Sports Movies, Topiaries, and Pedagogical Styles

Imagine the classic sports movie. In it a rag-tag group of young players, who have never won a championship, are presented with a new coach. This coach is different. He isn’t nice. He yells, he insults. The training is brutal. Players get punished for every mistake, no matter how slight, or unintentional. “We’re going to practice this until we get it perfect!” he frequently tells them. Eventually they are transformed into a championship team. In fact not only are they successful in their sport, but they even start to turn around their personal lives.

Anyone familiar with the genre could easily name multiple examples of this story without trying. What this type of story exemplifies is a specific pedagogy that I call the corrective style.

The principle behind this style is one of perfectionism. There is a perfect form the teacher has in mind, and any deviation from that form must be caught and stopped by the teacher. In a sense it treats the player, or student, as an unguided and errant force, one which is ruled by entropy and randomness. This randomness must be confined and directed towards the proper form. It is like a shrub used in topiary, which simply grows with no regard for the desires of the topiarist, but simply has various random inclinations which must be directed. Pain is an essential part of this teaching method; not out of masochism, but because there is no other option; one must constantly prune the unwanted growths that lead away from what one has in mind.

But what makes us think the shape we cut the plant is the best one? The coach might force his players to shoot a certain way, and catch a certain way, and run a certain way, and he'll punish them for doing it differently until he's stamped out all resistance and it becomes automatic, but why did he choose that way to shoot, catch, and run? And what if a player wants to switch sports? We never see that conflict in the sports movie of week. We can force a thing into the form we want, but to be blunt, what if we're wrong? What makes us so confident we know exactly which form to force? If only half of all social science studies can be replicated then what makes us sure that we're better than random?

Let's take it one step further: if all our natural impulses are random, then why do we think that we know better than randomness? What exactly pulled us out of randomness? And remember, life is not as easy to test as sports. In sports if you use an ineffective style then you'll lose against the more effective one. How will you even know if you're using the wrong style when raising a person? The goal in raising a person is not simply given to us like in a game of basketball.

This much is clear; the corrective style is not done for the good of the student. The good of a thing is what is good for that thing. In other words, it comes from the nature of the thing itself; that end that a thing is naturally inclined towards. But the corrective style is about an imposed end. A bush, when examined according to its nature, desires to grow, it desires sunlight, it desires water, it desires to reproduce; it does not care at all about looking like a swan, that is an end imposed by the gardener. There is nothing inherently good for a bush about looking like a swan.

The other style of teaching I call the cultivating-style. This style is not focused on correcting errant behavior until only good behavior remains, but on discovering and encouraging the internal tendencies without the student towards the goal. It should be noted that by "encourage" I don't mean enhance, or prod along, but to remove things which might impede growth, and making sure that those circumstances which are necessary for growth are present. It is not about giving to the student a desire, but about nurturing the desire the student already has; focusing on the internal inclinations of the student, rather than making external demands.

This style does not seek to implant the proper tendencies into the student.  One might also call it a desire-based style, because it assumes that the student has an inherent inclination towards good ends.

The cultivating style takes as its end what is natural for the student. In this way it is more free; not simply because it does not force the student, but because the student's movement is in accordance with its own inclinations. This style therefore takes on the role not so much of a master, but of a guardian. It primarily watches out not for those internal elements which must be restrained, but those external elements which would restrain or harm the student. Its corrections are more about removing those obstacles which might hinder growth, but also knowing what obstacles should be allowed in order to inspire adaption in the student, as some growth depends on resistance, but again, only if we think there is something in the student that can adapt to resistance.

The mistake would be to think that this is a difference of strictness versus kindness. It is not. Certainly the corrective style requires strictness to work, though plenty of those who ascribe to that style are not at all strict (and so fail at the style they have chosen). But strictness is not the point. What is true is that the cultivation-based style allows for more freedom than the corrective-style. But this is not truly a lack of strictness, anymore than a soccer coach is less strict than a track coach because he doesn't make his players run in a single lane. The corrective-style is properly said to be more restrictive, but true strictness primarily has to do with the teacher, not the student. Strictness properly describes how consistently a teacher keeps to their principles; one might therefore use either style and be strict or not strict.

Now this is not to say that the cultivating-based style would forgo any possible correction. It is possible that certain maladaptations could need correction. But there are two important differences. The first is that it is understood that any correction is done with the goal of returning the student to his natural growth. In other words, correction should be looked upon as being out of the ordinary, just as medical treatment is not considered part of the normal functioning of the body, but rather something done in exceptional times, when it is beyond the body’s ability to recover on its own. So while some correction may have to be done first, it is never primary to the true goal, whereas correction is primary means of growth. The second difference (which follows on the first) is that in this style what is more important than correcting is teaching the student to self-correct. Because the basis for the student's actions are ultimately the student himself, what is sought is the proper self-efficacy, meaning it is ultimately desired that the student would not rely on a teacher for correction. So rather than just being taught what is wrong, the student is taught how to spot what is wrong, and how to fix what is wrong. Again, using the body as an analogy, while medicine might sometimes be needed to return someone to health, what is most preferable would be someone being healthy enough to heal without the need of medicine.

The advantages of the cultivating method are obvious, but it should also be obvious what the catch is. The catch is that it demands far more of the teacher. The teacher himself must understand and possess these qualities he hopes for in the student. Moreover he must understand what is proper to the student, and what is natural to the student, a task that is far easier said than done. The teacher must have some faith in the student, because the teacher is ultimately relying on the principle of growth to be one which is provided by the student, not the teacher.

However in another sense it is far easier, because it does not require that the teacher be the originator of the correct form, but only to recognize it. And while the teacher must learn to recognize the correct form, the movement towards that form is done voluntarily and freely by the student, rather than something forced onto a resisting object.

This is not to suggest that there is nothing required of the teacher, or that the student is completely unreliant on the outside world. That the growth of the student comes from the nature of the student does not mean the nature of the student might not depend on things which are outside of the student, just as the growth of he body, although determined by the DNA of the body, still relies on food, water, and air, shelter and other things. Contrast the topiary with the garden. In a garden the gardener must do various things to cultivate his plants. He has to prepare the soil, and provide water, and shelter the plants from too much sun or cold, or insects and animals. However none of what he is doing is making the plant grow. Rather it is doing everything necessary to prepare for the plant’s growth, but he must simply have faith that the plant will, when given the right circumstances, grow on its own.

There is another difference between the two styles that might not be obvious, and it is related to the perceived strictness differences of the two styles. It is perfectionism. Often when people think of pursuing perfection, they think of perfectionism, which is the natural result of the corrective style. But the corrective style does not seek after perfection any more than the cultivating-style. It is not different in that it wants the student to be as perfect as possible; both styles desire that. But in order to achieve this, the corrective style requires the student do everything perfectly. There is no acceptable achievement less than perfection in how a student performs; there is no such thing as an acceptable error because any deviation from perfection is nothing but destructive of the goal. But the cultivating-style does not consider a lack of perfection a problem, because the cultivating-style does not look for perfection, but direction. If a student does something imperfectly, it is acceptable if they still show signs of progressing towards perfection. Indeed, doing things improperly might even be a part of progressing, not just because it happens necessarily, but because it actually can encourage growth. If one is learning to bake then one learns more about what proofing does if they under-proof their bread than if they get it right the first time. But in the corrective style, corrections are necessary, but never wanted. There is nothing to learn from doing something incorrectly in the corrective style, because there is no fundamental difference to the student between the wrong way to do things and the right way to do things.

How would the cultivating style instruct? It would leave out "should." Not, because as some people rashly assume, because "should" does not truly exist, but because it's an end, and this style does not try to decide the end. It is not that this style is not concerned with shoulds, it's that because the end is what is natural, instead of instructing in what the proper end is, it instructs in how to reach that end.

This is all very abstract, but what does it mean in practical terms? In practical terms, what is hard is not figuring out what goals are good. Rather it's in seeing what leads to what goals. We assume the end does not need to be taught, because the desire for the right end is innate within the student. But what is not innate is by what method one reaches an end, because such a method will depend on many complex facts not known by the student. In the same way someone might know they want to go to Dallas, but how one gets there will be completely different if they're in Houston vs London. So the teacher's role is to show what choices lead to what outcomes, and more generally how one can learn for themselves what outcomes result from what choices. But the goal is not to tell the student what they should want, but rather what choices will lead to what ends, and what those ends truly entail. But desiring the end is left in the hands of the student.

The Sixth Hour

Take a person. A student, say, or a lover. They have something important in their lives, such as their homework, or their relationship. And yet they don't work on it. They might even avoid it. Often they might do things to distract themselves from thinking about it. When it comes time to work on it they suddenly find themselves "needing" to do things they'd previously been putting off, such as cleaning the house, or balancing their budget. Or they'll plan on working on it, but get on their computer, or start watching tv, and put it off until it is too late to work on it anymore. These behaviors are not planned, but completely predictable to anyone who knows them. They don't argue if told the homework or relationship is good, in fact they'd defend its goodness if asked. Yet they simply have no desire to do the thing they think is good.

We don't have a word for the cause of these behaviors. The closest we have is "depression," but depression is just a catch-all term that is more about the symptoms than it is about the condition itself. The medievals had a word for it, which was "acedia." Acedia is translated as "sloth," but that isn't accurate. Acedia is not a type of laziness, but a type of sadness. But sadness, in the sense of a feeling, isn't right either. It isn't about "feeling bad." Someone in a state of acedia might not feel anything at all.

Acedia is best understood not as a positive, but as a negative. It is a kind of loss. It is the loss of joy at what is good. The classic example was the monk who didn't want to pray. The point was not that he ought to pray, the point was that he ought to want to pray. Prayer is a great spiritual good, and we ought to desire what is good. So acedia is a sadness, meaning a lack of joy, in the face of what is good.

It's not just a lack of energy. A weak person might desire to play basketball, but only have the energy to do so for a few minutes before they need a break. But the person experiencing acedia doesn't want to play at all. They need a break not because they've had their fill, so to speak, but because they've run out of the ability to force themself to continue. A person can only eat so much cake. But to the person who doesn't desire brussel sprouts, any amount is too much. They can force themselves to eat them, but only to a point. They've never had "enough" like the person with the cake, rather they can have no more.

So what's the treatment? First one must address any impediments to the enjoyment of the good. Many times there is some hardship or pain associated with the good that prevents our enjoyment. These are too numerous to address specifically, suffice to say in these cases the acedia is addressed when the hardship is addressed.

Second one must truly decide if they truly think the thing they don't feel joy from is good. Many people only tell themselves something is good, but really have other reasons for wanting it that have little to do with the thing itself, such as the opinion of others. Often simply realizing what we had really wanted before is enough to let us view the thing for what it truly is, and love it or abandon it.

But let's assume it's good. The mistake people make is in trying to wait and be made to feel it is good. They expect a lightning bolt to strike them with inspiration. But this isn't right. What we want to encourage is love, and not just for a moment, but as a habit. Anyone can love anything at the right moment. But who wants to live simply waiting to be inspired? If then we want a habit then there are two things we need. Exposure, and practice.

Exposure, because if a thing is good, then the more we know a thing the more we love it. We have all had this experience, that of being near a place or a person and growing to love them. Or even growing to enjoy a food we didn't previously like from eating it over time. Even if we are resistant, if we acknowledge the resistance and decide it is mistaken then we can overcome it through exposure to what we've decided is good.

We practice acts of love, and thus encourage the habit of love. Some people resist this because they feel it is somehow fake. But this is nonsense. That's like saying it's fake to practice the guitar if you can't already play, or fake to lift weights if you aren't already strong. If in every other area of life we become a person who can do a thing by practicing that thing then why would that not apply to love? Why would the principles that apply in training, such as the principle of specificity, or the principle of progressive overload, not apply to our soul? The reason those apply to the body is because it's living, not because it's a body. Well our soul too is living. It adapts, just as the body does. So then train it like you would your body, one day at a time, a little at first, increasing over time, regulating workload to what you can handle, and defining the training by what is closest to the goal. Why not keep a training log, if you find that helpful? If you're still worried that all this sounds fake, then put yourself in another's shoes. Imagine you were the person who someone felt acedia about. Imagine you discovered they felt that way, and that you discovered that to treat it they developed such a plan, and worked on it every day, even if they could only do a tiny amount at first, and that they tracked their progress, and made note of what worked and what didn't. If you discovered all that, would you think they didn't love you? On the contrary, what greater act of love could there be than if someone did all that in order to love you more?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Force

1. The biggest complaint most people had about The Force Awakens is that it was too similar to A New Hope. The truth is, it wasn't similar enough. In fact, they were about entirely different things. It's an understandable mistake to make though, it was designed to fool you.

If the imitation in The Force Awakens is so obvious to you then don't you think it was obvious to J.J. Abrams as well? Do you think he just couldn't come up with an original story? The guy wrote Lost, whatever storytelling problems he might have "lack of originality" isn't one of them.

Knowing that the lack of originality is intentional is not the real secret however. The real secret is that the obviousness of the lack of originality was intentional. You were supposed to notice it. It was meant to be so obvious that you wouldn't realize just how different it is in all the ways that actually matter. You're given symbols of the original movie so you go, "Death Star, desert planet, secret plans, okay they're trying to do the original, got it." You think they're trying to do the original so you won't realize that they're trying to do something entirely different.

So what happens when we actually do compare them?

2. Although A New Hope had a lot of main characters, everyone would agree that Luke was the main main character, even more than in either of the sequels. Well, if Luke was the main character of the original, Rey is the main character of The Force Awakens, right? The parallels are obvious. An orphan, stuck on a desert planet, who at first resists the call of adventure, but then travels to the giant planet-destroying enemy base and helps destroy it.

Except–

Rey doesn't even know about the base until 2 hours into the movie; in fact it's unclear that she ever knows anything about it. Probably she just thought she was on a regular planet until it got blown up. In A New Hope we're told about the bad guy superweapon in the opening crawl. In The Force Awakens we don't even see it until an hour into the movie (I checked). This is not a minor difference, or a mere oversight. In ANH the Death Star looms over the entire plot, literally and figuratively. It is the cause of all the major plot points. In TFA it is an afterthought, both to the movie and to the characters. In ANH the all-important plans are about how to destroy the Death Star. In TFA the plans are about the location of Luke. The plan to destroy the evil superweapon is formulated in two minutes (in-universe) of “whoever” at an informal meeting throwing ideas around. The good guys don't seem to care that much about destroying it, and the bad guys don't seem to care that much about saving it, even though its destruction is, on paper, the climax of the film. “What should we do about the big evil weapon?” “How about we blow it up?” Good plan.

This might be a controversial opinion, but a story has to be about something. Not should be about something, has to be about something. You can try to write a story about nothing but then it's a story about being about nothing. It is debated in philosophy whether reality must be ultimately intelligible, but it is a fact that any creation of a human intellect must be intelligible. So if TFA isn't about the superweapon (and the fact that most people don't remember that it was called Starkiller Base proves that it wasn't. No one had to be reminded that the original was called the Death Star. No, nerds don't count) then what is TFA about? Well, it's about Rey. Understand this. It is not that Rey is the main character, it is that the movie is about her. A New Hope is about the Death Star; the heroes trying to destroy it, the villains trying to save it. Luke, Han, Leia, and Obi-Wan are the main characters trying to destroy it, Vader is the main character trying to defend it. The conflict in the original movies was always bigger than any of the characters. Remember, that was why in Return of the Jedi Luke turned himself in; not because he wanted to convince Vader to reform, but because he realized he was “endangering the mission.”

Never does Rey care about the plans themselves, unlike Luke who chooses to help Obi-Wan deliver them to the rebels. And that right there is the biggest difference between the two characters: Luke chooses to help the rebels. Rey is dragged along every step of the way. She explicitly does not want to leave her planet, she is forced off. Luke is ambivalent about leaving, but decides to go fight once his aunt and uncle are killed. And it is a choice; simply saying “there's nothing here for me now” did not mean he had to help Obi-Wan, whereas Tie-Fighters shooting at you can at best be described as “coercive.” Every step of the way Rey is being forced along. Every time it looks like she is in a position to return to her planet some new event arises that carries her to the next scene in the movie. Luke had multiple opportunities to turn back, first on Tatooine, then after escaping the Death Star, when Han explicitly invites him to leave with him.

3. Here's a question: what actually changes if Ray wasn't in the movie? A lot of things happen around her, but she doesn't actually do that much. I know, I know, “she does a lot!” you'll say. “She pilots the Falcon, and saves Finn from the tentacle monsters on the station, and fixes the Falcon, and hacks the doors, and beats Ren in a fight, etc etc.” Rey has the appearance of agency but not the reality of it. She doesn't have the power to do any of the things she chooses to do. When she does act it is not by her own power, but by the illusion of her own power. This is how things happen for Rey: there will suddenly appear some deadly problem, Rey will not be able to solve it, then she'll concentrate for a second and suddenly be able to. Everything she does is designed to give her the appearance of agency but not the reality of it. All the problems she solves are ones that only exist for her to solve them. The ship will suddenly break, but for no reason, and in just the way she happens to know how to fix. Meanwhile, she doesn't deliver the plans to the good guys, she doesn't help blow up the bad guy base, she beats the villain in a fight but the victory is completely pointless. And again, whatever problems she does fix are not fixed because of her own abilities.

Not convinced? What do we know about Rey? She's a homeless orphan on a nowhere planet surviving by selling trash. What can she do? Well, apparently she can expertly fly and fix spaceships, win gunfights with soldiers, win street fights with professional tough guys, beat trained people in a swordfight, hack computers, and keep her skin surprisingly healthy for someone living on a sun-scorched desert planet. “Well she's a scavenger, that's where she learned all about ships and stuff.” That might be believable if there weren't examples of real life people in her situation, i.e. homeless people, and I'm pretty sure being homeless taught approximately none of them how to fix cars. “Well maybe she—” Stop. This is how fiction works: if it doesn't happen during or is explained in the story then it didn't happen. This isn't a historical record, this is something that only exists on-screen. If Rey was taking night school classes in between working in Space-Somalia then they would have mentioned it.

4. Ever notice that Luke is kind of a screw-up in ANH? He has to be saved a lot. Like, a lot. He has to be saved from the Sand People, he has to be saved in the bar, he has to be saved when he's stuck in the hallway after breaking out Leia, he has to be saved when he is in the trash compactor, he has to be saved during the attack on the Death Star, he has to be saved when Darth Vader is about to shoot down his fighter. I don't mean situations where everyone is in the same kind of general danger, I mean situations where Luke specifically is in danger and he can't get out of it without help. Other than his piloting skills, he doesn't have that much going for him. I'm not saying he doesn't progress as a character, he does. But he fails a lot. This is of course not a bad thing. From a storytelling perspective it helps maintain tension, but it is also a good trait to have as a person. Failure is a sign of trying. To progress as a person means to expand past one's limitations, to become actually something rather than potentially anything. Failing means being pressed up against one's limitations. It means you are forced to acknowledge that there are certain things you are not, certain things that you cannot do, and that you will have to change yourself if you want to be able to do those things.

But Rey is never allowed to fail, and if you can't fail then you can't try. Reread that last sentence and take note of the order. The lesson is that since you're the main character, life will make you good at things. Don't bother doing things because that means you're not what the story is about. Actions are necessarily directed outwards; you act on things. If someone is acting then that means they are directing themselves towards something else. If you're doing things then you're acknowledging that the story isn't about you. But if the story is about you then you don't have to do anything, the story will do things for you. Instead of you reacting to reality, reality is reacting to you. That's what happened to Rey when she could magically fly ships, and to Finn when he magically betrayed the bad guys.

5. A side-note: at first I hoped the movie would reverse our expectations and actually make Finn the one who was sensitive to the Force. It would have explained why he was able to “make a choice” and decide to leave the bad guys when no other storm trooper could. The movie even makes a point of explicitly telling us that there had been no previous signs of trouble from him. If the movie had gone this way it would have actually been good writing. The other storm troopers never betrayed the First Order not because they had all chosen to follow it, but because they never had the choice. If you grow up and only know one system then you don't get the choice to rebel against that system. If the reality of his situation was revealed to Finn by the Force then he would be then free to make that choice. As it was however, it appears that he was simply chosen by the movie to be the one storm trooper that rebelled.

“That's not how the Force works!” Han exasperatedly exclaims when Finn suggests they use it to help them break into the base. By which he means, you can't use the force like that because you can't use it at all. Not Finn, not Rey, not anyone. You either have it or you don't, it's not something you can just “use” because that would imply that it was something that depended on your own will. You don't use the Force, it uses you.

It's worth noting however that the Force didn't always act this way. Somewhere between the original trilogy and TFA everyone decided that the way the Force worked was that it just mysteriously picks you. But if all someone had to go on was the original movies then they would have surmised that the Force was a skill, or perhaps a virtue; something trainable. Someone might have innate talent for it, but the difference between someone who can use the Force and someone who can't is that the person who can use it is the one who works at it. When Obi-Wan starts training Luke in the use of the Force he doesn't start by saying “Luke, you have a natural gift,” he just says “You must learn the ways of the Force, if you're to come with me to Alderaan.” It's treated as though anyone could learn to use it if they wanted to. It's a matter of choice, not destiny. Rey doesn't have to learn anything about the Force when she starts using it. She's just able to do it. Why? Because she's the main character. Not: she's the main character because she can use the Force; she can use the Force because she's the main character. This is why Luke has been retconned into being so important, because otherwise they'd have to acknowledge that the old movies weren't about Luke. No, he wasn't that important. Not so important that the entire focus of two different militaries would be on him. “He was that important in the original movies! Remember in The Empire Strikes Back? We were told Vader was 'obsessed' with finding him!” Yes, Vader was. The Empire cared about the Rebellion, and the Rebellion cared about the Empire. Luke had blown up the Death Star but Han was still the only one willing to risk going out and looking for him when Luke was freezing to death. How important does that sound? TFA, when it treats Luke as being all-important, is reflecting our the audience's idea of Luke as “what the movies were about,” not the actual focus of the movies.

6. Nothing about this is unique to TFA. It is the common theme of modern-day adventure stories, e.g. Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek film becoming the captain despite having done nothing to earn it, simply because he's Kirk (not coincidentally also a J.J. Abrams movie). It was almost inevitable that this would be the kind of story they told from the moment they decided on a female lead (that isn't a put-down of women by the way. It wasn't a woman who wrote the script). In the modern Star Wars you don't become a Luke Skywalker by doing kinds the things Luke did, instead you are chosen for the role.

On Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion:" Part 2

Part one can be found here.

Thomson's argument essentially comes down to a question about the nature of responsibility. She has a very odd idea of what that nature is like. From how she describes it, responsibilities and obligations are more like prison sentences than anything else, at their core a type of restriction on the rights and freedoms of the person who has them. In presenting them like this Thomson has lost sight of one of the most important aspects of responsibilities: that they are not about the person who has them. The whole point of a responsibility is that it is first and foremost not about the person who holds it, but about that person's relationship to that thing or person they are responsible to. If you try and treat responsibility without also treating the object of that responsibility then it will always sound like nothing but arbitrary restrictions given to a particular person. However that's not what a responsibility is at all. A responsibility is a relation one person has to another, simply with the added aspect that the relation is maintained through an act of the will, rather than it just maintaining itself. A person being affected by the gravity of a planet is in a similar relationship as a person with a responsibility to another person or object. A person under the effects of gravity will fall towards the source of gravity because of the properties of the person and because of the properties of the planet attracting him. Now because gravity is a principle of physics, as oppose to a principle of ethics, there is no question of choice or morality that comes up. We do not need to choose to be responsible to gravity, it exists because of laws of nature. A moral responsibility is much the same except with the addition of free will. It comes about because of the relationship between a person and something else, such as the relationship between a mother or a father and their child. Because these responsibilities are things that we can choose to follow or not it is a matter of free will, but that we are responsible is not a matter of free will. The responsibility is simply a reality that exists due to the mother or father being a mother or father and the son or daughter being a son or daughter.

Responsibility as a concept does not work if all it is is an expression of consent. If responsibility is nothing more than the willingness to be responsible, then responsibility would always end as soon as someone stopped willing that responsibility. Even if someone initially made an act of the will where he committed himself to having a permanent responsibility, if all that responsibility is is that commitment then as soon as he changes his mind the responsibility must necessarily disappear. The very fact that we can follow or not follow our obligations means that there must be something there for us to follow. Responsibility only has meaning if it represents some kind of actual relationship between a person and that which they are responsible to.

The obvious objection is that there are some responsibilities which are clearly chosen, such as marriage or contractual agreements. Now, one could point out that there are plenty of very important responsibilities which are very clearly not chosen. Taxes, the draft, child support, indeed any laws that a citizen is required to follow are not chosen, or at least are still obligatory if not chosen. But even those obligations which are chosen are not of a different sort than all the others. With marriage, or a contract, or joining the military, or the Hippocratic Oath, what one is consenting to is not the responsibility, but the state of being which entails that responsibility. The consent is the cause of one's being in that state, but it is not the cause of that state entailing that responsibility. Being responsible means being in a specific state, not simply consenting to be in that state. Now because human beings have free will, whether or not they are in those states is often voluntary. To be married, for example, one has to freely consent to be in a state of marriage. However, the responsibilities of marriage are due to being in the state of marriage, not due to the consent per se, even though a person can only be in that state if they consented. This is why a natural-born citizen and a naturalized citizen have the same responsibilities as citizens, even though the naturalized citizen is the only one who entered that state by a free choice. Being a father or a mother is the same. If everything is going properly, no one would ever be a parent without having willed it. As marriage is the natural human means to create and raise children, and marriage can only be entered voluntarily, ideally everyone who becomes a parent should have done so naturally. But as we all know it is possible for parenthood to happen without being intended. However this doesn't change the relationship between the accidentally conceived child and the mother or father. We can't pretend that someone isn't a parent simply because they didn't choose to be one. It may be that parenthood should only happen in a particular way, but it's an undeniable reality that it doesn't have to happen that way. We cannot mistake the cause for the effect it is the cause of; parenthood still exists even if its cause was something other than what normally would or should have been expected.

When one has a normal and natural relationship with another person, as a mother does with her child, then those aspects of the child that relate to the mother cannot be to the detriment of the mother, and those aspects of the mother that relate to the child cannot be to the detriment of the child. In a normal and natural relationship, which surely pregnancy is if there ever was one, what is good for one party is not evil for the other. A fetus is not an intruder inside the mother; to compare pregnancy to trespassing is madness. We do not have to choose between what is good for the mother and bad for the child, or what is good for the child and bad for the mother. When one has a relationship of responsibility, it is not simply that one part is obligated to keep harm from the other, it is that what is bad for a person is bad for the person responsible, and what is good for a person is good for the person responsible. Helping a child is the same as helping his parents, and harming a child is the same as harming his parents. If then we accept the reality of this relationship between a parent and child, which Thomson ignores, then to talk about harming a child for the good of the mother becomes incoherent. We are not forced to choose between the good of the mother and the good of the child, because they are inseparable goals.

Thomson claims at the start of her essay that she would be able to justify abortion while still granting the personhood of an unborn infant. It is clear however that she does nothing of the sort. Instead her whole argument is based upon ignoring the essential truths about the persons involved. Her essay is nothing but a misdirect, designed to give the impression of dealing with the reality of the issue while actually avoiding it completely.

On Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion:" Part 1

Judith Jarvis Thomson's essay “A Defense of Abortion” is an oddly-titled essay as there are very few defenses made. It is full of claims to be sure, but very little in the ways of actual philosophical arguments. What Thomson does instead is provide analogous hypothetical situations that she assumes require no further argument, that if the reader is simply presented with her examples the truth of the matter will be plainly visible. But if the truth of the matter were so plainly visible that all one needs to see it is to be presented, sans argument, with an analogous situation, then one wonders why there would be any controversy over the issue at all. As there is controversy, it is worthwhile to examine her essay and see whether her defense actually works.

Thomson starts her essay by addressing what she asserts to be the pro-life position. She claims that this section is ultimately irrelevant to her defense, but as it makes up a significant amount of her essay and its arguments are often referenced in the abortion debate it is worth addressing. According to her the pro-life argument goes like this: at some point between conception and birth the zygote, or embryo, or fetus obviously starts being a person. To pick any particular point after conception as the point personhood starts is to choose an arbitrary point, therefore we ought to suppose, or at least treat, conception as the point at which personhood starts. This, Thomson claims, is a slippery slope argument. She argues that a “clump of cells” is no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree. Now, one might wonder what exactly Thomson thinks an acorn is if it is not the same plant as the adult oak tree? It seems perfectly reasonable to think that an oak tree is merely the mature version of the same plant that starts as an acorn. Regardless, this is not a slippery slope argument by any means, an accusation Thomson doesn't try to prove. There are no logical inconsistencies or philosophically repugnant consequences of thinking that if we are unsure as to whether or not a living being is a person, we should treat it as such. If the military were testing a bomb and they saw on their radar something in the test area that could be a person, there is no one who would think that they shouldn't bother stopping and finding out before continuing.


The argument as Thomson describes it is that:

1. The start of personhood must be a non-arbitrary point.

2. There is no non-arbitrary point between birth and conception when the cells in question becomes a person.

3. The collection of cells is a person by the time of birth.

4. Therefore personhood must start at conception.


This is not a slippery slope argument. She can deny the premise that there are no non-arbitrary points between conception and birth, but formally the argument is perfectly valid. If a zygote is not a person, and a baby is, then there must be some point between the two at which personhood starts. If Thomson wants to claim that there is some non-arbitrary point at which that happens, then it is on her to demonstrate it. If we have no reason for thinking otherwise then we are morally obligated to assume that the living being which we know is a person at one point in its life is a person at all points in its life. This is not an argument that we have a moral obligation because we have epistemological certainty of when personhood begins, it is an argument that we have a moral obligation because we don't have epistomological certainty.

Denying that the unborn have personhood however is not the main thesis of her essay. Thomson claims that even if one grants the premise that personhood starts at conception, abortion is still defensible. Let us then examine the rest of the essay and see how well her argument stands.

One of the first thing that jumps out at the reader is the strangeness of Thomson's analogies for pregnancy. The analogy of the violinist hooked up to you against your will is in theory possible, but is exceptionally outlandish. The analogy of the people-seeds that float through the countryside has crossed beyond the outlandish and into the bizarre. Now an analogy being outlandish or bizarre doesn't invalidate it, but it does make it more than a little suspect. If we are talking about a common and ordinary occurrence then one would think that we would be able to come up with a common and ordinary analogy. Pregnancy is very common and very ordinary. Every female ancestor of every single person ever born underwent pregnancy, often more than once. So when the best analogies Thomson can come up with are rogue music appreciation clubs and floating people-seeds it is reasonable to wonder why she couldn't use analogies a little more mundane, and to want to take a closer look at them and see if they're really above board.

Thomson uses her analogies as a way to raise questions about her opponent’s views, and then treats those questions as counter-arguments. The problem is that simply raising a question does not alone disprove a position. If someone claims that life exist on Pluto, then one might ask, “If life exist on Pluto then they must not be breathing oxygen, so what are they breathing?” It's a good question, and it would also be a difficult one to answer. But it doesn't actually disprove anything. One could say, “aliens can't exist on Pluto because there's no oxygen, and all life requires oxygen.” This would at least be a valid argument. But Thomson does not do this. She simply assumes that such arguments follow from the questions she raises. If someone says, “I think life exists on Pluto because we have recorded structures that seem artificial on its surface,” then it is not a counter-argument to say “Well if there is life then we don't know what they breathe.” It is simply an unanswered question. Raising an unanswered question is not the same as proving something impossible. Thomson's violinist analogy is a perfect example of this. She claims that the pro-life advocates argue that the right to life outweighs the right to decide what happens to one's body, a kind of “right-conflict thesis.” But, she says, what about a case where someone is forcefully hooked up to a violinist in order to keep him alive? There it would seem that the violinist's right to life doesn't outweigh your right to freedom. This is an interesting scenario, and would raise interesting questions for the pro-life position (had that actually been the pro-life position; more on this later). But it does not actually prove it wrong, in fact it's more of a slippery slope argument than the pro-life argument she presented was, as it is claiming that it follows that if abandoning the violinist if justified then abortion must be justified, without providing any actual reason think so. The pro-life argument she gave doesn't make less sense due to the counter-example she offered. The moral principle that the pro-life argument appeals to, that the right to life is stronger than the right to bodily autonomy, is not overturned by her example. It might well prove that there's more to the issue than the rights-conflict thesis alone explains, but it doesn't alone prove the argument false. The violinist hypothetical is different from pregnancy, and Thomson needs to explain why those differences don’t matter if she wants to claim the analogy is valid. An analogy is not a replacement for an argument, it is a way of explaining a situation or concept. And all analogies are necessarily imperfect, they all have elements that make them different from what they are analogous to. They require explanations for why they apply to the issue at hand, and why their differences do not invalidate the comparison. It is these differences Thomson fails to address, and these differences that make her argument a failure.

People-seeds, felonious music lovers, babies that grow to gigantic proportions in inescapable houses, why does Thomson rely on such outlandish inventions? Why would anyone use these analogies at all? The justification might be that by setting up a reality of her own creation it allows her to keep the analogy simple and to the point. But there is nothing simple about her analogies. There is nothing simple about imagining a reality where reproduction works through “people-seeds” that float through the air. So what reason could she have for using it? If a magician is flourishing with his right hand it's because he doesn't want you to look at his left. Magicians want us to watch the flashiness of the magic, and ignore the ordinariness of the trick. People-seeds and terrorist violinists are very flashy. Pregnancy is very ordinary. And it is precisely this quality of ordinariness, which is present in pregnancy and absent in the analogies which render all Thomson's examples invalid. One can justify any extreme action if they invent an extreme enough situation. But pregnancy is not an extreme situation, it is a normal one. Not simply common, normal. People-seeds would not be normal, even if they were common. Pregnancy on the other hand is one of the most normal and natural acts possible for a human being.

It is in this normality that we find the key difference between Thomson's fictions and the reality of pregnancy. Like the magician's sleight of hand, her analogies only work if she includes the flourish. Killing can be justified in a situation as extreme as a kidnapping, and in a situation as bizarre and nonsensical as “people-seeds” it can at least easily be imagined as justified, because we have absolutely no context with which to analyze our situation or understanding of how any of it works, and it is easy to imagine possible justifications for almost any action if the context is obscure enough. If pregnancy was unnatural like people-seeds or evil like kidnappings, then it would be easy to deny any bonds of responsibility between a mother and a child. Thomson tries to pretend the abortion issue is about conflicting rights, but rights do not conflict in normal and natural relationships. Rights are only in competition when both parties are in competition. While this may be the case with felonious violinists, it is not the case with pregnancy. A parent and child are not conflicting parties. The strangest world Thomson creates in her essay is not one of people-seeds, but rather one where human rights play a game of survival of the fittest, with the rights of one person trying to overwhelm those of another. If a relationship is normal and natural, like the relationship between a mother and her child, then their rights should align. The relationship between a kidnapper and their victim is not a normal or natural one, it is an evil one. The relationship between a random person and a random “people seed” might not be evil, but it is at least arbitrary. But to argue that the relationship between a mother and her child is either evil or arbitrary is a complete denial of reality.

Part 2 can be found here.