This is an old revision of the document!
PBA310Y: The Good Samaritan Argument
Prerequisite: PBA210H
Judith Jarvis Thompson
- “In chapter 7 of Francis Beckwith’s book, Politically Correct Death: Answering Arguments for Abortion Rights (1993), it extensively covers arguments such as this when refuting an analogy similar to the professor’s. The points Beckwith makes are in response to an analogy proposed by abortion advocate Judith Jarvis Thomson, known as “unplugging the violinist” and articulated in her paper, “A Defense of Abortion.” http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca/training/classroom/use#footnoteref3_bfcjhip
Analysis
Themes
- Bodily autonomy versus right to life
- Killing versus letting die
- Direct versus third-party action
- What does a right to life actually entail
- right to continued life versus right not to be killed
- right not to be killed unjustly
- on what constitutes a “right”, immoral versus unjust
- Good Samaritan versus Minimally Decent Samaritan
- “Special Responsibility”1)
- “while I am arguing for the permissibility of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of the unborn child”
Thompson seems to be assuming a consequentialist perspective to be obvious. She doesn't seem to entertain the nothing that something might be intrinsically wrong. Yet, she says this about torture: “If someone threatens you with death unless you torture someone else to death, I think you have not the right, even to save your life, to do so.” Maybe the real problem is that she's not actually allowing the premise, she doesn't actually believe a pre-born child is a person.2)
Bizarre Language
- “But it cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the mother performs an abortion on herself to save her life. It cannot seriously be said that she must refrain, that she must sit passively by and wait for her death.”
- “If anything in the world is true, it is that you do not commit murder, you do not do what is impermissible, if you reach around to your back and unplug yourself from that violinist to save your life.”
- “there isn't much a woman can safely do to abort herself”
- “Perhaps a pregnant woman is vaguely felt to have the status of house, to which we don't allow the right of self-defense.”
- Indeed, in what pregnancy could it be supposed that the mother has given the unborn person such a right? It is not as if there are unborn persons drifting about the world, to whom a woman who wants a child says I invite you in.”
- “a burglar”
- “If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot now withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it.”
- “people-seeds” as some kind of environmental toxin as an analogy for the attempted sterilization of the conjugal act
Commentary
- Against (pro-life)
- Schwarz 1990
- Beckwith 1993
- Lee 1996
- Against (abortion advocates)
- Tooley 1972
- Warren 1973
- Steinbock 1992
- McMahan 2002
- In Defence
- Kamm 1992
- Boonin 2003: ch 4
David Boonin
From the moral point of view, that is, a woman who carries a pregnancy to term is like a person who generously offers at some considerable cost to herself to provide waht another needs but does not have the right to, while a woman who declines to carry a pregnancy to term is like a person who declines to offer such assistance. It is not the case that abortion violates the requirements of morality, on this account, but rather that continuing to incur the burdens involved in a typical pregnancy goes beyond them, even if the fetus does have the same right to life that you or I have. […] while I will not attempt to defend Thomson's defense of the good samaritan argument, I will attempt to defend the argument itself.3)
Boonin summarizes Thompson's framing of the pro-life argument4):
- P1: The fetus is a person
- P2: Every person has a right to life
- C1: The fetus has a right to life.
- P3: The woman has a right to control her body.
- P4: The right to life outweighs the right to control one's body.
- P5: Abortion kills the fetus.
- [P6: If abortion kills the fetus, then abortion violates the fetus's right to life]
- C2: Abortion is morally impermissible.
Thomson presents this scenario in response:
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. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you – we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” (1971: 132)
Boonin claims she's not attacking P4, as many claim. Surely Thomson would agree the right to control your body doesn't trump a right to life when they are in genuine conflict, e.g. the right to swing your fists and pummel someone else to death.5) She is not arguing that the right to control your body outweighs someone else's right to life. Thomson's claim is that there's no such conflict in the first place, that a right to life does not entail a right to use your kidneys. “So, in unplugging yourself from him, you do nothing that conflicts with his right to life, even though you do something that brings about his death. […] the fetus's right to life does not include or entail the right to be provided with the use or the continued use of whatever is needed in order for it to go on living.”6)
Thomson is arguing that C2 does not follow without P6, and that P6 is not true. “The right to life does not include or entail the right to life support.”7) Thomson says, “We need to be shown also that killing the foetus violates its right to life, i.e., that abortion is unjust killing. And is it?”8)
However, you still need to show that if P6 is false for unplugging the violinist, that it's also false for abortion – that the two cases are sufficiently analogous. Boonin says Thomson's argument is that the rights-based argument against abortion is unsuccessful without P6, and that it cannot be revised to succeed with P6.