First, her response to the thought experiment is not intuitively obvious. Thomson replies that remaining joined to the musician would be a "great kindness," but not a moral obligation.īut there are two potential problems with Thomson's argument. The music lovers say you must remain attached to the violinist, and therefore virtually incapacitated, for nine months.
You did not consent to the operation, but now that the two of you are joined together, the music lovers tell you that unplugging the violinist would kill him. For example: a group of music lovers has attached your circulatory system to that of an unconscious violinist in order to save his life. Most of Thomson's essay is taken up with delineating some of the circumstances in which one person may justifiably take the life of another. In 1971, the moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson made a similar claim in " A Defense of Abortion." She argued that abortion could still be morally permissible even if "the fetus has already become a human person well before birth," because "the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly." If a woman terminates the life of her own fetus in a way that can be considered just, then no one's right to life has been violated. Wade's fortieth anniversary, Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams argued that "a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides." (Williams, like most laymen, uses the term "human" and "person" interchangeably, though many philosophers argue that there is some distinction between their meanings.)
In a column timed to coincide with Roe v. Most pro-choicers subscribe to that view-but not at all. Pro-lifers argue that the same is true of abortion, because fetuses are persons-hence the term "pro-life." Most pro-choicers, on the other hand, would argue that fetuses are not persons until they reach a certain late stage of development, either at the moment of birth or some time prior to it.
Nearly everyone believes that persons have a special moral status: Taking the life of another person, barring extreme circumstances, is a grievous sin. The issue of abortion hinges on the question of personhood.
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