Moral status of the fetus and the permissibility of abortion: a contractarian response to Thomson’s violinist thought experiment

Judith Jarvis Thomson famously argued that abortion is permissible even if we accept that a fetus qualifies as a person and possesses a right to life. The current paper presents two arguments that undermine Thomson’s position. First, the paper sketches a contractarian argument that explores Thomson’s violinist thought experiment from behind a veil of ignorance, which suggests that if we had an equal likelihood of being an unwanted fetus and a pregnant woman, it would be rational for us to oppose abortion. Second, the paper discusses the hypothetical self-aborting fetus, a thought experiment that reverses the dependence relationship between a woman and a fetus. It is argued that in this scenario, where fetuses have agency of their own, Thomson’s position would counterintuitively prohibit a woman from temporarily curtailing the freedom of her fetus even to save her own life.

Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929-2020)

Judith Jarvis Thomson Obituary.

Introduction

The aim of this book is to develop a positive account of the value of human beings. This involves thinking about the nature of value itself. Following Judith Jarvis Thomson, when we say of something that it is “of value” we mean that it has some property that makes it reason-giving. Theunissen takes the humanist position that the relevant property is being such as to contribute to the quality of the life of human beings (or individuals more generally), and she explores the implications for the value of human beings themselves. The author situates her proposal between absolutist and eliminativist positions—between views that see human beings as absolutely valuable, and views that deny that there is a meaningful sense in which human beings are bearers of value at all.

Sacrifices, Self-Defense, and Victim Relations

In this paper, I first survey the history of the trolley problem from Philippa Foot to Judith Jarvis Thomson. I then canvass Thomson’s earlier attempts to solve the problem before discussing her more recent about-face. Because I find her latest solution (or attempted dissolution) to be problematic, I revisit Thomson’s earlier work on self-defense in an effort to find an alternative route to a solution. By switching the vantage point from the actors to the victims, I try to reveal an element of the cases that has hitherto escaped notice. On my view, to the extent that the victims being sacrificed have a legitimate claim to self-defense, this suggests that their being sacrificed in the name of the greater good is impermissible after all. So, while it would be heroic if they engaged in altruistic self-sacrifice, it is well within their rights to resist being sacrificed. If I am right about this, it suggests that negative rights are weightier than positive rights—much as Thomson herself came to believe. If this is right, then the trolley problem was much ado about nothing. The entire enterprise was predicated on the mistaken belief that it is permissible for the bystander to kill the one in order to save the five. Once that case is seen aright, the rest of our intuitions fall into their proper place.

Equilíbrio Reflexivo, Intuições Morais e a Busca por Coerência

Como devemos conduzir nossas investigações morais para decidir no que acreditar sobre questões morais? Como a plausibilidade de juízos, teorias e princípios morais deve ser avaliada? Como devemos tentar remover nossas dúvidas quando estamos incertos sobre o que é certo ou errado, bom ou mau, justo ou injusto? O método do equilíbrio reflexivo, desenvolvido por John Rawls em A Theory of Justice (1971) e desde então adotado por um crescente número de filósofos, é uma tentativa de responder a questões como essas. O equilíbrio reflexivo pode ser (e de fato foi) interpretado de vários modos, muitos dos quais completamente incompatíveis entre si, mas as duas visões mais representativas do método são os modelos coerentista e intuicionista. Neste artigo o meu objetivo é argumentar que nós deveríamos entender o equilíbrio reflexivo como um método intuicionista de investigação moral. Assim, eu comparo essas duas visões, como elas diferem no modo como concebem o funcionamento e os objetivos do método, para defender que a tradição coerentista de interpretação do método reduz a investigação moral a uma mera busca por coerência, com isso ignorando a função metodológica (e epistemológica) que intuições morais desempenham em nossas reflexões morais. Em contraste, a interpretação intuicionista oferece um modelo de investigação que integra intuição morais com a busca por coerência, explicando por que e como esses dois elementos funcionam em conjunto em nossas reflexões morais. A minha alegação é a de que apenas quando o equilíbrio reflexivo é interpretado de acordo com esse modelo intuicionista que ele pode ser visto em uso na prática reflexiva de filósofos morais reconhecidamente competentes, como John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson e Peter Singer.

Paternalism and Moderate Deontology

This chapter attempts to situate pro-paternalism within a moderate deontological moral theory. According to moderate deontologists such as Judith Jarvis Thomson, moral rights have thresholds beyond which they can be permissibly infringed. According to one plausible way of developing this view, a right has a threshold of zero when its infringement would benefit the right-bearer. If so, then beneficial paternalistic intervention may be permissible even if it infringes rights. After developing this argument, the chapter considers several possible anti-paternalist replies, including the suggestion that rights thresholds are sensitive to the value of autonomy. It is argued that each reply either has implausible implications or is unlikely to support common anti-paternalist judgments about cases.

Thomson on Goodness

Judith Jarvis Thomson has written extensively on what is usually (though she does not seem much to care for the word) known as ‘metaethics’. Notably in the Thomson half of Harman and Thomson’s 1996 Moral Knowledge and Moral Objectivity, the 1997 Journal of Philosophy paper “The Right and the Good”, and her Tanner Lectures in Goodness and Advice published in 2003. Thomson thinks there is no such thing as being good simpliciter. There is only what she sometimes talks of as being good in a way or being good in some respect. A thing can be good at stuff, good at football or baking or whatever. This critical note analyses what is at stake in Thomson's approach. Keywords: Metaethics, Judith Thomson, Consequentialism, Moral good

Thomson's Trolley Problem

No one has done more over the past four decades to draw attention to the importance of, and attempt to solve, a particularly vexing problem in ethics—the Trolley Problem—than Judith Jarvis Thomson. Though the problem is originally due to Philippa Foot (“The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect”), Thomson showed how Foot’s simple solution would not do and offered some solutions of her own. No solution is uncontroversial and the problem remains a thorn in the side of non-consequentialist moral theory. Recently, however, Thomson has changed her mind about the problem. She no longer thinks she was right to reject Foot’s solution to it. I argue that, though illuminating, Thomson’s current take on the Trolley Problem is mistaken. I end with a solution to the problem that I find promising.