I am sorry but this is completely the wrong question. Absolutely everybody is pro abortion, there is absolutely no doubt that abortion is awesome and great fun. The debate is if you can abort a fetus or if you wait 18 years and then send him to another country where the fetus then kills a few kids and women before he gets aborted. This is the whole question, it is not about killing anybody in general. The conservative and religious side always prefers a solution with the highest number of victims, it always has, just read a history book. Church and Conservatives were always evangelists for mass-murder. So please do not pretend that it is about life, it is NOT.
A better scenario is one where you were involved in an accident that you caused. You made the decision to drive but not the decision to get into the accident, even though your actions cause the accident. The right to your body still trumps someone else's right to life. This better represents pregnancy.
Thank you for this example! I agree that this captures the responsibility aspect of it a bit better. I think the point of the violinist was to have the 9 months duration of your being strapped to the other person, which is supposed to mirror the discomforts of pregnancy and their long duration. An accident is more of a momentary event, so it does not convey this aspect of pregnancy in the same way. Perhaps one could change it to say that you get into your car, cause an accident, and then you have to take care of the other person who was involved in the accident for nine months, until they are healed. If the accident was due to your actions, would this seem unjust? My intuition would tend to say that I should, indeed, take care of the victim I created through my actions. What do you think?
@@dailyphilosophy let me rephrase, sorry: the car accident was with the violinist. In order to heal him, doctors attached them to you for 9 months, leading into your example. Hope that clarifies what I meant. As for ehat you would personally do, that's up to you. The argument is whether someone could force you to stay attached to the violinist. And that's a clear "no"
In your scenario where you caused the accident, you say the right to your body still trumps someone else's right to life. But let me ask this. Because you caused the accident, do you have the right to your money, or is it legal and ethical for you to be required to pay fines or expenses to the person you injured? Do you still have the right to your freedom, perhaps it is determined your negligence was enough to send you to jail for the accident. In essence, because you caused the accident, even unintentionally, should you be completely free from all consequences or restitution to the other person injured?
@@4thHermit616 should you suffer consequences for the accident? Depends. Driving may always lead to an accident, but unless you were drunk driving or engaging in otherwise risky behaviour, you should not be legally punished. Should you suffer consequences for terminating your connection to that person, the only thing keeping them alive? Definetly no. But that is a bit irrelevant. In the accident example and the pregnancy example, the underlying consequences are different. The example works to explain bodily autonomy, not to directly compare legal repercussions. Only the second question matters here
@@m1g4s I ask this question because the definition of bodily autonomy is tricky. If I have claim on your money, your money is basically something you received by using your body and time. There are many reasons where you do not and should not have complete control over your time or what you do with your body. As far as suffering consequences of causing an accident if you are NOT drunk or engaging in risky behavior, you say you should not be legally punished. I am not talking about punishment exactly, but bearing responsibility for consequences. If you hurt someone in an accident, that person is bearing the consequences, possibly, through no fault of their own. Consequences happen and injury results even without intention. Why should the other party bear all the consequences where you bear none of them? Driving and sex are being used here as a comparison, but they are a poor comparison to each other. Evolutionarily speaking, sex is primarily for reproduction. So saying you had sex and being surprised when a pregnancy results boarders on delusional. The primary purpose of sex is to create life, whereas the primary purpose of driving is not to get in an accident.
To your rebuttal points: I would state that just because a person makes the choice to have sex they do not make the choice become pregnant. These can be looked at as two separate choices. While one choice leads to another, it is impossible to know hoe likely one choice will lead to other. For example, there are many examples of people not getting pregnant even if they have unprotected sex. Likewise, there are many situations where a person having protective sex still gets pregnant. So with a good judgement on the probability of becoming pregnant a person's cannot make a reasonable choice on the action. Thus, while sex is a choice that a person can make, pregnancy is not a choice that a person can make. If pregnancy is not a choice that a person can make, then they did not make a choice to become pregnant. If they did choose to become pregnant then the person is being forced to be pregnant. For the mother having required rights, this could be addressed by changing the violinist to a relative. Thus, you make it the same moral choice. You could also age down the violinist too. For the rinal rebuttal, you could argue that instead of killing the fetus, they could juat remove the fetus from the mother and let it die to other causes. Thus making the violinist deatha dn the fetus death the same thing. All in all, great video. It has been a long time since I seen a good philosophy channel that actually explains these thought experiments correctly. I cannot wait to see what you produce next.
Indeed. That would be like claiming the choice to drive a car is the same as making the choice to kill oneself. There is a given risk that one might die by driving a car. However, if that were to happen, very few would claim he made the choice to kill himself. Same principle here. Just because you make a choice that may possibly lead to something doesn't mean you've chosen to do that something.
Thank you for your points and your encouragement! I am not so sure about your view of sex vs pregnancy. Sex is at least a necessary condition for pregnancy, so if there is a residual risk of pregnancy despite one taking measures against it, then this risk has at least been accepted by the agent. Thus, they were not "forced to become pregnant," one might argue. They accepted the inherent risk. But yes, I see what you mean. This is why these thought experiments can be difficult to sort out. In the end, it's all a matter of interpretation and one's own values. Thanks again!
With that logic: if I as a man have unprotected sex with a woman but don't intend to get her pregnant, then I never made a choice to have a child, and therefore I shouldn't be forced to pay for the child. Most pro-abortion people sort of do this weird dance that we can't hold the woman responsible for her pregnancy, but we can hold the father responsible.
@@SlimThrull by that logic, a person can drink and drive, and if he kills someone he can always claim he didn't intend to kill anyone therefore he should not be held responsible. What your argument misses is it ignores risk. There is a risk when you drink and drive that you will harm someone. There is a risk when you have sex that you will become pregnant. "I didn't intend to..." does not stand up against negligent behavior in any court of law, and it shouldn't be our measure for moral culpability.
@@sidwhiting665 "by that logic, a person can drink and drive, and if he kills someone he can always claim he didn't intend to kill anyone therefore he should not be held responsible." Says who? He'd be charged with vehicular manslaughter. Not sure where you're getting that idea. "What your argument misses is it ignores risk. There is a risk when you drink and drive that you will harm someone." I haven't claimed otherwise. "There is a risk when you have sex that you will become pregnant." Still haven't claimed otherwise. ""I didn't intend to..." does not stand up against negligent behavior in any court of law, and it shouldn't be our measure for moral culpability." Okay, so you should be arrested for driving because it can kill someone. It doesn't matter if you intended to or not, apparently. Good luck with that. I don't think many will buy into that logic. I certainly don't.
I seem to be in the odd camp that sees it as unethical to disconnect myself from the violinist. He is just as much a victim as I am, and while I never agreed to this situation, his survival now depends on me. Waiting such a short while is a small price to pay to avoid being responsible for his passing. However, the real wrongdoing I see comes from the Society of Music Lovers who put us in this situation. I would strongly advocate for stopping them from ever forcing this on anyone again, with severest legal consequences. I don't even consider my consent relevant. For example, take the case of conjoined twins. If I were born attached to a twin and wanted to separate at some point, but a doctor told me that waiting a little while would mean my twin could survive, I would consider it my moral duty to wait. Note that I'm only critiquing the violinist argument in this case. >> Surely executing an action directly or letting a consequence occur naturally are two entirely different things and should be judged differently. Not always in ethical contexts in my view. If a parent neglects their child to the point where they freeze to death, we don’t say they simply let them die - we must hold them responsible. Society cannot condone that level of neglect. The same applies if firefighters stood by and refused to respond to burning buildings while people were trapped inside. Even if they didn’t cause the fire, their refusal to act would be unacceptable. We have proximal responsibilities to each other. Emphasis on "proximal" since practically demands that I cannot be held responsible for every single starving child on the planet. Yet if I'm a parent, I am absolutely responsible for making sure my own child does not starve in this proximal fashion. Also if I have plenty of water to spare and I encounter a person dying of thirst, I would consider is my duty to share my water. It is not merely a generosity but a duty to my fellow human being. That doesn't mean I am responsible, however, for every single person dying of thirst. It doesn't mean I'm responsible for the violinist's death if I didn't find myself plugged to him, as I have immediate responsibilities around me that I must effectively prioritize and that we must effectively distribute between us in a proximal fashion. >> Tell me what you think in the comments. I would be happy to hear whether you find the argument convincing or not. I am thoroughly unconvinced. My view of ethics is extremely simple. Our actions either move us closer to our preservation (ethical) or further towards our extinction (unethical). Determining in which direction we're moving can be extremely complicated from an epistemic standpoint given the sea of uncertainties, and demands epistemic humility, practical distribution of responsibilities, and risk-aversion against actions which risk catastrophic consequences. Yet the criterion is extremely simple: the only complexity is epistemic in nature and not conflicts within the framework itself. I don't find the distinction between negative and positive rights, or between passivity and activity, always relevant in this regard. What is of potential ethical relevance to me is that if every single pregnant woman were to needlessly have an elective abortion, our entire species would go extinct within a single generation. We at least can't afford too many of them at once, in the same way we can't afford too many passive firefighters on a fire fighting team who refuse to save people. We might be able to afford a few of them, but never too many or else it's thoroughly counter-productive for our collective survival.
Thank you for your comment! I would agree with you up to the last paragraph of what you write. Of course, avoiding human extinction must be a very high-priority goal. But I don't buy the argument that abortions lead to extinction for two reasons: 1. *Permitting* abortion is not equivalent to *requiring* abortion (which would lead to extinction of the species). Many actions are permissible because we assume, correctly, that only a small subset of the population will perform them at any time. There is no problem with a person studying to be an accountant, but if *everyone* on Earth suddenly decided to be accountants and nothing else, we would have a survival problem as a species. According to the US CDC website, currently the abortion rate in the US is 11 abortions per 1000 women, or about 1 percent. In relation to births, we have 200 abortions per 1000 live births, or 20% (and this includes all causes medical or otherwise). So we have an overall abortion rate of 20%, with 80% of children being born. There is no reason to assume that this will lead to human extinction. French statistics institute Ined (see their website at ined.fr) estimates that abortion rates are higher in countries where abortion is illegal, but generally average around 2-4% of women worldwide. 2. Contrary to recent Elon Musk propaganda, we don't have too few people on Earth, we have far too many. Nearly all our environmental problems would be easily solved if we had, say, one billion humans on Earth instead of eight. Note that in my own lifetime alone, the population on Earth has doubled. In the 1960s, it was 4 billion, now it's eight. This is, in reality, the extinction danger. Not that we have too few people on the planet, but that we have too many. I am aware of the many and grave economic problems of downscaling a country's population, and nobody seems to have a good solution on how exactly to do that while still having a working economy and the ability to finance social security and elder-care. But we will have to find working solutions, because it is folly to try and grow a limitless population on a planet with limited resources. So ways of reducing the human population, including wide-ranging family planing and birth control, are not threatening human extinction but making it *less* likely and could help find a sustainable size for the global human population that ensures that we can have a long-term future on Earth. As I said, I tend to agree with you on everything else you wrote. Thanks again!
@@dailyphilosophy Cheers! I agree with your logic there on permitting elective abortion. However, I would say it is necessary for us to have some accountants in our society, at least with the way it's currently arranged. It is not necessary for us to have needless (elective) abortions. >> There is no reason to assume that this will lead to human extinction. I tend to root collective survival in a proximal fashion as mentioned above. In that sense, there is a proximal threat in many developed nations of declining birth rates, and I am far less concerned with the preservation of the entire species. I am from Japan and this is arguably among our greatest existential crisis at the moment on a localized scale. We can patch the problem with immigration, and I am not averse to it provided it doesn't completely reform our culture, but it tends to be a band-aid to a longer-term problem. So I hope you'll forgive me if I see needless abortions as a genuine threat to our society, even though I am not necessarily in favor of criminalizing them. I err on the side of persuasion, communal support, and education over the force of law, since seeking with force what can be achieved through other means tends to be maladapted for survival as well. Also it takes two to tango. I don't see this about reforming women's behavior but also men's as well (gently, persuasively). >> [...] we don't have too few people on Earth, we have far too many. The problem I see, as you mentioned, is the way our economic systems are structured. There isn't enough self-sufficiency. Social security in Japan isn't some savings accumulated on behalf of the tax payer, but a present redistribution from those who are able to work to those who can't. When our population consists predominantly of elderly people who can't work, there is too small a labor force to run hospitals, to provide sanitized water, food, shelter, electricity, and so forth. That is the more imminent threat I see to even our population exceeding the available resources is having too few producing them in the first place and too many consuming them. I am in favor of seeking practical and sustainable reforms that don't require constantly replenishing the labor force, but in the meantime I think we require that replenishment. >> So ways of reducing the human population, including wide-ranging family planing and birth control, are not threatening human extinction but making it less likely and could help find a sustainable size for the global human population that ensures that we can have a long-term future on Earth. It is perhaps just a matter of order in which we disagree. Given the risks involved to human lives, I would rather we have the solution first before we face the greatest pressure for it. I consider climate change a genuine problem, for example, but I would rather we invest in solutions for affordable renewable energy before we make the alternatives unaffordable via taxes and regulations, for example, rather than invest in the idea that affordable solutions will emerge through such pressures. I am very risk-averse when it comes to anything that can cost lives.
@@dailyphilosophy Argh, YT seemed to hide my comment. I hope you can see it. A bit more on proximal priorities: I consider proximity in time as well. A responsible parent might go beyond investing and saving for their children, and even towards their future grandchildren. Yet I wouldn't consider it responsible for a parent to invest in their great-great-great-great-grandchildren, if it means it imposes any nontrivial cost on their children and grandchildren. There is a wisdom to broadening this "proximity" across time and present people, and the more we can broaden the scale into an "us" thing and not a "them" thing, the better I see it ideally. Yet the ideal must be practically constrained by our limited resources, including but not limited to epistemic gaps given that we're a species which isn't Borg with a hive mind which shares the entirety of their knowledge across themselves and even across generations. So it ceases to practically be more productive when the proximity is too wide to manage. An investor who invests in too many things spreads their investments too thin -- this sort of mindset. As a result, practicality as I see demands we limit the proximity and associated investments across time, across people: to family above community, to community above nation, to our nation above other nations, to our species above other species, to children above grandchildren, to grandchildren above great-grandchildren, and so forth. Yet this is just a matter of priorities. It doesn't mean lower priorities should get neglected entirely; it just means we avoid investing more resources into items of lower priority than items of higher priority. So while I agree that overpopulation given the plant's non-renewable resources is a huge and longest-term existential threat, there is another I see that takes more immediate and "proximal" priority -- not to the point of neglecting this former one, but to the point where we're not celebrating a reduction in our proximal population before we arrive at solutions to make that much less of an imminent threat.
I think the thought experiment is just that, a thought experiment. I see multiple responses. Violinist POV: We don’t really know anything about them. They made have made decisions that led them to that state meaning the morality of the decision depends on the forward life of the violinist. Maybe they are an addicted person grasping at avaricious continuation. Maybe they are a perfect Buddha but we don’t know. Maybe this experience makes their art, life, and effect better but nobody knows. Maybe this leads to depression where the art is affected and the loss of choice of the donor is useless. POV of donor: Don’t know if their life path would have led them to being as effectual as the violinist during those months. Beyond that, there is a hidden chance that violinist causes an effect on the world the donor suffers from (trans donor and a violinist that advocates for the the eradication of their group). At the end of the day, the thought experiment reflects a world where some parties have perfect knowledge of events but doesn’t share that knowledge (as the donor doesn’t have the necessary understanding to agree fully) and I can’t help but think that one way or another the entire situation of outside influences (doctor/assistants to help the process happen) aren’t able to clearly state in a way to fully convince the donor. Maybe it’s lack of sharing or maybe a lack of understanding (in which case I feel the decision makers look at the donor as merely meat) but something is wrong with the entire thought experiment. At the end of the day, the thought experiment forces the observer to try to guess the relative understanding of each party and whether or not anyone has relevant knowledge of the outcomes or act itself. Choice is personal, and the only person’s choice I feel matters is the one who has their bodily autonomy violated. Violinist and Donor are on equal footing in that regard (as long as violinist wasn’t involved with the planning of the situation) and has a right to justice against those who perpetrated the situation. But less so the donor who, while they may be a bad person, has the same rights to be as good/evil as the violinist. Don’t understand how this relates to real world scenarios honestly.
Thank you for your comment! I agree that many things are wrong about this thought experiment. Still, I think that there is a value to looking at things this way. By reducing complex real-world cases to simplified thought experiments, we can examine our thoughts about particular features of a situation in isolation and perhaps get new insights, where a real-life case might be too complex and confusing to study at once. In this case, we are supposed to look at the rights of the mother vs the rights of the fetus, while avoiding the complications that come from the question of whether the fetus is a person or not (because the violinist certainly is a person). I do think that such thought experiments can be helpful in clarifying issues, even if they are not realistic.
@@dailyphilosophy I kinda disagree. I think Graham Priest and his refutations of non-contradictions (dialetheism) is something that should be taken into consideration. There can be multiple truths and one should look at these thought experiments as pointing out that there can be multiple defendable positions that can be defended. At the end of the day, I do think there is a respect/understanding of the viewpoint that should be observed by identifying the personal circumstances of each participant in a situation and a respect we should pay to the method developed by John Berger. Wish you the best. Edit: Replaced a word. Currently rocking out to Tom Petty so if something comes off weird it is because I am switching songs/distracted by good music.
IF the unconscious Musician was plugged into a HUMAN that did not want them plugged in, then yes, I would definitely unplug them. Being on life support is a completely different scenario.
Hi! Perhaps I did not state it clearly, but this is indeed the thought experiment. The violinist is going to be plugged into a person, not only into some machinery. But, as others have pointed out, there is still a lot of uncertainty about whether this is relevantly similar to the case of being pregnant... Thanks!
The issue is one of the rights of the mother and of the fetus. The pro-life position is that God bestows full rights (ensoulment) to the fetus at conception, based upon the genetics of being human. About a third of all fetus's are lost early-on due to natural causes. The question is: if God ordains that a fetus is a human with full rights then is not God responsible for the murder?
People can start making that argument after they've shown this god of theirs even exists, and even then they have to argue why we should care about what it wants. It has nothing to do with genetics. Do you hear any theist arguing that it's immoral to have a period? After all the egg is human based on genetics, and it dies. What about those millions of sperm that die even if you get pregnant? No-one complains about that. The truth of the matter is that these so called pro-life activists aren't pro-life. They're pro controlling women. Pro forcing their religion on other people. But then as soon as the child they forced a woman to have is born, they vote against support to raise that child, because they do not actually care about the child. What they care about is control.
I agree with you that questions of power often play into this discussion and make it harder to analyse it rationally. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be entirely about control. As a society, even without a religious basis, we do extend protection to human beings as part of, if you will, a social contract. And this protection also includes babies, but not other body parts (it's one's own business what one wants to do with one's fingers). So there is something special about the developing human life. But I agree with you that religious arguments are not very helpful here, particularly because they are not convincing to non-believers.
@@wellhellothere6347 The issue is the rights of a fetus from conception on, regardless of multiple Bible versus. Absolute "Personhood" rights at conception is an assertion trying to be a law. The principle behind Roe v Wade was the gradual gain of rights of a developing fetus.
@@dailyphilosophy The issue of abortion is complex as it involves: the law, religion, medicine, family planning, demographics, politics, "recreation" and as you mention power. Ultimately, I consider it a medical problem. Adequate contraception mostly eliminates the need for abortions. However, you hit the nail on the head when you identified the issue of power and control over others. The struggle (social contract) has always been between freedom and control.
There are so many things wrong with Thompson's argument: 1. Let's assume, to make this clearer, that the woman was kidnapped and strapped to the violinist by direct order of the violinist; this is to put the burden of his survival and of the kidnapping of that woman on the violinist's own hands. In this situation, the violinist would be de facto guilty of the crime of kidnapping. Is the punishment for kidnapping death? If the answer is yes, then the scenario of having the woman unplugging herself would end in the same state as if she had endured the 9 months and then the violinist was condemned to death for his crime. If the punishment is not death, then how can the woman justify inflicting death on the violinist? 2. The difference between the thought experiment and a pregnant woman is that the pregnant woman would not be bedridden for 9 months. Pregnancy does not hinder a woman's life the way this scenario with the violinist would. 3. "One person's right to her own body can trump even another person's right to life." I don't think that this can be an argument because the statement is evaluating two very different this: body and life. Use this thought experiment: Considering that I have very long hair, and hair is considered part of my body, somebody, while I sleep, takes me and puts me right at the edge of a 20 stories building, with my hair going over the edge, and at the tip of it there is a basket tied to it, and in the basket, there is a sleeping baby. What would happen if I decided to cut my hair right then (knowing that there is a baby dangling from it)? I will, rightly so, go to jail or the gas chamber. 4. The focus of the argument is limited to finding if there is a right to kill the living being (violinist or fetus/baby); the answer should be simple: Body for body and life for life. In this situation, the only way to justify the death of the dependent life is if the life of the woman is dependent on the disconnection of the other life (baby or violinist). In other words, if the only way for the woman to not-die in one of these scenarios is to kill the baby or violinist, the woman has total right to do so. 5. The only thing that this thought experiment can make evident is that none of the participants' lives should be risked, but responsibility can still be sought and remediations applied. In the case of the violinist, if the association acted on their own, they should be held responsible, they should be judged for kidnapping, and remunerations should come to the woman immediately. In the case of rape, the rapist should be judged and sentenced, but the new life cannot be put on trial.
You raise many good points, particularly with the "not bedridden" and "long hair" arguments. I agree with both your conclusions there. Thomson's argument relies a little too much on the intuition that the woman will be "strapped to the violinist" in a violent, medical setup. While pregnancy can be difficult in some cases, it is still a natural process and, over at least a big part of it, it does not seem to consist of pure suffering for the mother. I am not so sure about your first argument, though. We do have a right to the use of our own body, even if depriving others of the right to use our body would cause their death. Think of all the desperate transplant patients who right now would need one of your kidneys to survive. I guess that you don't feel that you are required to part with your kidney, just because a stranger somewhere would die if you did not give it to him. Not being willing to share your organs is not the same as putting someone else to death, even if that person's death could have been avoided by the sharing. At least that's how it seems to me.
@@dailyphilosophy - Hello! Thanks for replying with your thoughts. I absolutely agree with you that I have no moral debt to pay with any of my organs to a person (stranger or not) in need of a transplant, and I love that you brought this example up because with it I can showcase something that previously I wasn't able to put into words as an argument, and that is the responsibility of the, let's call this person, initiator. In most, if not all, arguments, we always refer to the new life as this initiator, some sort of parasite that suddenly attaches to its host/mother as if with machiavellian intent, but the truth is that it is the mother's 50% (in most cases, when consent is involved) responsibility of putting this new life inside her body. She and the male partner who got her pregnant are the initiators, and they should hold most, if not all, of the responsibility for the new life. This is important and in direct contrast to the matter of a random stranger needing my kidney to survive because the dependency of that stranger on my kidney (even if for some reason my kidney is the ONLY compatible kidney in the world that he can get) was not caused by me. His lifestyle, his genetics, an accident, or pure fate put him in that position, and I had nothing to do with that, so there is no moral responsibility for me to assist him or save him from death. Yet again, if I had got into a fight with him and as a result, I had stabbed him or shot him, and because of that he needed my kidney, my blood, or another safely transplantable organ to survive, I would be 100% morally obligated to give him what he needs. In fact, it would be, from a legal standpoint, in my best interest to do so because that way, if I prevent his death, I would avoid a murder charge falling on me. The woman, by engaging in sex and exposing her eggs to a man's sperm, gets herself in the same situation as me getting into a fight and shooting the stranger in the above example. An argument I hear sometimes is that a woman choosing to have sex is not equal to choosing to get pregnant, but this is akin to saying that, returning to my example above, me shooting or stabbing a stranger is not equal to intending to kill him, and yet, if he dies I would be responsible for his death.
@@NuntiusInfestissumam Thank you for your detailed reply and explanation! I agree with you that there is certainly an element of risk and of willingly exposing oneself to that risk in getting pregnant, and that this should also be considered in the debate. We won't be able to clarify all the problems here in the TH-cam comments, but I think that the violinist argument is still valuable, if only because it provokes is to think more carefully about the issues involved. If you look at the comments here, we have all participated in a discussion that has raised many excellent points from both sides, and, after all, this is what philosophy is supposed to do: not so much to give answers but to make us think about the right questions. Thank you again for contributing to that!
Funny how people need to pretend a fetus is a person like a violinist, rather than a clump of cells that one day might become a person, to pretend to make a point. And still fail.
Even a person is a 'clump of cells'. Who actually is anyone to decide when they become 'alive'? Thing is, no matter how you answer the logical conclusions of either answer are unsatisfactory to say the least.
Surely this is a continuous process, isn't it? In the first week of pregnancy, the fetus is likely just a clump of cells. But shortly before birth, it's a human baby, almost indistinguishable from the same baby after it has been separated from the mother. In both cases, one could doubt whether it's a "person," since even born babies lack some aspects of personhood, but if we protect babies from being killed by their parents, we must also deal with the question when exactly this protection should kick in for the fetus. Thanks!
Another analogy would be if a person male or female were traveling afoot in the wildness of Alaska and came across a dead mother her living toddler in cabin. Toddler will die if you leave it. Winter is coming and you cannot communicate with the outside or get the child to safety until summer. Morally are you obligated to rough a hard winter to keep the child alive, or should you be free to go your own way. I do not think any legal argument would convict you, but the Christian moral argument is that you must stay regardless. I would rather live and be a part of a people who followed that morality as opposed to any other.
Thank you for your comment! It’s interesting how in the case you describe we tend to have different intuitions than with the violinist. Maybe this is because we are biologically wired to want to protect children, so when we are thinking of a child alone in an Alaskan winter, this emotion kicks in and it seems unbearably cruel to leave the child to die. On the other hand, a grown up person should be responsible for their own welfare, so we don’t have the same feelings towards the violinist. And probably, we don’t have them towards a bunch of cells (the fetus) either. The tricky thing is that our emotions are not really reliable. For example, the child in Alaska might just be the same fetus three years later. And the violinist might be the same child thirty years later. Or that child might turn into the politician your despise most (insert name here). Or into a murderer. Or shall we go backwards? Then that child would just be the violinist thirty years earlier. Does it therefore deserve our help less? Or does the violinist deserve it more? I think that these decisions are really difficult to make. But I also think that putting it in terms of cells and small children and violinists plays upon our emotions in a way that distracts us from the rational treatment of the issue. This is why German 18th century philosopher Kant, for example, would insist that we should not use our emotions to make moral judgements, but only our reason. Only reason should guide us towards what is our moral duty. For Kant, it was respecting all human beings and their dignity. Which sounds sensible, but the problem is that (a) a fetus is not yet a human being; and (b) the mother is, and we must also consider her rights and dignity. So we’re still stuck. This is why ethics is hard. Christian morality, which I very much respect, does not really solve the problem either, because the potential mother is also a fellow human being that has a claim to our Christian love and assistance. If having the baby would mean unbearable hardships for the mother, how can we, as Christians, justify this? I don’t see any good way of solving these problems, so everyone must try and find their own solutions to the problem. What I do think is wrong, is when states and governments try to force a one-size-fits-all decision on human beings, without proper consideration of each person’s particular situation. A moderate legislation that allows for abortion in specific cases while not encouraging it where it’s not justifiable seems to me to be the safest way to balance the interests involved. Thanks again!
I would state that this thought experiment is more similar the trolley problem than the violinist problem. The violinist is only concerned with whether or not you are morally obligated to assist someone when you have already been connected to them. However your thought experiment seems to be talking about whether or not you have a moral obligation to assist someone in need. The trolley problem is about choice and how to weigh moral obligations and moral weight. However, one way to look at the trolley problem is with action and inaction. For example, instead of making a choice on which people will die, you can choose not to make the choice. Then the question become is inaction a morally good choice. I would argue this is at the heart of your thought experiment. You can choose inaction and leave the baby to die or choose action and save the baby. However, the violinist is different because the inaction would be leaving the violinist plug into you, while the action would be unplugging the violinist. Of course, all these thought experiments are trying to get at the core of how much we owe to a person. If you are forced into a situation, does this change the outcome of the moral judgement? How do we assign moral weights to a person? How infinite are humans? All these questions and more needs to be considered when we ask these thought experiments.
@@tauntingeveryone7208 I agree with you, and also with your last sentence. We need to question these thought experiments and their assumptions much more. As I said in another comment, these thought experiments often try to appeal to our feelings rather than to a rational consideration of what is morally right. Of course you would protect a toddler! But what if the toddler was an old, ugly, aggressive, homeless man in an Alaskan cabin? Would we feel the same? Emotions are tricky, and perhaps we should be more wary of being manipulated by the imagery in these thought experiments. Thanks!
While you are responsible for the child, you are NOT using your organs to keep the child alive. If you had the same scenario, but you had to attach the child to your own body, you would not be morally obligated to do so. You also aren't clear about your scenario. Is the cabin fully stocked, so that you only have to feed and care for the child from the supplies, or is the cabin where you will both certainly die if you stay because there is no food in the cabin or area? If death was certain if you stayed, the best scenario would be to take the child with you were you were going and maybe one or both would die, or maybe one or both would survive. IF the cabin is supplied, you are doing nothing that is compared to pregnancy. You are simply losing a bit of time.
The violinist argument has been debunked in numerous ways. It's a distraction that makes so many strawman arguments it's hardly worth discussing. What it comes down to is who has a duty to provide safety and security for another human being. It is a well-established moral and legal principle that mothers (and fathers) have duties toward their offspring to care, provide, and nurture to the best of their ability. It is also a well-established moral and legal principle that random strangers do not have duties toward each other, beyond perhaps extremely short term "Good Samaritan" obligations to attempt to help during an extreme emergency that is of a very brief duration and doesn't present an undue burden on the helper. Anyone who pursues the violinist argument could theoretically be sued for not feeding every starving person because they preferred to use money to go on a vacation. I don't think anyone wants to go there.
It's even more simple than that. NO human get's to use the organs of another human without their permission. Ever. And to your last sentence, anyone who has two kidneys could also be charged with murder as long as someone needs a kidney.
But Peter Singer and others (for example, effective altruists) do make such points, arguing that we may have duties towards strangers. Certainly we do have some duties towards strangers: not to cheat them, for example, not to threaten them, and in some legislations, not to insult them (I'm told this is law in France). So it's not quite as clear-cut as you say. But I agree that there are relevant differences between one's child and a stranger, and that these are not sufficiently accounted for in the Violinist argument. Thanks!
@@wellhellothere6347 Does a baby have the right to nurse at it's mother's breast if that is how he needs to be fed? Can a baby cry and force her mother to listen to those cries? Can a baby poop and his mother is required to clean up the mess? That's where I have problems with the phrase, "NO human get's to use the organs of another human without their permission. Ever." We obviously "use" each other's organs all the time, both directly and indirectly. A womb is designed specifically to provide a safe place for an unborn baby to grow and develop naturally. That is it's purpose and the only thing for which it exists. I can't tell if you're arguing for or against abortion.
@@sidwhiting665 No, a baby has none of those rights. However, at that point the mother can separate herself from the baby with out killing it if she wants. At 20 weeks, no such separation is possible without the death of the baby. And no, we don't "use each others organs all the time." Thats just silly.
I am sorry but this is completely the wrong question. Absolutely everybody is pro abortion, there is absolutely no doubt that abortion is awesome and great fun. The debate is if you can abort a fetus or if you wait 18 years and then send him to another country where the fetus then kills a few kids and women before he gets aborted. This is the whole question, it is not about killing anybody in general. The conservative and religious side always prefers a solution with the highest number of victims, it always has, just read a history book. Church and Conservatives were always evangelists for mass-murder. So please do not pretend that it is about life, it is NOT.
Thomas Swift was funny and poignant. You are neither.
A better scenario is one where you were involved in an accident that you caused. You made the decision to drive but not the decision to get into the accident, even though your actions cause the accident. The right to your body still trumps someone else's right to life. This better represents pregnancy.
Thank you for this example! I agree that this captures the responsibility aspect of it a bit better. I think the point of the violinist was to have the 9 months duration of your being strapped to the other person, which is supposed to mirror the discomforts of pregnancy and their long duration. An accident is more of a momentary event, so it does not convey this aspect of pregnancy in the same way. Perhaps one could change it to say that you get into your car, cause an accident, and then you have to take care of the other person who was involved in the accident for nine months, until they are healed. If the accident was due to your actions, would this seem unjust? My intuition would tend to say that I should, indeed, take care of the victim I created through my actions. What do you think?
@@dailyphilosophy let me rephrase, sorry: the car accident was with the violinist. In order to heal him, doctors attached them to you for 9 months, leading into your example.
Hope that clarifies what I meant.
As for ehat you would personally do, that's up to you. The argument is whether someone could force you to stay attached to the violinist. And that's a clear "no"
In your scenario where you caused the accident, you say the right to your body still trumps someone else's right to life. But let me ask this. Because you caused the accident, do you have the right to your money, or is it legal and ethical for you to be required to pay fines or expenses to the person you injured? Do you still have the right to your freedom, perhaps it is determined your negligence was enough to send you to jail for the accident.
In essence, because you caused the accident, even unintentionally, should you be completely free from all consequences or restitution to the other person injured?
@@4thHermit616 should you suffer consequences for the accident? Depends. Driving may always lead to an accident, but unless you were drunk driving or engaging in otherwise risky behaviour, you should not be legally punished.
Should you suffer consequences for terminating your connection to that person, the only thing keeping them alive? Definetly no.
But that is a bit irrelevant. In the accident example and the pregnancy example, the underlying consequences are different. The example works to explain bodily autonomy, not to directly compare legal repercussions. Only the second question matters here
@@m1g4s I ask this question because the definition of bodily autonomy is tricky. If I have claim on your money, your money is basically something you received by using your body and time. There are many reasons where you do not and should not have complete control over your time or what you do with your body.
As far as suffering consequences of causing an accident if you are NOT drunk or engaging in risky behavior, you say you should not be legally punished. I am not talking about punishment exactly, but bearing responsibility for consequences. If you hurt someone in an accident, that person is bearing the consequences, possibly, through no fault of their own. Consequences happen and injury results even without intention. Why should the other party bear all the consequences where you bear none of them?
Driving and sex are being used here as a comparison, but they are a poor comparison to each other. Evolutionarily speaking, sex is primarily for reproduction. So saying you had sex and being surprised when a pregnancy results boarders on delusional. The primary purpose of sex is to create life, whereas the primary purpose of driving is not to get in an accident.
To your rebuttal points:
I would state that just because a person makes the choice to have sex they do not make the choice become pregnant. These can be looked at as two separate choices. While one choice leads to another, it is impossible to know hoe likely one choice will lead to other. For example, there are many examples of people not getting pregnant even if they have unprotected sex. Likewise, there are many situations where a person having protective sex still gets pregnant. So with a good judgement on the probability of becoming pregnant a person's cannot make a reasonable choice on the action. Thus, while sex is a choice that a person can make, pregnancy is not a choice that a person can make. If pregnancy is not a choice that a person can make, then they did not make a choice to become pregnant. If they did choose to become pregnant then the person is being forced to be pregnant.
For the mother having required rights, this could be addressed by changing the violinist to a relative. Thus, you make it the same moral choice. You could also age down the violinist too.
For the rinal rebuttal, you could argue that instead of killing the fetus, they could juat remove the fetus from the mother and let it die to other causes. Thus making the violinist deatha dn the fetus death the same thing.
All in all, great video. It has been a long time since I seen a good philosophy channel that actually explains these thought experiments correctly. I cannot wait to see what you produce next.
Indeed. That would be like claiming the choice to drive a car is the same as making the choice to kill oneself. There is a given risk that one might die by driving a car. However, if that were to happen, very few would claim he made the choice to kill himself. Same principle here. Just because you make a choice that may possibly lead to something doesn't mean you've chosen to do that something.
Thank you for your points and your encouragement! I am not so sure about your view of sex vs pregnancy. Sex is at least a necessary condition for pregnancy, so if there is a residual risk of pregnancy despite one taking measures against it, then this risk has at least been accepted by the agent. Thus, they were not "forced to become pregnant," one might argue. They accepted the inherent risk. But yes, I see what you mean. This is why these thought experiments can be difficult to sort out. In the end, it's all a matter of interpretation and one's own values. Thanks again!
With that logic: if I as a man have unprotected sex with a woman but don't intend to get her pregnant, then I never made a choice to have a child, and therefore I shouldn't be forced to pay for the child.
Most pro-abortion people sort of do this weird dance that we can't hold the woman responsible for her pregnancy, but we can hold the father responsible.
@@SlimThrull by that logic, a person can drink and drive, and if he kills someone he can always claim he didn't intend to kill anyone therefore he should not be held responsible.
What your argument misses is it ignores risk. There is a risk when you drink and drive that you will harm someone. There is a risk when you have sex that you will become pregnant. "I didn't intend to..." does not stand up against negligent behavior in any court of law, and it shouldn't be our measure for moral culpability.
@@sidwhiting665 "by that logic, a person can drink and drive, and if he kills someone he can always claim he didn't intend to kill anyone therefore he should not be held responsible."
Says who? He'd be charged with vehicular manslaughter. Not sure where you're getting that idea.
"What your argument misses is it ignores risk. There is a risk when you drink and drive that you will harm someone."
I haven't claimed otherwise.
"There is a risk when you have sex that you will become pregnant."
Still haven't claimed otherwise.
""I didn't intend to..." does not stand up against negligent behavior in any court of law, and it shouldn't be our measure for moral culpability."
Okay, so you should be arrested for driving because it can kill someone. It doesn't matter if you intended to or not, apparently. Good luck with that. I don't think many will buy into that logic. I certainly don't.
I seem to be in the odd camp that sees it as unethical to disconnect myself from the violinist. He is just as much a victim as I am, and while I never agreed to this situation, his survival now depends on me. Waiting such a short while is a small price to pay to avoid being responsible for his passing.
However, the real wrongdoing I see comes from the Society of Music Lovers who put us in this situation. I would strongly advocate for stopping them from ever forcing this on anyone again, with severest legal consequences.
I don't even consider my consent relevant. For example, take the case of conjoined twins. If I were born attached to a twin and wanted to separate at some point, but a doctor told me that waiting a little while would mean my twin could survive, I would consider it my moral duty to wait.
Note that I'm only critiquing the violinist argument in this case.
>> Surely executing an action directly or letting a consequence occur naturally are two entirely different things and should be judged differently.
Not always in ethical contexts in my view. If a parent neglects their child to the point where they freeze to death, we don’t say they simply let them die - we must hold them responsible. Society cannot condone that level of neglect. The same applies if firefighters stood by and refused to respond to burning buildings while people were trapped inside. Even if they didn’t cause the fire, their refusal to act would be unacceptable.
We have proximal responsibilities to each other. Emphasis on "proximal" since practically demands that I cannot be held responsible for every single starving child on the planet. Yet if I'm a parent, I am absolutely responsible for making sure my own child does not starve in this proximal fashion. Also if I have plenty of water to spare and I encounter a person dying of thirst, I would consider is my duty to share my water. It is not merely a generosity but a duty to my fellow human being. That doesn't mean I am responsible, however, for every single person dying of thirst. It doesn't mean I'm responsible for the violinist's death if I didn't find myself plugged to him, as I have immediate responsibilities around me that I must effectively prioritize and that we must effectively distribute between us in a proximal fashion.
>> Tell me what you think in the comments. I would be happy to hear whether you find the argument convincing or not.
I am thoroughly unconvinced. My view of ethics is extremely simple. Our actions either move us closer to our preservation (ethical) or further towards our extinction (unethical). Determining in which direction we're moving can be extremely complicated from an epistemic standpoint given the sea of uncertainties, and demands epistemic humility, practical distribution of responsibilities, and risk-aversion against actions which risk catastrophic consequences. Yet the criterion is extremely simple: the only complexity is epistemic in nature and not conflicts within the framework itself.
I don't find the distinction between negative and positive rights, or between passivity and activity, always relevant in this regard. What is of potential ethical relevance to me is that if every single pregnant woman were to needlessly have an elective abortion, our entire species would go extinct within a single generation. We at least can't afford too many of them at once, in the same way we can't afford too many passive firefighters on a fire fighting team who refuse to save people. We might be able to afford a few of them, but never too many or else it's thoroughly counter-productive for our collective survival.
Thank you for your comment! I would agree with you up to the last paragraph of what you write. Of course, avoiding human extinction must be a very high-priority goal. But I don't buy the argument that abortions lead to extinction for two reasons:
1. *Permitting* abortion is not equivalent to *requiring* abortion (which would lead to extinction of the species). Many actions are permissible because we assume, correctly, that only a small subset of the population will perform them at any time. There is no problem with a person studying to be an accountant, but if *everyone* on Earth suddenly decided to be accountants and nothing else, we would have a survival problem as a species. According to the US CDC website, currently the abortion rate in the US is 11 abortions per 1000 women, or about 1 percent. In relation to births, we have 200 abortions per 1000 live births, or 20% (and this includes all causes medical or otherwise). So we have an overall abortion rate of 20%, with 80% of children being born. There is no reason to assume that this will lead to human extinction. French statistics institute Ined (see their website at ined.fr) estimates that abortion rates are higher in countries where abortion is illegal, but generally average around 2-4% of women worldwide.
2. Contrary to recent Elon Musk propaganda, we don't have too few people on Earth, we have far too many. Nearly all our environmental problems would be easily solved if we had, say, one billion humans on Earth instead of eight. Note that in my own lifetime alone, the population on Earth has doubled. In the 1960s, it was 4 billion, now it's eight. This is, in reality, the extinction danger. Not that we have too few people on the planet, but that we have too many. I am aware of the many and grave economic problems of downscaling a country's population, and nobody seems to have a good solution on how exactly to do that while still having a working economy and the ability to finance social security and elder-care. But we will have to find working solutions, because it is folly to try and grow a limitless population on a planet with limited resources. So ways of reducing the human population, including wide-ranging family planing and birth control, are not threatening human extinction but making it *less* likely and could help find a sustainable size for the global human population that ensures that we can have a long-term future on Earth.
As I said, I tend to agree with you on everything else you wrote. Thanks again!
@@dailyphilosophy Cheers! I agree with your logic there on permitting elective abortion. However, I would say it is necessary for us to have some accountants in our society, at least with the way it's currently arranged. It is not necessary for us to have needless (elective) abortions.
>> There is no reason to assume that this will lead to human extinction.
I tend to root collective survival in a proximal fashion as mentioned above. In that sense, there is a proximal threat in many developed nations of declining birth rates, and I am far less concerned with the preservation of the entire species. I am from Japan and this is arguably among our greatest existential crisis at the moment on a localized scale. We can patch the problem with immigration, and I am not averse to it provided it doesn't completely reform our culture, but it tends to be a band-aid to a longer-term problem.
So I hope you'll forgive me if I see needless abortions as a genuine threat to our society, even though I am not necessarily in favor of criminalizing them. I err on the side of persuasion, communal support, and education over the force of law, since seeking with force what can be achieved through other means tends to be maladapted for survival as well. Also it takes two to tango. I don't see this about reforming women's behavior but also men's as well (gently, persuasively).
>> [...] we don't have too few people on Earth, we have far too many.
The problem I see, as you mentioned, is the way our economic systems are structured. There isn't enough self-sufficiency. Social security in Japan isn't some savings accumulated on behalf of the tax payer, but a present redistribution from those who are able to work to those who can't. When our population consists predominantly of elderly people who can't work, there is too small a labor force to run hospitals, to provide sanitized water, food, shelter, electricity, and so forth. That is the more imminent threat I see to even our population exceeding the available resources is having too few producing them in the first place and too many consuming them. I am in favor of seeking practical and sustainable reforms that don't require constantly replenishing the labor force, but in the meantime I think we require that replenishment.
>> So ways of reducing the human population, including wide-ranging family planing and birth control, are not threatening human extinction but making it less likely and could help find a sustainable size for the global human population that ensures that we can have a long-term future on Earth.
It is perhaps just a matter of order in which we disagree. Given the risks involved to human lives, I would rather we have the solution first before we face the greatest pressure for it. I consider climate change a genuine problem, for example, but I would rather we invest in solutions for affordable renewable energy before we make the alternatives unaffordable via taxes and regulations, for example, rather than invest in the idea that affordable solutions will emerge through such pressures. I am very risk-averse when it comes to anything that can cost lives.
@@dailyphilosophy Argh, YT seemed to hide my comment. I hope you can see it.
A bit more on proximal priorities: I consider proximity in time as well. A responsible parent might go beyond investing and saving for their children, and even towards their future grandchildren. Yet I wouldn't consider it responsible for a parent to invest in their great-great-great-great-grandchildren, if it means it imposes any nontrivial cost on their children and grandchildren.
There is a wisdom to broadening this "proximity" across time and present people, and the more we can broaden the scale into an "us" thing and not a "them" thing, the better I see it ideally. Yet the ideal must be practically constrained by our limited resources, including but not limited to epistemic gaps given that we're a species which isn't Borg with a hive mind which shares the entirety of their knowledge across themselves and even across generations.
So it ceases to practically be more productive when the proximity is too wide to manage. An investor who invests in too many things spreads their investments too thin -- this sort of mindset. As a result, practicality as I see demands we limit the proximity and associated investments across time, across people: to family above community, to community above nation, to our nation above other nations, to our species above other species, to children above grandchildren, to grandchildren above great-grandchildren, and so forth.
Yet this is just a matter of priorities. It doesn't mean lower priorities should get neglected entirely; it just means we avoid investing more resources into items of lower priority than items of higher priority. So while I agree that overpopulation given the plant's non-renewable resources is a huge and longest-term existential threat, there is another I see that takes more immediate and "proximal" priority -- not to the point of neglecting this former one, but to the point where we're not celebrating a reduction in our proximal population before we arrive at solutions to make that much less of an imminent threat.
I think the thought experiment is just that, a thought experiment. I see multiple responses.
Violinist POV: We don’t really know anything about them. They made have made decisions that led them to that state meaning the morality of the decision depends on the forward life of the violinist. Maybe they are an addicted person grasping at avaricious continuation. Maybe they are a perfect Buddha but we don’t know. Maybe this experience makes their art, life, and effect better but nobody knows. Maybe this leads to depression where the art is affected and the loss of choice of the donor is useless.
POV of donor: Don’t know if their life path would have led them to being as effectual as the violinist during those months. Beyond that, there is a hidden chance that violinist causes an effect on the world the donor suffers from (trans donor and a violinist that advocates for the the eradication of their group).
At the end of the day, the thought experiment reflects a world where some parties have perfect knowledge of events but doesn’t share that knowledge (as the donor doesn’t have the necessary understanding to agree fully) and I can’t help but think that one way or another the entire situation of outside influences (doctor/assistants to help the process happen) aren’t able to clearly state in a way to fully convince the donor. Maybe it’s lack of sharing or maybe a lack of understanding (in which case I feel the decision makers look at the donor as merely meat) but something is wrong with the entire thought experiment.
At the end of the day, the thought experiment forces the observer to try to guess the relative understanding of each party and whether or not anyone has relevant knowledge of the outcomes or act itself.
Choice is personal, and the only person’s choice I feel matters is the one who has their bodily autonomy violated. Violinist and Donor are on equal footing in that regard (as long as violinist wasn’t involved with the planning of the situation) and has a right to justice against those who perpetrated the situation. But less so the donor who, while they may be a bad person, has the same rights to be as good/evil as the violinist.
Don’t understand how this relates to real world scenarios honestly.
Thank you for your comment! I agree that many things are wrong about this thought experiment. Still, I think that there is a value to looking at things this way. By reducing complex real-world cases to simplified thought experiments, we can examine our thoughts about particular features of a situation in isolation and perhaps get new insights, where a real-life case might be too complex and confusing to study at once. In this case, we are supposed to look at the rights of the mother vs the rights of the fetus, while avoiding the complications that come from the question of whether the fetus is a person or not (because the violinist certainly is a person). I do think that such thought experiments can be helpful in clarifying issues, even if they are not realistic.
@@dailyphilosophy I kinda disagree. I think Graham Priest and his refutations of non-contradictions (dialetheism) is something that should be taken into consideration. There can be multiple truths and one should look at these thought experiments as pointing out that there can be multiple defendable positions that can be defended. At the end of the day, I do think there is a respect/understanding of the viewpoint that should be observed by identifying the personal circumstances of each participant in a situation and a respect we should pay to the method developed by John Berger.
Wish you the best.
Edit: Replaced a word. Currently rocking out to Tom Petty so if something comes off weird it is because I am switching songs/distracted by good music.
IF the unconscious Musician was plugged into a HUMAN that did not want them plugged in, then yes, I would definitely unplug them. Being on life support is a completely different scenario.
Hi! Perhaps I did not state it clearly, but this is indeed the thought experiment. The violinist is going to be plugged into a person, not only into some machinery. But, as others have pointed out, there is still a lot of uncertainty about whether this is relevantly similar to the case of being pregnant... Thanks!
The issue is one of the rights of the mother and of the fetus. The pro-life position is that God bestows full rights (ensoulment) to the fetus at conception, based upon the genetics of being human. About a third of all fetus's are lost early-on due to natural causes. The question is: if God ordains that a fetus is a human with full rights then is not God responsible for the murder?
People can start making that argument after they've shown this god of theirs even exists, and even then they have to argue why we should care about what it wants. It has nothing to do with genetics. Do you hear any theist arguing that it's immoral to have a period? After all the egg is human based on genetics, and it dies. What about those millions of sperm that die even if you get pregnant? No-one complains about that. The truth of the matter is that these so called pro-life activists aren't pro-life. They're pro controlling women. Pro forcing their religion on other people. But then as soon as the child they forced a woman to have is born, they vote against support to raise that child, because they do not actually care about the child. What they care about is control.
If so, then why does the Bible, which is supposedly the word of god, say that life starts with the first breath, and not conception?
I agree with you that questions of power often play into this discussion and make it harder to analyse it rationally. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be entirely about control. As a society, even without a religious basis, we do extend protection to human beings as part of, if you will, a social contract. And this protection also includes babies, but not other body parts (it's one's own business what one wants to do with one's fingers). So there is something special about the developing human life. But I agree with you that religious arguments are not very helpful here, particularly because they are not convincing to non-believers.
@@wellhellothere6347 The issue is the rights of a fetus from conception on, regardless of multiple Bible versus. Absolute "Personhood" rights at conception is an assertion trying to be a law. The principle behind Roe v Wade was the gradual gain of rights of a developing fetus.
@@dailyphilosophy
The issue of abortion is complex as it involves: the law, religion, medicine, family planning, demographics, politics, "recreation" and as you mention power. Ultimately, I consider it a medical problem. Adequate contraception mostly eliminates the need for abortions. However, you hit the nail on the head when you identified the issue of power and control over others. The struggle (social contract) has always been between freedom and control.
There are so many things wrong with Thompson's argument:
1. Let's assume, to make this clearer, that the woman was kidnapped and strapped to the violinist by direct order of the violinist; this is to put the burden of his survival and of the kidnapping of that woman on the violinist's own hands. In this situation, the violinist would be de facto guilty of the crime of kidnapping. Is the punishment for kidnapping death? If the answer is yes, then the scenario of having the woman unplugging herself would end in the same state as if she had endured the 9 months and then the violinist was condemned to death for his crime. If the punishment is not death, then how can the woman justify inflicting death on the violinist?
2. The difference between the thought experiment and a pregnant woman is that the pregnant woman would not be bedridden for 9 months. Pregnancy does not hinder a woman's life the way this scenario with the violinist would.
3. "One person's right to her own body can trump even another person's right to life." I don't think that this can be an argument because the statement is evaluating two very different this: body and life. Use this thought experiment: Considering that I have very long hair, and hair is considered part of my body, somebody, while I sleep, takes me and puts me right at the edge of a 20 stories building, with my hair going over the edge, and at the tip of it there is a basket tied to it, and in the basket, there is a sleeping baby. What would happen if I decided to cut my hair right then (knowing that there is a baby dangling from it)? I will, rightly so, go to jail or the gas chamber.
4. The focus of the argument is limited to finding if there is a right to kill the living being (violinist or fetus/baby); the answer should be simple: Body for body and life for life. In this situation, the only way to justify the death of the dependent life is if the life of the woman is dependent on the disconnection of the other life (baby or violinist). In other words, if the only way for the woman to not-die in one of these scenarios is to kill the baby or violinist, the woman has total right to do so.
5. The only thing that this thought experiment can make evident is that none of the participants' lives should be risked, but responsibility can still be sought and remediations applied. In the case of the violinist, if the association acted on their own, they should be held responsible, they should be judged for kidnapping, and remunerations should come to the woman immediately. In the case of rape, the rapist should be judged and sentenced, but the new life cannot be put on trial.
You raise many good points, particularly with the "not bedridden" and "long hair" arguments. I agree with both your conclusions there. Thomson's argument relies a little too much on the intuition that the woman will be "strapped to the violinist" in a violent, medical setup. While pregnancy can be difficult in some cases, it is still a natural process and, over at least a big part of it, it does not seem to consist of pure suffering for the mother. I am not so sure about your first argument, though. We do have a right to the use of our own body, even if depriving others of the right to use our body would cause their death. Think of all the desperate transplant patients who right now would need one of your kidneys to survive. I guess that you don't feel that you are required to part with your kidney, just because a stranger somewhere would die if you did not give it to him. Not being willing to share your organs is not the same as putting someone else to death, even if that person's death could have been avoided by the sharing. At least that's how it seems to me.
@@dailyphilosophy - Hello! Thanks for replying with your thoughts. I absolutely agree with you that I have no moral debt to pay with any of my organs to a person (stranger or not) in need of a transplant, and I love that you brought this example up because with it I can showcase something that previously I wasn't able to put into words as an argument, and that is the responsibility of the, let's call this person, initiator. In most, if not all, arguments, we always refer to the new life as this initiator, some sort of parasite that suddenly attaches to its host/mother as if with machiavellian intent, but the truth is that it is the mother's 50% (in most cases, when consent is involved) responsibility of putting this new life inside her body. She and the male partner who got her pregnant are the initiators, and they should hold most, if not all, of the responsibility for the new life. This is important and in direct contrast to the matter of a random stranger needing my kidney to survive because the dependency of that stranger on my kidney (even if for some reason my kidney is the ONLY compatible kidney in the world that he can get) was not caused by me. His lifestyle, his genetics, an accident, or pure fate put him in that position, and I had nothing to do with that, so there is no moral responsibility for me to assist him or save him from death.
Yet again, if I had got into a fight with him and as a result, I had stabbed him or shot him, and because of that he needed my kidney, my blood, or another safely transplantable organ to survive, I would be 100% morally obligated to give him what he needs. In fact, it would be, from a legal standpoint, in my best interest to do so because that way, if I prevent his death, I would avoid a murder charge falling on me.
The woman, by engaging in sex and exposing her eggs to a man's sperm, gets herself in the same situation as me getting into a fight and shooting the stranger in the above example. An argument I hear sometimes is that a woman choosing to have sex is not equal to choosing to get pregnant, but this is akin to saying that, returning to my example above, me shooting or stabbing a stranger is not equal to intending to kill him, and yet, if he dies I would be responsible for his death.
@@NuntiusInfestissumam Thank you for your detailed reply and explanation! I agree with you that there is certainly an element of risk and of willingly exposing oneself to that risk in getting pregnant, and that this should also be considered in the debate. We won't be able to clarify all the problems here in the TH-cam comments, but I think that the violinist argument is still valuable, if only because it provokes is to think more carefully about the issues involved. If you look at the comments here, we have all participated in a discussion that has raised many excellent points from both sides, and, after all, this is what philosophy is supposed to do: not so much to give answers but to make us think about the right questions. Thank you again for contributing to that!
Funny how people need to pretend a fetus is a person like a violinist, rather than a clump of cells that one day might become a person, to pretend to make a point. And still fail.
Even a person is a 'clump of cells'. Who actually is anyone to decide when they become 'alive'?
Thing is, no matter how you answer the logical conclusions of either answer are unsatisfactory to say the least.
Surely this is a continuous process, isn't it? In the first week of pregnancy, the fetus is likely just a clump of cells. But shortly before birth, it's a human baby, almost indistinguishable from the same baby after it has been separated from the mother. In both cases, one could doubt whether it's a "person," since even born babies lack some aspects of personhood, but if we protect babies from being killed by their parents, we must also deal with the question when exactly this protection should kick in for the fetus. Thanks!
Not an equivalency.
Another analogy would be if a person male or female were traveling afoot in the wildness of Alaska and came across a dead mother her living toddler in cabin. Toddler will die if you leave it. Winter is coming and you cannot communicate with the outside or get the child to safety until summer. Morally are you obligated to rough a hard winter to keep the child alive, or should you be free to go your own way. I do not think any legal argument would convict you, but the Christian moral argument is that you must stay regardless. I would rather live and be a part of a people who followed that morality as opposed to any other.
Thank you for your comment! It’s interesting how in the case you describe we tend to have different intuitions than with the violinist. Maybe this is because we are biologically wired to want to protect children, so when we are thinking of a child alone in an Alaskan winter, this emotion kicks in and it seems unbearably cruel to leave the child to die. On the other hand, a grown up person should be responsible for their own welfare, so we don’t have the same feelings towards the violinist. And probably, we don’t have them towards a bunch of cells (the fetus) either. The tricky thing is that our emotions are not really reliable. For example, the child in Alaska might just be the same fetus three years later. And the violinist might be the same child thirty years later. Or that child might turn into the politician your despise most (insert name here). Or into a murderer. Or shall we go backwards? Then that child would just be the violinist thirty years earlier. Does it therefore deserve our help less? Or does the violinist deserve it more? I think that these decisions are really difficult to make. But I also think that putting it in terms of cells and small children and violinists plays upon our emotions in a way that distracts us from the rational treatment of the issue. This is why German 18th century philosopher Kant, for example, would insist that we should not use our emotions to make moral judgements, but only our reason. Only reason should guide us towards what is our moral duty. For Kant, it was respecting all human beings and their dignity. Which sounds sensible, but the problem is that (a) a fetus is not yet a human being; and (b) the mother is, and we must also consider her rights and dignity. So we’re still stuck. This is why ethics is hard. Christian morality, which I very much respect, does not really solve the problem either, because the potential mother is also a fellow human being that has a claim to our Christian love and assistance. If having the baby would mean unbearable hardships for the mother, how can we, as Christians, justify this? I don’t see any good way of solving these problems, so everyone must try and find their own solutions to the problem. What I do think is wrong, is when states and governments try to force a one-size-fits-all decision on human beings, without proper consideration of each person’s particular situation. A moderate legislation that allows for abortion in specific cases while not encouraging it where it’s not justifiable seems to me to be the safest way to balance the interests involved. Thanks again!
I would state that this thought experiment is more similar the trolley problem than the violinist problem. The violinist is only concerned with whether or not you are morally obligated to assist someone when you have already been connected to them. However your thought experiment seems to be talking about whether or not you have a moral obligation to assist someone in need. The trolley problem is about choice and how to weigh moral obligations and moral weight. However, one way to look at the trolley problem is with action and inaction. For example, instead of making a choice on which people will die, you can choose not to make the choice. Then the question become is inaction a morally good choice. I would argue this is at the heart of your thought experiment. You can choose inaction and leave the baby to die or choose action and save the baby. However, the violinist is different because the inaction would be leaving the violinist plug into you, while the action would be unplugging the violinist. Of course, all these thought experiments are trying to get at the core of how much we owe to a person. If you are forced into a situation, does this change the outcome of the moral judgement? How do we assign moral weights to a person? How infinite are humans? All these questions and more needs to be considered when we ask these thought experiments.
@@tauntingeveryone7208 I agree with you, and also with your last sentence. We need to question these thought experiments and their assumptions much more. As I said in another comment, these thought experiments often try to appeal to our feelings rather than to a rational consideration of what is morally right. Of course you would protect a toddler! But what if the toddler was an old, ugly, aggressive, homeless man in an Alaskan cabin? Would we feel the same? Emotions are tricky, and perhaps we should be more wary of being manipulated by the imagery in these thought experiments. Thanks!
While you are responsible for the child, you are NOT using your organs to keep the child alive. If you had the same scenario, but you had to attach the child to your own body, you would not be morally obligated to do so. You also aren't clear about your scenario. Is the cabin fully stocked, so that you only have to feed and care for the child from the supplies, or is the cabin where you will both certainly die if you stay because there is no food in the cabin or area? If death was certain if you stayed, the best scenario would be to take the child with you were you were going and maybe one or both would die, or maybe one or both would survive. IF the cabin is supplied, you are doing nothing that is compared to pregnancy. You are simply losing a bit of time.
The violinist argument has been debunked in numerous ways. It's a distraction that makes so many strawman arguments it's hardly worth discussing.
What it comes down to is who has a duty to provide safety and security for another human being. It is a well-established moral and legal principle that mothers (and fathers) have duties toward their offspring to care, provide, and nurture to the best of their ability. It is also a well-established moral and legal principle that random strangers do not have duties toward each other, beyond perhaps extremely short term "Good Samaritan" obligations to attempt to help during an extreme emergency that is of a very brief duration and doesn't present an undue burden on the helper.
Anyone who pursues the violinist argument could theoretically be sued for not feeding every starving person because they preferred to use money to go on a vacation. I don't think anyone wants to go there.
It's even more simple than that. NO human get's to use the organs of another human without their permission. Ever. And to your last sentence, anyone who has two kidneys could also be charged with murder as long as someone needs a kidney.
But Peter Singer and others (for example, effective altruists) do make such points, arguing that we may have duties towards strangers. Certainly we do have some duties towards strangers: not to cheat them, for example, not to threaten them, and in some legislations, not to insult them (I'm told this is law in France). So it's not quite as clear-cut as you say. But I agree that there are relevant differences between one's child and a stranger, and that these are not sufficiently accounted for in the Violinist argument. Thanks!
@@wellhellothere6347 Does a baby have the right to nurse at it's mother's breast if that is how he needs to be fed?
Can a baby cry and force her mother to listen to those cries?
Can a baby poop and his mother is required to clean up the mess?
That's where I have problems with the phrase, "NO human get's to use the organs of another human without their permission. Ever." We obviously "use" each other's organs all the time, both directly and indirectly. A womb is designed specifically to provide a safe place for an unborn baby to grow and develop naturally. That is it's purpose and the only thing for which it exists.
I can't tell if you're arguing for or against abortion.
@@sidwhiting665 No, a baby has none of those rights. However, at that point the mother can separate herself from the baby with out killing it if she wants. At 20 weeks, no such separation is possible without the death of the baby. And no, we don't "use each others organs all the time." Thats just silly.