“Give me liberty, or give me death!” - Patrick Henry (Wirt: 1836).
Abstract
In “Abortion and Ownership” John Martin Fischer argues that in Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case you have a moral obligation not to unplug yourself from the violinist. Fischer comes to this conclusion by comparing the case with Joel Feinberg’s cabin case, in which he contends a stranger is justified in using your cabin to stay alive. I argue that the relevant difference between these cases is that while the stranger’s right to life trumps your right to property in the cabin case, the violinist’s right to life does not trump your right to liberty in the violinist case.
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Notes
Although Thomson contends that abortion is not always impermissible, she contends that it might not always be permissible; for example there may be situations in which being a minimally decent Samaritan requires that one go through with the pregnancy. (Thomson 1972: 65) For example, suppose that there was a breakthrough in incubator technology, and fetuses could be safely removed from a mother and safely grow to maturation in these new incubators starting at 2 weeks. A minimally decent Samaritan might be required to carry the fetus for two weeks and then get it safely removed, rather than being allowed to perform an abortion.
Note: in Feinberg's original case, you do the breaking into another's cabin. Here I've reversed the ownership roles to make the case more analogous to Thomson's violinist case.
Otsuka's principle entails incompatibilism, or the view that free will and moral responsibility require multiple possible futures. (Otsuka 1998) Fischer is a semi-compatibilist and believes that moral responsibility is consistent with there being only one possible future. In "Blame and Avoidability: A Reply to Otsuka," John Martin Fischer and Neal A. Tognazzini argue that Otsuka's principle is vulnerable to Frankfurt-style cases—cases in which an agent is supposed to be morally responsible despite lacking multiple possible futures (Fischer and Tognazzini 2010). In "A rejoinder to Fischer and Tognazzini," Otsuka argues his principle is immune the Fischer and Tognazzini's Frankfurt-style case (Otsuka 2010). The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists is highly contentious, and within this debate there is a wide body of literature built around Frankfurt-style cases that is too large to cover here. See Frankfurt (1969, 2006), Widerker (1995), and Kane (1996) for the heart of the debate.
It is, I think, easy to equivocate between Thomson's conception of your right to control your body and property rights in virtue of her expanding baby case. In this case you find yourself trapped in a house with a rapidly growing child. Thomson argues that in this case a third party has a non-arbitrary rationale for saving your life over the child's life because the child is in your home. It is innocent, by stipulation, but your property right in your home gives the third party a reason to seek to intervene on your behalf. (Thomson 1972: 52) By analogy, abortion to save the mother's life is justified because the mother's ownership of her body gives you a reason to intervene on her behalf. Although it is true the mother owns her body, this ownership is more substantive than normal ownership, and one's rights to one's body are different than normal property rights.
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Simkulet, W. Abortion, Property, and Liberty. J Ethics 20, 373–383 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9201-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9201-x