The "Violinist" Argument
Perhaps the most famous argument for abortion-choice, surfaced in a 1971-article by Judith Jarvis Thomson titled “A Defense of Abortion” (Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 [Fall 1971], 47-66). In this article Thomson argued for abortion-choice by using a thought-experiment to illustrate how it’s wrong to force someone to lend an organ to save someone else’s life. This line of argument took root in the wider abortion debate, and has been adapted and discussed ever since. This argument is also known as the “Good Samaritan Argument,” (Boonin, A Defense of Abortion [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2003], 133ff). Other variations are the “organ donation argument” and the “blood donor argument.”
“I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person's right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother's right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.
It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine 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." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. "Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him." I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.” (Thompson 1971, pg. 47)
Strengths
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This argument is one of the strongest for the pro-choice camp because it can still “work” while granting fetal personhood.​
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It’s also relatively easy to understand.
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Its emotional weight and the presumed response are nearly universal. People generally agree that the woman should not be obligated to lend her kidney to the violinist.
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It helpfully distinguishes derogatory (required) acts versus supererogatory (good, but not required) acts.
Weaknesses
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Opponents consider this argument to be a disanalogy and/or logically fallacious.
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It’s not yet proven to be persuasive to opponents, since abortion could be wrong for other reasons that aren’t analogous to the JJT’s thought experiment (ex., parenthood, active killing).
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It’s contrived and strange, making it difficult to conceptualize in its finer details and thus empathize with its protagonist. It’s basically science-fiction.
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It does not analogize the parent-child relation that might be needed for a strong thought experiment.
Rebuttals
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It’s a disanalogy because in the violinist scenario, the person’s involvement was non-consensual while in pregnancy the person consented to sex wherein she then became a mother-with-child.
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It’s a disanalogy because the violinist scenario is ad hoc/artificial while the parental relation is fundamental/natural.
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It’s a disanalogy because the violinist scenario lacks the legal precedent and natural-law jurisprudence fortifying one’s duty to non-family medical dependents whereas there is a bounty of legal precedent and natural-law jurisprudence fortifying duties to one’s children.
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It’s a disanalogy because the violinist scenario has a passively victimized woman, whereas normal sex relations actively invites pregnancy (whether intentional or accidental), so the woman is not victimized; she is getting the natural, normal, and known consequences of her actions.
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It’s a disanalogy because pregnancy (from consensual sex) is not a violent assault, whereas the violinist scenario involves the woman being kidnapped and violently assaulted (albeit for a life-saving purpose).
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It’s a disanalogy because the violinist scenario is passive killing while abortion is active killing—to fix this, Thomson would need to have the woman invite the doctor to actively dismember or poison the violinist.
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It’s a disanalogy because in the violinist scenario the disease, not the doctor, is the killer.
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It’s a disanalogy because the child is not an intruder, while the violinist is.—The child is “precisely where he or she belongs at that stage of development.” (Klusendorf, The Case for Life, 188).
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It’s a disanalogy because going to sleep is not as ethically weighted as “sleeping with” someone.
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“That a woman looks upon her child as a burglar or an intruder is already evil.” (Stephen Schwarz, The Moral Question of Abortion [Chicago: Loyola Univ., 1990], 118).
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Sex is an entry into the baby lottery (see above) meanwhile the hypothetical victim in JJT’s argument did nothing which is a lottery entry to “link with a violinist.”
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It can be rebutted by analogy: what if the violinist was instead the woman’s own 2-year old child? (see Koukle, “Unstringing the Violinist,” Stand to Reason Ministries, [Signal Hill, CA: STR, 4 Feb. 2014], para. 25-28).—The parental relation would be maintained—making it a stronger analogy—but then the presumed outcome (ethical detachment) would be questionable, and we should be biased towards life in such cases.
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Children have a prima facie right to be protected by their parents, whereas violinists—even great ones—have no prima facie right to be sustained artificially by strangers.
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Parents have a prima facie duty to protect their children, not to protect strangers.
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Abortion does not merely “withhold support” as Thomson suggests, abortion actively kills a human being. The child’s right to life is not simply ignored, it’s actively violated with willful and malicious intent.
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The relevant part of the analogy can be maintained without drawing the same conclusion: One may “throw out” an unwanted intruder to your house, who is entering only for the sake of medical attention (i.e., akin to parental dependence) but not if that means killing them. That general right of autonomy is not a free-pass to maim, mutilate, and murder another human being.
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The violinist scenario lacks consent, and to that extent is more akin to rape. The sex act itself is natural consent to pregnancy (though it can be admitted that a woman may have sex and still try to contradict that natural invitation by desiring non-pregnancy and using contraception). If rape is understood as “unnatural” (defying the natural law principle of informed consenting adults) and normal sexual relations are understood as “natural” (being nature’s mode of reproduction) then the violinist scenario parallels rape, not consensual sex.
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The expansion from 9 mos. to 9 years to a lifetime is a stretch, yet that’s how JJT develops her argument. That time frame isn’t arbitrary—one could reacquire his or her old job after 9 mos. but not after 9 yrs. All her remaining birthing years could be sacrificed in those 9 years.
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Even if the whole argument is granted, it fails to show that abortion is “good” or even “ethical” preferable but only that it’s ethically permissible. The argument admits the greater action would be to stay connected to the violinist.
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Hypothesis contrary to fact: by suggesting expansive time-frames—9 years/lifetime—that are dissimilar from the normal 9 mo. gestation, she’s dealing in a relevantly different hypothetical scenario which, if it were the case, would radically reorient biology and practical ethics. Hence she errs by trying to use the rules of a different “game” to judge this “game.” That is, she’s committing a fallacy of hypothesis contrary to fact by imagining a counterfactual that would stipulate a radically different ethical landscape and then using it to judge the present facts.
What about rape?
Perhaps, Thomson’s argument doesn’t work for pregnancy generally, but it still works in cases of rape. There was no consent, so the “baby lottery” characterization breaks down. In this way, the parallel between the violinist scenario and a rape case are strengthened.
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However, there remain too many points of disanalogy to maintain that this is a valid argument by analogy. (1) The parental role is left out, (2) active vs. passive distinction is left out, and (3) natural death vs. manslaughter/murder/killing.
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It’s just/fair to decline the violinist but unjust to punish someone for another’s crimes, as with rape pregnancies.
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Plus, being harmed is no excuse to harm another, especially if that other person is morally/legally innocent.
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Abortion is not how civilized society should treat human beings just because they remind us of painful, ugly, or unpleasant events.
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Abortion adds trauma without necessarily resolving any prior trauma.
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Abortion doesn’t unrape anyone.
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We should prefer to suffer evil than generate more of it.
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New life can be redemptive.
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We can celebrate life without celebrating the evil act that produced it.
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Many rape victims don’t terminate the pregnancy, though abortion is treated like a forgone conclusion.
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This is a small percentage of abortion cases, and exceptions should not make the rule.
Imperfect Drug Analogy
According to David Boonin the “Good Samaritan” Argument, specifically the violinist argument, can be recast in terms of a thought experiment about an imperfect drug (David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion [Cambridge, UK; NY: Cambridge, 2003], 172). In this thought experiment, a doctor prescribes a necessary drug to a patient though both know there’s a chance for that person to develop, as a side effect, a kidney condition in seven years (the same kind the “violinist” had) and if that happens, the doctor is the only one who can give the life-saving kidney sharing treatment. Now, Boonin argues that if the doctor had an alternative medicine, a “perfect drug” which had no such side effects, then the doctor would be ethically responsible for the kidney sharing treatment 7 years later. But if there was no “perfect drug” and the imperfect drug was the only option, then the doctor is not ethically obligated for kidney-sharing because even though he generated the person’s existence (i.e., by giving a life-saving imperfect drug) he did not generate the person’s specific neediness (since he did not directly cause the side-effects; the drug caused that). Boonin argues that abortion is akin to the imperfect drug scenario and not the perfect drug scenario.​
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By extending an analogy with another different analogy Boonin’s “Imperfect Drug” loses explanatory power. It’s awkward and convoluted, it is for philosophy what mixed metaphors are for English—it signals a confused, incomplete idea.
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Since sex remains the natural route to motherhood and pregnancy, whereas obscure diseases are not the natural route to drugs and kidney-sharing technology, there remains a critical disanalogy at the point where natural law ethics enters the conversation. Natural relations can generate moral responsibility where otherwise comparable but non-natural relations do not. A parent is responsible for their child in a way that a stranger is not.
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Disanalogy: the initial disease, in the story, isn’t paralleled in reality. Pregnancy is not a disease nor a cure for a disease. Neither does elective abortion cure any “disease.”
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The doctor-patient relation, while similar to a parent relation, is still different from parent relations in ways that undermine the analogy. Doctors attend to the patient’s health, parents attend to the child’s health and well-being. Doctors give of their service, whereas parents give of themselves. The patient’s dependence on the doctor is unfortunate/tragic while the child’s need for his or her parents is normal/healthy/good.
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By treating the child’s need the same as the patient’s, the analogy blurs medical and familial dependance, as if these are morally equivalent. But the child’s needs are intrinsic, normal, and healthy; the patient’s needs are extrinsic, abnormal, and sick.
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Human nature (which includes child-to-parent dependence) carries established/intrinsic norms and values while medicines (which generate the kidney-sharing dependent relation) have only fabricated/extrinsic values.
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By appealing to an unrealistic scenario, it’s difficult to imagine what real moral duties might result for the Doctor.
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With these points of disanalogy, the doctor may or may not be ethically obligated in the “perfect drug” or “imperfect drug” scenarios without that scenario informing us about whether pregnancy issues in the same ethical obligation.
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As such, Boonin may have identified a real difference (between causing people’s existence vs. causing their neediness) that is relevant in some scenarios but he has not demonstrated it to be a relevant analogy to pregnancy.
Improving the Violinist argument?
Overall, the violinist argument is seriously undercut by accusations of disanalogy and rebuttals with stronger analogies that fail to generate the same, sympathetic, response for which Thomson is aiming.
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A stronger argument from analogy would be if the woman plugged into the machine linking her to the violinist because she received physical pleasure from it (maybe it involved a morphine shot as part of the procedure) and she was not intending to help the violinist; but she knew that there was a good chance that the machine rejects her, even if there is also the chance that it accepts her and she’ll be locked into a 9 month contract to share kidneys with this violinist. As it turns out, it didn’t reject her and she is now hooked up to the violinist. In that case she has consented and Thomson’s example could be made more analogous. Unfortunately, that scenario would not generate a compelling pro-choice conclusion. Strengthening the analogy, it turns out, undermines any pro-choice conclusions. As such, it’s not clear that the violinist argument can be much improved without weakening or ruining Thomson’s pro-choice objective.
