Thomson's Violinist Analogy for Abortion

Once again, thanks to Pro for instigating this debate. Pro is obviously very well-read in the abortion literature, and it’s a pleasure to debate someone as knowledgeable as he is.Parental obligationPro is right to make a distinction between two different types of parents: biological parents and custodial parents (one might call them “adoptive” parents). If a mother decides she can’t raise her child, she can adopt the child out, and the adopting parent thereby takes on all the responsibilities of caring for that child because she consented to doing so. However, the case of the biological mother is different because this is not something can be assented to. If a woman engages in intercourse and produces a child, she is a mother, whether or not she wanted to get pregnant. The child’s needs are what are at issue here. Since the child did not ask to be brought into existence, and can’t survive without the aid of another person, this biological connection to the mother grounds her obligations to help this child. If she does not want to care for the child or decides she cannot raise the child, she is not morally permitted to kill the child, anymore than a woman who gives birth is morally permitted to kill her infant for the same reason. She must adopt the child out so that the child can have his/her needs met by another person.Pro has changed the thought experiment around, but in the case of your long-lost child being in the place of the violinist, isn’t it obvious that the moral implications have shifted? Much like my analogy of finding your own child abandoned on your doorstep, it seems that you are doing something much worse by denying your own child the use of your kidneys for nine months. In Thomson’s essay, she gives a similar analogy: If Thomson was in the hospital and all she needed was the touch of Henry Fonda’s hand, he would not be morally obligated to fly out to her to touch her with his hand. He would not even be obligated to do so if he was in the same room as her. [1] Contra Pro, this seems intuitively implausible. However, as John T. Wilcox points out, even if he did not have an obligation to heal Thomson with a touch of his hand, surely he would be a monster if the person he refused was Jane Fonda, his own wife. [2]Regarding Pro’s appeal to someone stealing your genetic material and creating a child, it seems that, at least in the United States, the courts would seem sympathetic to my point of view, considering a case in which a man’s sperm was stolen from him and used to make a woman pregnant. Because the child’s needs are at stake, and because of his biological connection to the child, he was forced to provide child support. [3]Pro’s second response to my argument, regarding the woman in Japan, shows that the biological connection is a sufficient condition to ground parental responsibility, not a necessary one. In the case of the woman in Japan, she becomes a “de facto guardian” of the child. The child has a fundamental right to life, and the woman, even though the child is not hers, now finds herself as the sole protector of the child. She becomes similar to Carl, from Up, who, in his house thousands of feet in the air, finds Russell on his front porch. He can’t push Russell off his house to his death, claiming that he has no obligation to Russell. He has an obligation to care for Russell because Russell is a child and Carl is the only one in the vicinity who can care for Russell. [4]Pro argues that your child raiding your fridge is not stealing because you have assumed responsibility for this child. But Pro has not told us what grounds this obligation of responsibility? If it’s not biology, what is it? It doesn’t seem like it can be that she took the child home. Why is it a woman can’t take the child home but still decide she doesn’t want to raise it, and instead abuse the child or kill her? Why is it that simply keeping the pregnancy after the first trimester instead of taking the child home after birth doesn’t ground the responsibility? What is the alternative to biological connectedness?Pro’s only response is that she can’t kill the child post-birth because it’s no longer in the situation that Thomson argued for. But remember that Thomson’s entire argument hinges on the fact that a mother has no natural obligation to her child (otherwise, bodily rights arguments don’t work to justify her right to kill the child). So it seems like this isn’t a good response to Tooley’s scenario, because Pro still hasn’t told us what does ground that obligation.Pro has also misunderstood Wilcox’s argument. The argument is not an objection from weirdness, per se. He does talk about its weirdness. But the objection is not that it’s weird, the objection is that since the violinist scenario is basically an impossible situation, and pregnancy is a very common situation (in fact, how we all enter life), it is very plausible to argue that our obligations in pregnancy are different from our obligations to the violinist because an ethical framework represents a way to deal with the realities and regularities of human life, and may not fit well the irregularities or impossibilities. Since the violinist scenario is basically impossible and pregnancy the way we all enter life, it is very plausible that our obligations in the two situations are different. This also has nothing to do with an appeal to nature. It is, essentially, an appeal to ethical systems needing to give us an idea of how to handle real and common situations.The Violinist Does Not Accurately Portray the SituationPro argues that his thought experiments more closely resemble pregnancy than Horn and George’s Reverse Violinist. I will argue below that they do not, so if my response succeeds, this argument is extended into the next round.Responsibility ObjectionPro responds to this objection by drawing a distinction between being responsible for the fact one exists and the fact they are in a needy position. Before I respond to Pro’s thought experiments, I want to just point out that in no sense can someone argue a woman is responsible for the existence of the unborn child, but not responsible for the child being in the mother’s womb. This is a tack that Eileen McDonagh argued in a book she wrote, and Boonin also attempts to defend in A Defense of Abortion. McDonagh argued that while the man and woman create the child, it is the fetus, not the man/woman, who makes the woman pregnant. [5] The procreative act is the sex act: the sperm is transported from the man into the woman’s fallopian tube, where it merges with the ovum and creates a new human being. This human being is then transported down the woman’s fallopian tube by way of tiny hairs called cilia, and then is deposited inside her womb where the embryo implants. From start to finish, the woman and the man are responsible both for the child’s creation and for placing the child in a state of neediness in the womb.So pregnancy could been seen like Pro’s analogy of poisoning. If you poison someone’s food, you are directly responsible for their situation of neediness, just like the man and woman are responsible for the child’s neediness by engaging in the procreative act of sex, since that act directly results in the child’s neediness.Pro uses an analogy from an imperfect drug and an unconscious violinist. However, these analogies make a very important confusion that can be misleading. Frank Beckwith gives us two reasons why these analogies fail to undermine the responsibility of the woman:1) the two cases are not symmetrical relative to increasing or decreasing human neediness. In the case of the violinist, you are decreasing his neediness due to administering the drug. In the case of pregnancy, the neediness of the child is intrinsically linked to the child’s creation, which are both actualized by engaging in an act that is ordered in such a way that its proper function is to create a child-with-neediness.2) the two cases are not symmetrical relative to the actors’ responsibility for the neediness of the beings in question. In the case of pregnancy, the unborn child’s neediness is a direct result of the same act that brought the child into existence. In the violinist case, you are merely extending his life (not bringing him into existence) with the foreseeable but unintended consequence of his future neediness. [6]The objection to the Hedonist response is similar: you are not responsible for the condition the violinist finds himself in, you are merely extending his life (and certainly not causing him pain or anguish, since he is unconscious).So Pro’s assertion that these scenarios more accurately represent pregnancy is false. The act of sex is an act that jointly creates a child-with-neediness. These two features of the child (her existence and neediness) cannot be separated because both stem from the same act, sex. As such, the Reverse Violinist more closely resembles sex since the violinist is directly responsible for your needy condition.Pro is correct that if Thomson’s argument succeeds, it could (only) justify abortion in the case of rape. Rape is a tragic crime, make no mistake. I don’t want to downplay the tragedy of the situation. But I have two responses to this: 1) Even if that is true, rape only accounts for less than 1% of all total abortions, [7] so it would only justify a very small percentage of abortions. Not abortion-on-demand as we currently have in the US. 2) In the case of rape, similar to the case from Japan I responded to earlier, a woman in the case of abortion would likewise become a de facto guardian. Responsibility is a sufficient, not a necessary, condition to ground the woman’s obligation not to abort. Sources in comments.