Would you be willing to remain immobile for nine months in bed in order to save the life of an unknown person?
SCENARIO
You wake up one morning with an unknown person in your bed. You realize that a whole network of tubes joins you together at the back, and that fluids are circulating round this network. An unknown person has been plugged into your back while you were asleep!
1How? Why?
In actual fact, it is the members of a music appreciation society who have organized the whole thing. They have sedated you, kidnapped you, and persuaded some doctors to plug this unknown person into you, having found no better way of saving his life. I should add that the unknown person is a violinist of consummate genius, stricken by a very grave disease of the kidneys. You alone have the blood needed to gradually clean out his kidneys and the tubes are precisely to flush them out.
In order to reassure you, the doctors tell you that you will only have them for nine months. In order to convince you of the importance of this medical procedure, they add that the violinist will die immediately if you unplug him.
You can of course act like a Good Samaritan and sacrifice nine months of your life for this violinist who is unknown to you and whom you did not even decide to save at the outset.
But if you demand to be unplugged, would that be monstrously immoral? Would it not be an act of legitimate self-defense, perfectly acceptable from the moral point of view, with regard to an intrusion that would leave you immobilized for nine months?
If you answer yes, you will also have to answer yes to the question of knowing whether there exists a moral right to interrupt an undesired pregnancy, for we are concerned here with like cases that should be treated alike.
THE MOST RADICAL DEFENSE OF ABORTION
For certain philosophers, if it were possible to prove conclusively that fetuses are persons who have the same rights as newborn infants, the question of knowing whether you can eliminate them would be settled. You would not be able to.
It is this argument that the thought experiment of the violinist plugged into one’s back is supposed to challenge. It poses the following problem: even if you grant that fetuses are persons, at any rate potentially, is it not possible, nonetheless, to envisage cases in which it would be legitimate to take steps to counter the threat that they represent to the survival of the mother or to her quality of life?
2Think of someone who kidnaps you and sequestrates you for months, while regularly taking your blood and your bone marrow. Would it be morally permissible to put an end to this aggression?
The violinist plugged into one’s back has really set the philosophers talking, which is no bad thing, obviously. But the radical implications of this thought experiment regarding the defense of abortion have not obtained unanimous agreement.
In actual fact, everything hinges upon the question of knowing whether the intention to unplug a sick person who has been hooked into one’s back and that of terminating an undesired pregnancy are sufficiently similar for us to be under an intellectual obligation to treat them in the same way.
For many philosophers, it is hard to see the fetus as an intrusion, save in cases of rape.
3Since the woman’s responsibility is involved in the case of a consenting sexual relationship, she must accept its consequences, namely, in certain cases, seeing the pregnancy through to its conclusion.
But it is hard to see why the fact of having consented to a sexual relationship that culminates in a pregnancy should imply an absolute duty to see it through to its conclusion.
It is well known that there is a range of different reasons for accepting an interruption of a pregnancy whose moral validity everyone (or nearly everyone) recognizes.
Philosophers and theologians advocating an absolute prohibition on abortion are rare indeed. With the exception of a few fanatics, they have always held that in cases of rape, incest, significant deformations of the fetus, and grave danger to the mother’s life, abortion was permitted.
The argument enabling us to justify such actions is the same in every case. There is no absolute duty to see a pregnancy through to its conclusion. If the cost is too high for the mother, it is morally permissible to interrupt it.
4 Essentially the circumstance is no different from the one that Thomson has attempted to clarify.
The whole question is to discover to whom the right to assess the moral costs belongs. To whom should we leave the decision from the moral point of view?
Like Ronald Dworkin, Judith Jarvis Thomson seems to rule out abortions of convenience, those performed simply in order to avoid postponing a holiday, for example.
5Personally, I reckon that pregnant women should be left free to make the decisions they deem appropriate in their own case, exempt from any philosophical inspection of their reasons. If they are free to abort, they should be so whatever their motive may be. I reject, therefore, the position of Thomson and Dworkin.
What about you?
