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.