[5.4.2.] Three Lessons from the Violinist Analogy.

 

Over the course of the article, Thomson draws three lessons from this story:

 

1.      The right to life is not the right to use someone else’s body to stay alive (“...having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body—even if one needs it for life itself.” RTD 99). Because the violinist is a person, he has a right to life. But this does not imply that he has a right to use your body in order to stay alive. If he had a right to use your body in order to stay alive, then that right might outweigh your right to determine what happens in and to your body. But having a right to life does not imply having a right to use someone else’s body to stay alive—so that right does not necessarily trump your right to determine what happens in your body.

 

She further illustrates this point with the Henry Fonda thought-experiment:

 

If I am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow. It might be frightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide it. It would be less nice, though no doubt well meant, if my friends flew out to the West Coast and carried Henry Fonda back with them. But I have no right at all against anybody that he should do this for me. (RTD 98)

 

If the violinist required, not nine months of your time, but only a single hour, he still would not have a right to use your body, and so you would not be violating his rights by disconnecting. Thomson concedes that it might be bad in some other way for you to disconnect. You might be “self-centered, callous, indecent” if you refuse to stay connected for an hour; but you would not be behaving unjustly.[1]

 

Applied to abortion, the lesson is this: even if the fetus has a right to life, this does not automatically give it the right to use your body to stay alive.

 

 

2.      The right to life is not the right not to be killed; it is the right not to be killed unjustly. (RTD 99)

 

Suppose that you have to spend nine years in bed in order to save the life of the violinist. According to Thomson, if you disconnect from him, you are killing him, but you are not killing him unjustly. This is true, despite the fact that he has a right to life (just like any other person).

 

Applied to abortion, the lesson is this: the pro-lifer needs to do more than show that the fetus has a right to life. The pro-lifer needs to show more than that, because from the fact that a fetus has a right to life it does not follow that it has a right not to be killed—it only follows that it has a right not to be killed unjustly. The critic of abortion needs to go beyond this to show that abortion is unjust killing.

 

 

3.      While you would be doing something above and beyond the call of moral duty if you were to stay attached to the violinist, you are not doing anything wrong by detaching yourself.

 

In other words, staying attached to the violinist would be supererogatory, not obligatory:

 

obligatory (df.): describes an action that it is morally wrong not to perform; you do something wrong by not performing the action.

 

supererogatory (df.): describes an action that is morally good, but not obligatory; you do nothing wrong by not performing the action.

 

 

[5.4.3.] Interlude: Moral Categories.

 

Supererogatory and obligatory are two of five moral categories into which a given action can be sorted:

 

a. immoral: not permitted by morality; morally bad; in performing the action, you are doing something morally wrong.

 

b. morally permissible: permitted by morality; in performing the action, you are not doing anything immoral. There are three sub-categories of morally permissible action: obligatory, morally neutral, and supererogatory:

c. obligatory: required by morality; if you don’t do it, then you’ve done something immoral

d. morally neutral: neither morally good nor morally bad; no moral value whatsoever

e. supererogatory: going above and beyond what morality requires; you are not obligated to do it, so in failing to do it, you would not be immoral; but you’ve done something morally good if you do it.

 

 

[5.4.4.] The Violinist Analogy as a Response to Marquis’s FLO Argument.

 

Now to tie all this back to Marquis’s FLO Argument: If many pregnancies are analogous to Thomson’s violinist case, then Marquis is wrong. Marquis may be right that it is prima facie immoral to kill a fetus, but in many cases a mother’s right to determine what happens in and to her body trumps that right, and in those cases abortion is not immoral.

 

In effect, Thomson is rejecting the following claim made by Marquis: in order for the mother’s right to self-determination to override her obligation not to destroy the fetus, the loss she suffers if she remains pregnant must be greater than the loss suffered by the fetus if it is destroyed.

 

Thomson seems to intend the violinist analogy to cover the case of pregnancy-by-rape.

 

However, she offers a challenge to those who say (a) in general, abortion is wrong because a fetus is a person with a right to life and (b) abortion in the case of rape is morally permissible:

 

Can those who oppose abortion on the ground I mentioned make an exception for a pregnancy due to rape? Certainly. They can say that persons have a right to life only if they didn’t come into existence because of rape; or they can say that all persons have a right to life, but that some have less of a right to life than others, in particular, that those who came into existence because of rape have less. But these statements have a rather unpleasant sound. Surely the question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn’t turn on the question of whether or not you are the product of a rape. (RTD 94)

 

So if we read Thomson as if she were responding to Marquis, her challenge would be something like this: a fetus still has an FLO, even if it was created by way of rape. If the central reason that abortion is wrong is that it deprives a being of an FLO, how can we allow abortion in the case of rape but not also allow it in other cases?

 

Her view is that we should allow abortion in the case of rape, so to be consistent we must allow it in other cases, too.

 

 

Stopping point for Friday September 18.  For next time, begin reading RTD ch.13,, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” and “Postscript on Infanticide” by Mary Anne Warren; read 109-114. As always, be prepared for a pop quiz.