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.