• But it is no closer to being a person than a six-month fetus that
happened to stay in the womb.
• So, to be consistent, Warren must either say that killing the
premature infant is permissible, or that aborting the six-month fetus
is not.
16. Sentience as the necessary condition for
moral consideration
• Since Warren brings up non-human animals, let’s consider what Peter
Singer would say about this. He argues against making personhood a
necessary condition for moral consideration (that would be
“speciesist”).
• Instead, he proposes that having interests is what matters,
and sentience(the capacity to feel pain) is both necessary and
sufficient for having interests.
• At what stage of development is a fetus capable of experiencing
pain? Somewhere between 5 and 6 months, it is now believed.
17. Don Marquis, objections against abortion
• No doubt most philosophers affiliated with secular institutions of
higher education believe that the anti-abortion position is either a
symptom of irrational religious dogma or a conclusion generated by
seriously confused philosophical argument.
• According to Marquis abortion is, except possibly in rare cases,
seriously immoral, that it is in the same moral category as killing an
innocent adult human being.
18. Leaving aside the hard cases of abortion
• certain abortions, such as abortion before implantation or abortion
when the life of a woman is threatened by a pregnancy or abortion
after rape, may be morally permissible.
•
• The purpose of his essay is to develop a general argument for the
claim that the overwhelming majority of deliberate abortions are
seriously immoral.
19. Don Marquis: “ Why Abortion is
Immoral?”
• According to Marquis “The pro-choicer wants to find a moral principle
concerning the wrongness of killing which tends to be narrow in scope
in order that fetuses will not fall under it.”
• The price is that they tend to be too narrow, so that infants, young
children, the temporarily unconscious or the severely retarded end up
in the same category as fetuses.”
20. the anti-abortionist stance
• On the other hand, the anti-abortionist wants to find a moral principle so
broad that even fetuses at an early stage will fall under it. These principles
are often too broad.
• For example: “It is always prima facie wrong to kill something that is
genetically human”, which seems to entail that it is wrong to “end the
existence of a living human cancer cell culture.”
21. The stand-off between pro-choice and
anti-abortionist perspective
• If the anti-abortionist tries to fix the problem by adopting the
principle that “It is always prima facie wrong to kill a human being”
then they simply beg the question against the pro-choicer when they
get to the next premise, “Fetuses are human beings”. (The pro-
choicer will deny that fetuses are human beings in the moral sense).
• The result is that we are facing a stand-off.
22. The solution according to Marquis
• An analysis of the wrongness of killing.
• “If we merely believe, but do not understand, why killing adult human beings
such as ourselves is wrong, how could we conceivably show that abortion is
either immoral or permissible?”
• What primarily makes killing wrong is neither its effect on the murderer nor
its effect on the victim’s friends and relatives, but its effect on the victim.
• The effect: “The loss of one’s life deprives one of all the experiences,
activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted
one’s future”.
23. In other words,
• “...what makes killing any adult human being prima facie seriously
wrong is the loss of his or her future.”
• Killing is wrong because it results in the loss of a future of value (like
ours).
• Points in favor of the analysis (according to Marquis):
•
24. In other words,
• It explains why killing is regarded as one of the worst of crimes: it
deprives the victim of more than perhaps any other crime.
•
• People who are dying believe it is bad because it is a loss of a future
of value. It makes sense that killing is fundamentally wrong for the
same reason that death is bad.
25. Implications of Marquis’ argument
• It Implies that it would be wrong to kill non-humans that have “a
future like ours” (a future of value), such as certain animals or
intelligent extra-terrestrials.
• Unlike “sanctity of human life” theories, does not entail that active
euthanasia is always wrong. Whether it is wrong depends on the
expected value of the future of the patient.
• Unlike personhood theories (e.g. Warren’s), it straightforwardly
entails that killing children and infants is wrong, and for the same
reason it is wrong to kill anyone else.
26. Marquis’ position in a nutshell:
• “The future of a standard fetus includes a set of experiences,
projects, activities, and such which are identical with the futures of
adult human beings and are identical with the futures of young
children...it follows that abortion is prima facie seriously wrong.”
