Last week, students from Oxford asked us about the ‘violinist’ analogy. It’s something we get asked about and comes up in pro-life conversations a lot so we thought we would give two ways of answering it! Check out the first part below!
A string to our bow? The ‘violinist’ analogy, part 1
23rd May 2020
For those who have never heard of it before, the ‘violinist’ analogy is a thought experiment from a moral philosophy paper by Judith Jarvis Thomson titled ‘A Defence of Abortion’ in 1971. It goes like this:
‘You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”‘
Jarvis Thomson’s goal with this analogy was to demonstrate how, in circumstances where someone would be reliant on us to survive for nine months, through no fault of our own, it would be morally acceptable to ‘unplug’ from the other person, even if that were to mean their death. In other words, it is supposed to show that expecting a woman to continue on with her pregnancy for nine months, a pregnancy that was the result of the heinous crime of rape, is morally unjust.
In philosophy, this type of argument is known as a ‘slippery slope’ argument – because it is not immoral to unplug yourself from the violinist, the logically similar example of abortion in the case of rape must be permissible too. To disprove this, we have to show that the parallels she draws are not, in fact, parallels at all and therefore she has committed a ‘slippery slope fallacy’.
So are Thomson’s parallels really parallels?
First of all, the violinist is artificially attached rather than naturally. An unborn child is naturally conceived by the mother through reproduction, they are not (usually) causing harm, the child is not an invader or parasite living off their mother, and finally he/she is not trespassing because the child is in its rightful place – an unborn child belongs in the womb.
Secondly, Thomson attempts to draw a parallel between letting someone die (i.e. by withholding life giving treatment from the violinist) and actively taking someone’s life. There is no such option in pregnancy – you either have to follow nature by nurturing the baby or go against nature by killing the baby. Additionally, to be similar, the musician would have to be crushed, vacuumed up, sliced, stabbed, burnt or poisoned, before being unplugged.
Thirdly, the relationship within each pair (violinist and stranger versus child and mother) is not similar. The stranger holds no responsibility for the violinist’s welfare which would not be true if the violinist were their child. Would you unplug yourself if you woke up to find yourself attached to your own child?
Finally, this analogy proves too much – Thomson freely presumed the premise that the unborn child is a person from the moment of conception. Therefore, if it is moral for a mother to deny her child life through abortion then it does not hold that the mother is obligated to provide necessities for the child after he or she is born. This means that if her argument works to justify abortion, then it also works to justify killing any dependent child. A newborn, and even a 2 year old, can arguably create a greater demand on the mother than an unborn child and therefore if we carry Thomson’s argument through to its logical conclusions than she would also have to concede infanticide.
Join us tomorrow for part 2!
