[5.4.5.] The People Seed Analogy.

 

Thomson gives other analogies to support the claim that it is morally permissible for a woman to abort a pregnancy that she had attempted to prevent with contraceptives. One of these is the people seed analogy:

 

Imagine that people seeds grow on trees. If one is blown into your house through an open window and lands on your sofa, it will grow into a person for whom you will have to care. You want your windows open, but you don’t want a person growing on your couch, so you install window screens. Unfortunately, one of these fails, and a seed ends up on your couch and grows into a person. Does this person now have the right to use your house?

 

Thomson says that it is morally permissible for you to force this person to leave, that he or she does not have a right to stay in your house.

 

She takes this case to imply that abortions are morally permissible in cases of unwanted pregnancies stemming from sex using (failed) contraception.

 

Thomson considers an objection, and offers a response:

 

Someone may argue that you are responsible for its [i.e., the people seed’s] rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won’t do—for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home without a (reliable!) army.  (RTD 101)

 

 

[5.4.6.] Rights and Wronging.

 

At this point Thomson argues that it is possible to wrong someone without violating that person’s rights.

 

One way of wronging someone is to fail to do something for that person that you should do.

 

But the fact that you should do something for a person does not imply that you have violated some right of hers by not doing it.

 

To support this point, Thomson offers the following thought experiments:

 

The One-Hour Violinist: Suppose that the violinist only needed an hour of your life, and staying connected to him had no health consequences for you. Thomson says it would then be “indecent” to disconnect rather than simply wait an hour.

·         To apply this point to the issue of abortion... Suppose that pregnancy lasted only an hour. Now imagine someone who becomes pregnant by rape. Would it be indecent for her to abort rather than simply wait an hour? Perhaps... but this will not mean that the fetus has a right to the mother’s body.

 

The Two Brothers: An older brother is given a box of chocolates and refuses to give any to his little brother, who sits pitifully watching his older sibling eat the entire box. Perhaps it is mean, or cruel, or indecent, for the older brother not to share... but this doesn’t imply that the younger brother has a right to any of the chocolates. He does not have a right to them, since those chocolates were given to his older brother and not to him. (Had the box of chocolates been given to them both and the older brother kept them from the younger, then we would have a case of injustice, of a violation of the younger brother’s rights.)

 

Henry Fonda Across the Hall: If all Fonda has to do to save your life is step across the hall into your hospital room, it would be wrong for him not to... but that does not mean that, if he refuses to do so, he is violating some right that you have.

 

She draws the following conclusion: “Except in such cases as the unborn person has a right to demand it ... nobody is morally required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other interests and concerns, of all other duties and commitments, for nine years, or even for nine months, in order to keep another person alive.” (RTD 103-104)

 

 

[5.4.7.] Right to Abortion vs. Right to Secure the Death of the Fetus.

 

According to Thomson, the fact that you have a right to detach from the violinist does not imply that you have a right to his death. Suppose that you detach and leave the hospital, and that by some miracle he survives. You do not have the right to come back to his hospital room and kill him.

 

Similarly, the fact that a woman has the right to abort a pregnancy does not imply that she has a right to kill a newborn, even if she is “utterly devastated by the thought of a child, a bit of herself, put out for adoption and never seen or heard of again.” (107)

 

Thomson’s view is that “the desire for the child’s death is not one which anybody may gratify, should it turn out to be possible to detach the child alive.” (108)

 

SUMMER: Stopping point for ???. For next time, read all of RTD ch.13, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” and “Postscript on Infanticide” by Mary Anne Warren.

 

 

[5.4.] Mary Anne Warren’s Pro-Choice Argument.

 

Warren was professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University; she is now retired.

 

Her article, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” is a widely-reprinted defense of the pro-choice view.[1]

 

Warren’s article was first published in 1973, the year in which the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Roe v. Wade. That decision held that state laws prohibiting abortion before the point at which the fetus is viable (which the Court, at that time, said occurs between 24 and 28 weeks) constitute an unconstitutional violation of the woman’s right to privacy.

 

In defending her pro-choice view, she adopts a very different strategy than Thomson. Recall that Thomson granted the claim frequently made by people on the pro-life side, that fetuses are persons with the right to life. In contrast, Warren is going to argue that fetuses are not persons at all:

 

It is possible to show that, on the basis of intuitions which we may expect even the opponents of abortion to share, a fetus is not a person, and hence not the sort of entity to which it is proper to ascribe full moral rights. (RTD 109)

 

It is important that she do this, given her view that pro-choice arguments based on rights to bodily control do not work. She offers the following criticism of such arguments:

 

…appeal to the right to control one’s body, which is generally construed as a property right, is at best a rather feeble argument for the permissibility of abortion. Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property, and indeed I am apt to be held responsible if such people injure themselves while on my property. It is equally unclear that I have any moral right to expel an innocent person from my property when I know that doing so will result in his death. … (RTD 110, emphasis added)

 

Her view seems to be this: If the right to bodily control (which is basically a property right) were enough to justify killing a fetus by aborting a pregnancy, then my property rights would be enough to justify killing a person who is trespassing on my land. But property rights don’t do that—they aren’t that strong. So the right to bodily control, on its own, does not justify abortion.

 

To show that abortion is relevantly different from the trespassing case, she argues that in the case of abortion, there is no person “trespassing” or otherwise intruding on the “property” of one’s body.

 

 

[5.5.1.] Two Senses of “Human.”

 

To begin her argument that fetuses are not persons, Warren poses the following question:

 

 “How are we to define the moral community, the set of beings with full and equal moral rights, such that we can decide whether a human fetus is a member of this community or not?” (RTD 110)

 

One possible answer to this question is: all and only human beings belong to the moral community.

 

But Warren suggests that this answer is not as clear as it first seems. This is because the word “human” is ambiguous (it has two different meanings or senses), and in using it some thinkers slide from one to the other.

 

The two senses of the word “human” are:

·         the genetic sense: “the sense in which any member of the species is a human being, and no member of any other species could be.” (RTD 111)

·         the moral sense: “a full-fledged member of the moral community.” (RTD 111)

 

 

[5.5.2.] The Traditional Argument Against Abortion.

 

The slide from one sense of “human” to the other is made in the following traditional pro-life argument:

 

1. It is wrong to kill innocent human beings.

2. Fetuses are innocent human beings.

3. So, it is wrong to kill fetuses.

 

Which of the two senses of “human being” is being used in each premise? When those senses are made explicit, is the argument still valid?

 

 

 

Stopping point for Monday September 21. For next time, finish reading article by Warren (RTD pp.114-119), and study today’s notes.