Does “The Violinist” Hypothetical Prove the Defensibility of Legal Abortion?

I. The Violinist Analogy
Judith Jarvis Thomson presents a hypothetical in her book, A Defense of Abortion, which she thinks proves the moral justification of abortion. It’s called “The Violinist,” and here’s how she presented it:

“You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?”

On face, this may seem like a good parallel to abortion, and a pretty compelling argument, but upon closer examination, the argument really breaks down. The link I mentioned above briefly presents some of the logical flaws.

  • For starters, the hypothetical presupposes no consent – 99% of pregnancies occur from consentual sex, so we’re in a rare case already.
  • Also, extremely few pregnancies result in a woman being bed-ridden for 9 months.

So the scenario Thomson presents is analogous, at best, to an extremely rare case. But it also ignores the relationship between the parties. From both a biological and legal perspective, mother/child relationships create a bundle of rights and responsibilities. Right now, there are too many people to count on the brink of starvation. You and I have the capacity to provide them with food – or at least, some of them. But the law doesn’t hold us accountable for child abuse for every kid who dies from our failure to act. In fact, if you’re at a friend’s house, and see their child on the brink of starvation, and do nothing, many states don’t require you to do anything. But if that kid is your own child, starving in your house, you’re absolutely liable for letting him or her die. Again, that’s strictly from a legal perspective. The moral duties owed to your child, your friend’s child, and the starving masses, are at least as high, and likely substantially higher.

But the action – unplugging the tubes – isn’t analogous to abortion at all. In the violinist case, you remove the food and drink you were providing him. That might be analogous to a premature birth. The only form of abortion which works the way that Thomson describes here, by removing food and drink without actively killing the child, would be the (generally-unintentional) abortions caused by certain forms of chemical birth control: by making the uterine lining less sticky, it leaves the fertilized egg unable to implant, and the days-old child starves to death. But that early in the pregnancy, you never realize you are (or were) pregnant. So there’s just no co-occurrence of: lack of consent + assuredness that 9 months will be spent bedridden + available abortion which removes food and drink without actively killing the fetus. But if the violinist hypothetical asked, instead, “is it permissible to shoot the violinist so he stops using your tubes?” the answer is a clear no. In the case of the violinist, your action isn’t intended to kill him. In the case of abortion, it is, and many forms of abortion function only by first killing (that is, it’s murder and then expulsion from the womb).

Finally, a strong case can be made that, morally, you do (as the only human being on earth who can save this violinist’s life) owe some sort of obligation to keep him alive. After all, the value of his life is surely worth more than 9 months of your free time. It’s an inconvenience, and you can sue the Society of Music Lovers for damages, but taking an action which kills him (even unintentionally) because it’s inconvienent to you is morally wrong. This turns on the distinction between refusing to provide help and removing help already being provided. Not providing a sandwhich to a starving man may not be sinful (after all, there are tons of starving people in the world). Not providing to a starving man you’ve made contact with is more likely to be a sin. And taking your sandwhich away from a man who’s begun eating it (knowing that taking it from him will kill him) is almost definitely a sin.

Edit: Gina said… “Sounds like rationalizing to me.”

It certainly does sound that way. The fact that she even feels the need to create the hypothetical seems like an implicit acknowledgement that there’s something very off about killing a being you know to be a living human. The argument acknowledges that the fetus is a human being, and tries to explain how killing that human being is okay because of all the other times we allow human beings to die. While many pro-choicers stick to the delusion that the fetus is a “clump of cells,” (which is true, inasmuch as of our physical bodies are a composed of cells), Thomson’s argument makes murder defensible.

And not just for abortion, either, although that’s how she intends it. The argument can easily be commandeered for other areas. If you can justify killing someone for using “your” resources (be it your liver, your sandwhiches, etc.), you’ve opened the door to permitting almost every genocide in history. Remember, for example, that the Nazi Germans initially cited the need for Lebensraum (“living space”) for the invasion of Poland: that is, that the Poles were on what should be considered German land, and that the Germans needed it to survive. Or consider the impact that being material-rich has on a country’s peacefulness: it turns out, countries with lots of natural resources are more prone to violence and warfare, as they fight (both amongst themselves and against foreign powers) to acquire, preserve, and defend those resources – look to the Middle East. We’ve excused our tendency towards the sword in the name of “those are our resources!” for millenia. Thomson’s argument is just a very particularized form of the same.

3 comments

  1. I think it’s such a false argument it would not stand – as it didn’t with you – any type of serious analysis. I guess they can’t come up with anything better because it’s simply hard to defend their position.

  2. The problem with treating The Violinist in isolation is that it acts as if the Violinist were the end-all and be-all of Thomson’s argument. It isn’t. In fact, Thomson deals with almost all of the arguments you make here, and in most cases, she dealt with them in the very article (NOT book) you are citing.

    Given that the link you provided is broken, I can’t judge whether the omission of this relevant fact is intentional. However, either way, the omission is inexcusable. If you’ve deliberately omitted the fact that she actually dealt with most of your arguments, then you are committing an act of intellectual dishonesty by misrepresenting her. If the omission was unintentional (e.g., you did not read the whole article), then you’ve still committed an act of intellectual negligence considering the full article has been readily available on the Internet literally for decades.

    Note I am not necessarily saying she dealt with your arguments adequately. Even people who agree with Thomson your arguments don’t hold frequently think her arguments don’t sufficiently address the given argument. Indeed, I will largely be following Thomson’s arguments here not because I necessarily think they are adequate, but to highlight your intellectual dishonesty.

    So, for your first disanalogy, that 99% of pregnancies occur from consensual sex, Thomson deals with that. To wit:

    “And we should also notice that it is not at all plain that this argument really does go even as far as it purports to. For there are cases and cases, and the details make a difference. If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, ‘Ah, now he can stay, she’s given him a right to the use of her house–for she is partially responsible for his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that burglars burgle.’ It would be still more absurd to say this if I had had bars installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a burglar got in only because of a defect in the bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders or falls in.”

    Now, Thomson herself (in the people-seeds analogy) and others have said more about whether abortion is permissible even though the pregnant person is at least partially responsible for their state. I am definitely prepared to argue the merits of the so-called responsibility argument if you so desire. For now, I’m just going to use this to illustrate the problem of dealing with The Violinist in isolation without dealing with the rest of Thomson’s argument.

    The Violinist was not meant to just stick with the specific case of the plugged-in violinist and its obvious application to pregnancies resulting from rape. It was meant to draw out and highlight the fundamental problem with the entire anti-abortion argument. And the fundamental problem is this: assuming the fetus does have the right to life, the right to life does NOT entail a right to use the pregnant person’s body. How does this apply to your disanalogy? It means it is now on YOU to show how consensual sex does give the fetus the right to use the pregnant person’s body. Simply pointing out the fact that most pregnancies result from consensual sex alone is not enough to overthrow The Violinist. Even if you don’t agree that the burglar analogy adequately covers her case (and note Thomson herself isn’t necessarily arguing that it does), she has successfully muddied the waters and made your case more difficult.

    Thomson does not specifically address the fact that extremely few pregnancies result in the pregnant person being bed-ridden for nine months. But at least at first glance, this doesn’t seem to be a morally significant difference. Let’s adjust The Violinist to account for your contention. Start with:

    “The director of the hospital now tells you, ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.'”

    Now add: This doesn’t mean you have to remain in bed for these nine months. You can go wherever you want, and do whatever you want to do, so long as you drag the violinist along with you.

    Given this modification, would it have any real effect on the intuition that the situation is an outrage, and that you would be within your rights to have the violinist unplugged? IOW, would it still be “incumbent on you to accede to this situation?” Honestly, I don’t see how it would affect the basic intuition that this would be an outrage. If anything, if one fully reflects to the implications, I’d warrant the sense of outrage would be intensified vs. the merely bed-ridden example. Why? Because if anything, you are substantially increasing the burden, rather than relieving it.

    “How so?” you might ask. Because while you might in THEORY be able to go wherever you want and do whatever you want, in practice, this simply isn’t so. To cite an admittedly extremely minor and far out example, you wouldn’t have even the privacy of a public restroom stall. You might say this is such a small burden and imposition that you should accept it, but the burdens, impositions, and problems only multiply from such a small example. That at least raises the question of just how much I must accept, a question I’ll return to later.

    Thomson already deals with the biological and legal perspective; biology directly, but also indirectly with the legal perspective–

    “It may be said that what is important is not merely the fact that the fetus is a person, but that it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of responsibility issuing from the fact she is its mother….

    “Surely we do not have any such ‘special responsibility’ for a person unless we have assumed it, explicitly or implicitly. If a set of parents do not try to prevent pregnancy, do not obtain an abortion, and then at the time of birth of the child do not put it out for adoption, but rather take it home with them, then they have assumed responsibility for it, they have given it rights, and they cannot NOW withdraw support from it at the cost of its life because they now find it difficult to go on providing for it. But if they have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it.” (emphasis Thomson’s)

    Again, more has been said by both Thomson and others regarding whether the biological relationship between the pregnant person and the fetus. But here, I think her case is more than sufficient. I have never been able to get a coherent response when I press someone to explain exactly how biology in itself creates a moral duty, particularly in light of Shimp v. McFall, where the parties were biologically related.

    Notice how Thomson’s response also tracks well with the legal perspective. It is the LEGAL parent that is charged with providing for the child. While the legal parent is usually the biological one, this isn’t necessarily so. If the biological parent gives up their child to adoptive parents, they no longer have any legal responsibility for the child. To illustrate, let’s look again at one of your cases:

    “But the law doesn’t hold us accountable for child abuse for every kid who dies from our failure to act. In fact, if you’re at a friend’s house, and see their child on the brink of starvation, and do nothing, many states don’t require you to do anything. But if that kid is YOUR OWN CHILD, starving in your house, you’re absolutely liable for letting him or her die.” (emphasis yours)

    If the friend is the adoptive parent of you biological child, then the law is not going to hold you accountable for doing nothing faced with seeing the child on the brink of starvation. Legally speaking, the child isn’t yours. It would be the adoptive parent who would be liable for letting the child die. Biology in itself has nothing to do with it.

    Thomson does not directly with the distinction between killing and letting die in the original article, merely hinting what she later stated in “Rights and Deaths.” To summarize, the only way your argument works here is that there be a morally significant difference between direct killing and letting die. Thomson denies this, and asserts the distinction is “shown to be false by the story of you and the violinist.”

    So, while it would ordinarily be impermissible to shoot the violinist so he stops using your tubes, if unplugging him REQUIRES first shooting him, or the unplugging process itself kills him, the killing is still justified. If you are justified in being unplugged, you are justified in doing whatever it takes to be unplugged.

    Thomson even dealt with the idea that one might well have some obligation to keep the violinist alive with her concept of the minimally decent Samaritan:

    “There is room for yet another argument here, however. We surely must all grant that there may be cases in which it would be morally indecent to detach a person from your body at the cost of his life. Suppose you learn that what the violinist needs is not nine years of your life, but only one hour: all you need do to save his life is to spend one hour in that bed with him. Suppose also that letting him use your kidneys for that one hour would not affect your health in the slightest. Admittedly you were kidnapped. Admittedly you did not give anyone permission to plug him into you. Nevertheless it seems to me plain you OUGHT to allow him to use your kidneys for that hour–it would be indecent to refuse” (emphasis hers).

    Sure, at least other things being equal, basic decency would require that one hour. Nine months? It seems to me that is debatable, even if the only factor under consideration is inconvenience. Are you really required to endure a nine month imprisonment even though you’ve done nothing wrong and indeed you’re the one who has been wronged? I think different people would have different answers to the question of how long you must endure having the violinist plugged into you in order to meet the standards of basic decency. I doubt most people would say you have to endure nine months, however. The distinction between providing help and removing help already provided will only take us so far.

    Furthermore, in any realistic scenario, few of us have nine months of free time we can spend plugged into the violinist. In our society, if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. If I don’t get paid, neither does the rent. So at the very least, being plugged into the violinist will leave me jobless and homeless. Sure, I could sue the Society of Music Lovers after the fact, but that doesn’t help me now. Surely basic decency doesn’t require that.

    And if instead of not affecting my health in the slightest, I would have to endure the symptoms and side-effects of pregnancy, including the increased risk of permanent disability and death, then there is no way basic decency requires I do that.

    No, Thomson’s argument does not make murder defensible. Thomson’s argument is that abortion is justified. And if it is justified, then it is by definition not murder. You’re just begging the question here.

    Thomson doesn’t deal with your fallacious slippery-slope argument. There is really no reason for her to, since, after all, it is fallacious.

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