What is distinctive about Thomson’s essay is that she thinks she has an argument for abortion rights that sidesteps the familiar disagreements about the point in human development at which fetuses become persons. She says that there would be a right to abortion even if fetuses were persons with the same right to life that any person has.
Thomson’s argument turns on an example involving a violinist who is plugged into another person, “you.” The violinist has the right to life but, Thomson thinks, you could unplug yourself from him even if he needs to be plugged into your body to stay alive. The lesson she draws from this is that the right to life does not give anyone a right to use another person’s body. She thinks it follows that fetuses do not have rights to use their mother’s bodies even if they have the right to life.
More specifically, she thinks that the violinist example shows that there is something wrong with what she regards as a plausible sounding argument against abortion rights. Here is how that argument goes, assuming that fetuses are persons (Thomson 1971, 48).
But here is how most people think of the violinist case (Thomson 1971, 48–49).
Whether you think the argument is conclusive or not, you have to admit that it is frightfully clever.
The main question is what the right to life gives someone the right to have. Thomson engages directly with this question pretty late in the article, starting on page 55. Nonetheless, that is where I think she truly begins in earnest; I explain why I think that in the appendix at the end.
You could imagine a variety of answers to the question of what the right to life gives someone the right to have.
Thomson thinks the violinist example rules out the first four. That leaves number five. What does it mean to say that you may not be killed unjustly?
One thing she thinks it does not mean is that you have a right to morally decent behavior. That is the lesson of the chocolates. It is selfish not to share, but it is not unjust not to share. The chocolates belong to the selfish kid, after all, and we can do all sorts of morally indecent things with our property without being unjust to others.
What would Thomson regard as unjust behavior? She does not give an abstract statement about justice. Rather, she gives an example of it. Suppose you gave someone the right to use a resource and that person needs that resource in order to live. If you took the resource away, you would treat that person unjustly. To be more precise, she thinks that you will kill that person unjustly.
This leads us to an objection to the violinist case. In that case, the person who is hooked up, namely “you,” is kidnapped. There is no question that you did not give the violinist the right to use your body. But most, though not all, pregnancies do not start with anything like kidnapping. So that looks like an important difference between the two cases. Since Thomson’s argument relies on showing that the two cases are similar, this threatens her position.
Thomson will try to approach this objection by asking whether the pregnant person can be accurately described as giving the fetus rights to use her body.
We will want to talk about whether she is successful or not.
In our discussion, Max said that the violinist case would be closer to most cases of abortion, if you, the person hooked up to the violinist, had been aware of the risk that you might be hooked up. Maybe you signed a piece of paper acknowledging the risks when you bought tickets to a concert. Or maybe it’s normal in your society.
I said that I thought she was trying to make these cases fit the model of contract law when tort law seems more relevant. No one accidentally makes a promise or signs a contract; there is no risk in these cases, you either do or you don’t. But we talk about risks and negligence all the time when we are talking about accidents. If I negligently run over your garden statue with my car, I bear responsibility for replacing it. I think that is the better analogy.
Here are two different questions.
Does a fetus have a right to life that trumps another person’s right to control her body?
Does a person have the right to abort a viable fetus?
Thomson believes the violinist example shows that the answer to the first question is “no.”
Suppose she is right about that. Would it follow that the answer to the second question is always “yes”?
I do not think so. There might be reasons why abortion is wrong that do not depend on the right to life. I think that is what the last third of the paper tacitly concedes. There, Thomson discusses questions about whether ending a pregnancy might be what she calls “indecent,” and that seems to have more to do with the person who is making the decision than it does with the rights of the fetus.
So we will have to talk about what else she would have to do to establish that there is a right to abortion. That, it seems to me, involves more than showing that the right to life is consistent with the right to abortion.
These are the points from today’s class that should be familiar to you.
I greatly admire this essay and I have never written anything nearly this good myself. That said, I think that it was probably a mistake to start off with what she calls the extreme view, namely, that abortion is wrong even to save the life of the pregnant woman. By doing it this way, she has to cover the same territory twice.
I say this because, in my opinion, the real question is the one that is posed on page 55: what does the right to life give you a right to have? The extreme view gives one answer to that question and the less extreme views give other answers. The extreme view is a distraction, in my opinion. First, no one believes that the right to life is absolute. As Thomson will point out, we all think you can kill in self-defense. So she does not need to spend so much space showing that the right to life is not absolute. Second, by doing the extreme view first, she delays getting to the fundamental question and so has to repeat herself rather than moving forward.
In addition to these tactical points, I think she makes a substantive error here. Thomson describes the right to abortion in cases where the pregnant woman’s life is at risk as a right of self-defense. I would not put it that way.
The right of self-defense is usually thought of as a right to use force against someone who is aggressively threatening you. You are allowed to punch, kick, shove, or shoot someone who is trying to hurt you. Rights of self-defense do not usually cover competition for scarce resources. For example, the people who are lower on the list for organ transplants are not allowed to kill those who are higher up in self-defense even though that would improve their chances of getting an organ transplant that they need to live. The cases involving abortion look to me like ones that involve competition for a scarce resource: two people want to use one body to stay alive.
I do not think this hurts Thomson’s position. She has a pretty good argument that the mother should win this competition: it is her body after all (Thomson 1971, 53). In fact, I think her presentation would much more straightforward if she skipped self-defense entirely. She would not have to have separate discussions of what a person may do in defense of her own life and what a third party may do. Plus she could dispense with the weird example of the baby that will burst out of the house (Thomson 1971, 52–54).