Thomson's Violinist Analogy for Abortion

Thanks once again to Pro for instituting this debate.Parental ObligationWe need to make a quick distinction. By a right to life, I simply mean a right not to be killed unjustly. There is a distinction to be made between killing someone and letting them die. In the case of the violinist, you are letting him die from a previous illness. You are not violating his right to life by unplugging from him. So I do not speak in terms of violating his right to life. Since you are not violating his right to life, it is permissible to unplug. Since you are violating the unborn child’s right to life, it is not permissible to abort.Also, I think I did show that you would be morally wrong if you were to unplug from your own offspring. Think back to the example from Henry and Jane Fonda. As Wilcox argues, surely Henry Fonda would be a monster if he allowed his own wife, Jane, to die without touching her. It seems to me that we have obligations to our offspring that we simply do not have to complete strangers.Regarding Pro’s three responses to my Up example:Pro thinks I’m now trying to argue apart from biological connectedness, but this is not true. I am arguing in lieu of biological protectedness. I think Pro is confusing necessary and sufficient conditions. A necessary condition is such that something must be there to obtain (e.g. Not being divisible by four is a necessary condition for being a prime number). A sufficient condition is something which, if it is present, is enough to make something obtain (e.g. being divisible by four is a sufficient condition for a number’s being even). So when I say that biological connected is a sufficient condition to ground obligation, I’m saying that it is enough to ground someone’s obligation, but even if it is not present, there may still be other reasons that we have obligations (so it doesn’t have to be there, but if it is, that is enough to ground it).Pro asserts that Russell is not using Carl’s body, but in fact he is. It is now a burden on Carl to take care of Russell, to use his body to make Russell food, to protect him after they land until he can get Russell to safety, etc. It’s true that Russell is not inside Carl’s body as an unborn child, but why would Russell need to be inside Carl’s body for Carl to be able to justify killing him? Russell is just as much a full-fledged human being inside the womb as outside.Pro asserts that my argument leads to absurdities, but I submit that Pro is simply making a fallacious appeal to consequences here. Why is it so absurd to think that you might have an obligation to remain plugged in to the violinist? I actually think you might have an obligation to remain plugged in, even though many people might not share my intuitions on this. Or you might not have an obligation based on other reasons. But I was not trying to argue in this debate that you should remain plugged in to the violinist, I was merely arguing that the violinist case does not ground a moral permissibility to abort a pregnancy. To reiterate, I do not think you are violating the violinist’s right to life by unplugging because you are not the active agent in his death; the kidney ailment is.Pro did give the response that you have assumed guardianship over the child, but as I have argued previously, this is an arbitrary response. Why is it that she doesn’t assume guardianship if she allows the pregnancy to progress past the first trimester? Why is it that she can’t simply deny guardianship, but take the child home anyway and abuse or kill him/her (or the woman on the deserted island)? Pro has not given an answer for what grounds the fact that she has assumed guardianship over this child. (As I argued, by engaging in sex, which resulted in the child’s creation and state of dependency, she has tacitly assumed responsibility for the child.)Pro does briefly respond to my use of Thomson’s Henry Fonda example, but he seems to have missed the point of it, since my point was that her obligation seems to be different to someone biologically related to her.Pro continues to assert that Wilcox’s objection is one from weirdness, but again, this is false. It is not an argument from weirdness per se. In fact, Boonin responds to the weirdness objection as so: “Suppose, for example, that you had been asked your response to the following scenario: You are driving a car when the brakes suddenly fail, and you can either steer left and run over five people or right and run over one. There is nothing difficult to understand about this example, and your response to it is presumably quite clear. But now suppose that I add that this car you are driving is powered by a tiny nuclear reactor in the glove compartment. This makes the case fantastic, but there is no reason to suppose that this feature of the example could alter the clarity or significance of your reaction to it. And the same goes for the violinist example. The fact that the technology involved in making the violinist dependent on you is exotic rather than mundane is morally irrelevant.” [1] However, what Boonin overlooks is that adding the nuclear reactor to the car doesn’t affect our moral intuitions in the thought experiment one bit, since the technology used is irrelevant to the moral intuitions of the case (do you kill one person or five?). The fact that the violinist scenario is rare and impossible does affect our moral intuitions because the technology, itself, is being used as an analogy for pregnancy, which is common; in fact, the way all of us enter the world. Since our ethical framework must guide us in the regularities and realities of human life, appealing to an impossible science fiction scenario confuses, rather than elucidates, our intuitions.I submit that the parental responsibility objection, including Wilcox’s argument, shows that the violinist analogy does not permit abortion.The Violinist Does Not Accurately Portray the SituationAgain, if my argument below succeeds, then Horn’s and George’s Reverse Violinist does, in fact, show that Thomson’s violinist scenario is not analogous to pregnancy, and therefore fails to support abortion’s moral permissibility.Responsibility ObjectionI understand that Pro never argued that she is not responsible for the fetus being in the womb; that was merely meant as a precursor to arguing for her responsibility, since she is clearly also responsible for the child’s neediness, as well as his existence.Pro responds to the poisoning analogy by saying that you are leaving the violinist worse off. However, I fail to see why this is relevant. First, if you conceive a child only with the intention of killing the child, is the child not worse off? You might be tempted to respond that you can’t compare non-existence with existence, but it seems that intuitively, you can harm someone by bringing them into existence. For example, if you tamper with an ovum that causes a child to be conceived without limbs, you have certainly harmed the child, even though the only alternative was non-existence. If you conceive a child only to kill him, then you are leaving him worse off as surely as if you had tampered with the ovum to produce a child with a debilitating fatal illness.Second, the alternatives are not between non-existence and death. The alternatives are between leaving the unborn child alive (the mother caring for the child) or killing the child, and if you kill the child rather than caring for him, you have clearly harmed him by leaving him worse off (dead).Pro says that being responsible for the fact that someone NOW exists is relevantly similar to being responsible for someone’s existence, but Pro overlooks the fact that the child’s neediness is tied to his coming into existence, so that since the woman is responsible for the child’s existence, she is also responsible for his neediness given that the two situations are linked.Pro finally responds with the rape exception again. He did not respond to my answer in the last round, so I push it forward into this round. Rape only accounts for a very small percentage of abortions (roughly 1%), so it cannot be used to morally justify abortion on demand. Second, the de facto guardian argument applies in this situation, too, so that since a woman is in a situation in which a needy child requires her assistance, she is not morally permitted to end the child’s life. Pro did not respond to these two points, so they move forward.I submit that the responsibility objection shows that the violinist scenario does not succeed in showing abortion to be morally permissible.[1] David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 143.