Thomson’s violinist: what is the point of thought experiments in moral philosophy?

This is a very powerful argument and I was shocked the first time I read it. However, despite being a supporter of abortion I don’t think *this* thought experiment has much to say about reality. A foetus growing inside a woman is not a stranger, either to the woman herself or her intercourse partner.

If you replace an unrelated “famous violinist” with “your own five year old son” then I think the argument has far less persuasive power.

hix: Which do you think?

Tom – but then she has established something, viz that the right to life is a marginal issue here, and it is not the right to life per se, but the moral force of some connection, that requires one not to abort. An account of what that connection is and why it has such strong moral force is what’s needed (and rarely provided by opponents of abortion, except by saying things like “but it’s her flesh and blood” or the like).

(I actually disagree that it is not a stranger, by the way — neither their mother nor I felt that we knew our children until several weeks after their birth. Loved them from the start, sure, but as strangers).

US. Id expect the biggest approval numbers there for the it should be permisable to unplug yourself position there in the developed world. Just that i would have expected those to be a minority everywhere.

A small point on the gratuitously violent nature of philosophical examples. I first raised the point here where a character in the examples is killed off for no reason I could see. Brian Weatherson gives some more here.

It would be silly to make this objection as regards examples involving abortion. In this case, the gratuitous feature is the “famous violinist” part of the example. Presumably, almost no-one is likely to agree[1] that we have an individual duty to save famous violinists but not others. So, including this irrelevant distraction seems to me, at best to complicate things to no purpose, and at worst, to stack the deck in favor of the view that it is OK to unplug.

fn1. Although in practice, things might be different. In The Pianist, lots of people were willing to do things to save a famous pianist that they didn’t do for others, and this didn’t strike me as unrealistic.

The main argument of the Thomson article (not at all made explicit, and in fact obscured by her talk of “killing”), is that a woman who has an abortion is in effect allowing the foetus to die rather than actively killing it, as, when you unplug the violinist, you’re allowing him to die.

But the people who Harry thinks have inconsistent beliefs don’t believe abortion is allowing to die — they think it’s killing, and that’s certainly a key part of anti-abortion rhetoric (abortion = murder, not abortion = failing to save.)

So I don’t think that what Thomson does is point out an inconsistency in people’s beliefs. Instead, she raises a challenge to one of those beliefs, inviting people to see abortion as involving not a killing but a defensible decision not to take extraordinary measures to save another.

A major contribution but not, in my view, the one Harry describes.

“Violinists are people and fetuses aren’t. Duh” (Matthias Wasser at 5).

There’s a problem with making the category of a person (as opposed to eg human being) central to one’s thinking about issues like this: namely, that it is itself a highly plastic and contested category, and the way people draw their boundaries around it tend to reflect their prior ethical commitments. Someone who expresses the conviction that a fetus is not a person is usually partly covertly expressing a prior conviction that abortion under the relevant circumstances is permissible. So the non-personhood of the fetus can’t function as a ground for the permissibility of abortion, on pain of lightly-disguised circularity.

With regard to thought-experiments in ethics, it seems silly to say that they are generally not OK, since some such experiments depict situations (eg lifeboat cases, the trapped potholer, even the trolley problem) that can occur and in many cases presumably have occurred; not to consider them would be to cut oneself off arbitrarily from bits of ethical thought and life. But some thought-experiments do seem to me to be not OK, namely the fantastical ones that ask us to imagine that the very general facts about human life are very different from what they actually are (eg your own fetus is not a blood relation — however that is supposed to work). The basic concepts of ethics (centrally, virtue- and vice-concepts) derive essential parts of their content from their roles in human ethical life and thought: to ask whether we would apply them or withold them in imagined circumstances in which some of the basic presuppositions of that life and thought no longer apply, is often to ask a simply unintelligible question. Thomson’s “people-seeds” thought-experiment is of this kind.

@Darius: I agree with much of this. I have no objection to thought experiments where the appeal to intuition is supported by the fact that the assumptions of the experiment are themselves reasonable and intuitive. But, I strongly object to cases where you are suppose to rely on your intuition in problems where the assumptions are either wildly outlandish or directly contrary to normal intution.

Take the trolley problem. It’s certainly useful to ask whether there’s a difference between
(a) You have to choose right or left, and right will kill more people than left
(b) You can choose not to act, in which case the train will go right and kill more people or go left

But once you bring in the fat man you’ve lost me. No one has good intuitions about absurd cases like this. (But make him a fat violinist from Twin Earth who will go on to father both Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler, and I can tell you instantly what to do:-)).

Similarly @engels, I at least don’t object to abstraction as long as there is enough left to represent an important part of a real problem. My objections are to counterintuitive assumptions and, as you say, McGuffins.

The point of the fat man is to warn you not to trust your intuitions (or at least your gut reactions). Most students in my experience recoil from pushing the fat man onto the tracks, but cannot defend a principled difference between that and switching the trolley. (He’s fat to make it plausible that he can derail the trolley).

Either Tom’s wrong or I’ve misread Thomson. I’m not going to check now, but Monday I have to read through it again and will check.

Harry, thanks for the tip (and I shall look into it). I can see how one might assert a duty, the stringency of which varies inversely with distance (however one define “distance”). From my perspective, though, the really interesting question is finding the point at which “you should do X” elides into “other people may legitimately compel you to do X”.

JQ@7 summed up my response to the “famous violinist” distraction. Even though I share Thomson’s general aim, my response to the violinist was to punch him for ruining him my outfit, pull the plugs out, hunt down the kidnappers, call the cops, sue for wrongful imprisonment, and my dry cleaning bill.

Thomson could have avoided all these camp distractions by combining two of her [not] experiments. “Imagine you wake up one morning, and there is a famous violinist living in your uterus”. Now, THAT would start a lively discussion.

@harry “The point of the fat man is to warn you not to trust your intuitions” That’s a good point, and I don’t trust my intuitions except in situations where they have had plenty of practice in reaching reasonably good answers.

So, why can’t I respond to the violinist example, or other similarly strange ones, by saying “My intuition is that it’s OK (or maybe not OK) to unplug, but I’ve learned (maybe from the fat man example) that I shouldn’t trust my intuitions in odd hypothetical situations, so I’ll disregard this example”

while revising and polishing a thought experiment on the zombie problem, zombies stormed your home, overpowered you, and ate your brain.

If they then took up residence in your husband’s uterus, abortion would become a sacrament.

I think part of the promise of the violinist model is that there is a clear alternative to the coercion – the violinist gets to take some ownership of the dilemma, the two of you have opportunities to talk and be persuaded, to offer compensation, to learn to care for one another or not. You’re hooked up in a hospital where food, shelter, etc. are provided, and once awake have the chance to demand the violinist and friends look after your existing family, ensure that your job is available nine or twelve months later, etc.

The points in my first sentence are the internal arguments for seeking either prenatal care or termination. The points in the second sentence ought to be the first line of action for people who believe both in the sanctity of human life and liberty of contract, enlightened self-interest, etc. But the main value is (what I think of as GA Cohen’s argument b/c he put it so well) is in turning the issue into one requiring interersubjective justification, face to face. De-“Milgram”-izing the moral issue. Something not true for the trolley problems, which is why I don’t like those, but am fond of Thomson’s.

What ethical philosophy teaches me – as in the violinist and trolley car thought experiments, and also in Peter Singer’s thinking on poverty – is that logical analysis has little or nothing to do with the way that people’s beliefs about moral obligations to others are actually formed.

Then again, maybe I misunderstood, but then what is it exactly that you find ‘odd’ about the fat man example? You mean that you find it implausible, right?

Activly killing people is something most people dont do in hypothetical examples, because it is just so unlikely to be the best course of action in real life and the huge emotional appeal throws you out of the let me think just within that theoretical model mode.

@engels “You mean that you find it (fat man example) implausible, right?”

Exactly right. It seems to me highly unlikely that, in the situation described, pushing the fat man onto the tracks could be guaranteed to work. Either he might be killed/injured but fail to stop the trolley or, if I didn’t push, some other event might occur that would prevent the disaster. But I’m supposed to believe with probability 1 that the trolley will be stopped if and only if I push the fat man. Then having adopted such counterintuitive beliefs, I’m supposed to consult my intuition.

To the extent that I have relevant intuitions derived from actual cases I have thought about, they relate to preventive war. There, experience tells us that you can be presented with a ginned-up, but hard-to-refute, case that war is the only way to prevent disaster. If you concede the hypothetical “Assuming that preventive war is the only way prevent disaster, do you support it”, you get stuck with the problem of trying to argue against dodgy dossiers, SOTUs and the like. A bright line rule against preventive war is highly desirable as a way to stop this.

Note that the problems with simplified economics examples aren’t quite the same, because there isn’t the same reliance on intuition. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem, for example, is a theorem, whether or not you find the result intuitive. There is, of course, still the general problem of abstraction: is the case of two goods, two factors and two countries close enough to reality to be relevant?

I am more in the play myself age, just stoped playing one actually. About as relevant as the question if you ever played chess.

The less abstraction the better. That is why I propose to ask how many times Cheney would have to waterboard his wife until he would admit it’s torture.

Following up on Aulus Gellius’ point, the main problem with thought experiments is the term, “thought experiment”. Thought experiments are simply hypotheticals held up as analogies, and we all know how to deal with those: we probe both the hypothetical and the analogy, to see what we can conclude from the former, and then whether it still applies to the original case. But calling something a “thought experiment” has the effect (intentional in most cases, I would surmise) of downplaying, and hence obscuring, the analogical aspect of the argument. Instead, one treats the hypothetical as an abstract, free-floating question–as one would, say, a physics problem–and then claims to extract a general principle from the outcome–again, as one would in physics–which can supposedly then be applied to the original question.

This roundabout way of reasoning by analogy–“solve” the hypothetical, extract a general principle, apply it to the original question–offers loads of opportunities to stretch analogies well past the breaking point, hiding the cracks in the awkward steps from hypothetical answer to general principle, and then from general principle to its application to the original question. For a polemicist, of course, such analogy-stretchers are a goldmine: if I want to convince people of my position on a controversial question, I first construct a convenient analogy that removes all my opponent’s arguments and retains all of my own, plus maybe a few new ones, and call it a “thought experiment”. Then I painstakingly lead my audience along the carefully constructed reasoning path by which, from my carefully rigged analogy, a “universal principle” is extracted that can be applied with full force to demonstrate my correctness on the original issue.

As I’ve argued before, trolley problems are a good example of this–they stack the deck in favor of pure consequentialism, by abstracting away any messy details of life that might argue against pure consequentialist ethics. Likewise, Thomson’s Violinist abstracts away all moral obligations that one might owe another by virtue of history and circumstances. One could easily construct an alternative “thought experiment”–and many anti-abortion polemicists no doubt already have–that similarly stacks the deck, but in the direction of, say, a “general obligation to maintain offspring”. Fortunately, anti-abortion polemicists–at least those whose arguments I’ve heard–typically aren’t so intellectually snobbish as to dress up their rigged analogies as “thought experiments”.

I have to wonder to what extent the discussion would change were the hypothetical parasite a violist instead. If not, how about an oboist? A bagpiper? Seriously? Even a banjo player?

Midway through a Sunday afternoon performance by the Tokyo String Quartet there was a fire alarm. We evacuated nonchalantly; the hall was new, still under construction, it was generally assumed that it was a glitch of some sort, as indeed it proved to be. There was a certain amount of concern about the instruments, a set collected by Paganini all made by Stradivarius. It’s likely that many of us, in appropriately contrived circumstances, would prefer one of a few fine fiddles from Cremona to any of an apparently inexhaustible supply of virtuosos.

We need to remind ourselves that an abortion doesn’t necessarily mean one less child, since the mother can usually, if she so chooses, bear another. It certainly wouldn’t be precisely the same, but if the loss of any possible human instance is an issue then menstruation is an occasion for a funeral and any male sexual expression is a holocaust.

The problem with philosophical thought experiments in general is that they aren’t experiments, but stories contrived to force you to reach a certain conclusion, but because of this it is so easy to object to the fantastical situations depicted in these “experiments” that derailment is as likely as serious moral thought.

The violinist experiment discussed here for example. If it hapened to me I’d just call the excellent dialysis/kidney treatment centre at the local academic hospital and get them to hook him up to a dialysis machine while he is put on a transplantation waiting list.

I know the argument Thomson is trying to make me think about, but it’s only because I’m already primed for it, just as I suspect the usual public for these sort of thought experiments knows more or less what’s expected of them and is of good will to play along with these games.

John Q:

_In this case, the gratuitous feature is the “famous violinist” part of the example. Presumably, almost no-one is likely to agree[1] that we have an individual duty to save famous violinists but not others. So, including this irrelevant distraction seems to me, at best to complicate things to no purpose, and at worst, to stack the deck in favor of the view that it is OK to unplug._

I think the dialectical purpose of the violinist’s eminence is fairly clear, actually. It it just to underline the intuition that we don’t have a duty to rescue strangers at significant cost to ourselves, _even when the stranger is specially admirable in some way_. If you think that’s true in the specially admirable case, then you’re bound to accept it in all the ordinary ones too.

#3 Harry B. I don’t think what you say in parentheses can be right as a response to those who say that the fetus isn’t a stranger. A particular relationship between parent and child might permanently be, or might become, one of being a stranger in your sense (i.e. be one where you find the other psychologically opaque). That doesn’t make the opaque child a stranger in the sense meant by someone like Tom.

You generally simply don’t need thought experiments at all and they are often very silly and terribly misleading. Instead, taking a close look reality is often preferable and sufficient to bring out the important aspects of an issue.

Case in point here:

There is no significant, clear-cut difference between the pre-natal and early post-natal state as far as personhood is concerned – yet, we are much more inclined to allow the killing of a developing human being during varying pre-natal stages, while most of us would be intuitively dead set against any such killing during the post-natal stage, even if it would permissible from or even mandated from, say, a utilitarian or hmuanistic point of view.

… and for what it’s worth, I think the foetus does not have a right to life in either the case of natural conception or my example of “forced pregnancy”. But I think the “mother’s” right to termination is much stronger in the case of forced pregnancy, *especially because* she is not the natural mother, and less because she had no choice in the matter.

I think Tom raises another useful thing about the violinist analogy. By making it such a bizarre and unpredictable situation, it highlights an aspect of opposition to abortion that is, I think, often present but rarely explicit: the sense that pregnant women are responsible for their condition (here one either makes an exception for victims of rape or just carefully avoids thinking about them). The violinist situation (in part, again, because it’s so bizarrely unlikely) utterly eliminates that aspect: so it forces abortion opponents either to explicitly say “pregnancy is different because women have a choice in the matter (except when they don’t)” or to really scrub that sense out of their arguments.

(interestingly, every now and then a student (usually they turn out to be some sort of lefty) who thinks there is a right to abortion thinks it is impermissible to unplug oneself, because one has extensive and stringent duties to aid stranger in need)

I’m one of these people. Interestingly enough, I’m also one of those people who would throw the fat man in front of the train (or jump myself) , if it were certain to prevent more deaths. I wonder if those two positions are related.

I realize this is about thought experiments, not abortion, but still:

Clay Shirky @30: This seems to be because, for most US adults, the animating belief isn’t about the fetus per se but about society; female (but not male) reproductive capability is regarded, by this group, as being a social and not personal capability, and seems to believe that having socially approved babies is better than not having them.

A VERY interesting insight. Which implies, as you say, that this particular thought experiment simply fails to highlight the issue that’s most important in anti-abortion folks in the US.

But mds, fetuses can’t take up residence in my husband’s uterus, at least until gay marriage is legalized.

I actually think that the violinist example is valuable and relevant in a way in which the trolley example is not. The trolley example in my view is unrealistic and nothing else. It doesn’t illuminate anything. It is a moral dilemma so abstract that we all know we will never face it in reality. Trying to base moral reasoning on impossible or at least highly unusual or marginal cases is bound to be misleading because moral reasoning should work in real life, not in exceptional circumstances.

Why do I think the violinist example is not in that category? Because the situation of a person’s body being vitally connected to another being is not that unusual. It is in fact what every pregnant woman experiences. My take on the violinist example is that it is an attempt at explaining to men – the meaning of pregnancy. Unwanted pregnancy is a moral dilemma that men never have faced and yet they have historically been making the rules, telling women how immoral it was to refuse sharing their body with a fetus for nine months. The example is an apt illustration of what it means “sharing one’s body with another human being for nine months”.

“Basically, I think she’s trying to lead her readers/students into feminism by the back door, without them noticing it—and that trick never works.”

Dr. Science: your point is similar to mine but the proposition that women are “normal human beings” doesn’t sound like radical feminism to me although historically it may have been.

Henry Vieuxtemps: “There were times when every birth was important for the survival of the tribe, and any kind of avoidance of procreation was a gross violation of morality.”

There also were times when it was imperative for the tribe to avoid population growth, either by contraception, abortion, or infanticide. The attitude you are describing arose in specific historic circumstances.

‘this particular thought experiment simply fails to highlight the issue that’s most important in anti-abortion folks in the US.’

Suppose this is true, which it might be. But why would that be a criticism of the thought-experiment? Why think that its purpose is to intervene in US politics? As a (UK-based) academic philosopher, I use this and other thought experiments as teaching tools: they’re stories which I use (in general) to elicit passionate and reasoned responses on which my students and I can do further analytic and argumentative work; and (in particular) to distinguish between different kinds of reason for judgements. I also use true stories (e.g. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan), more-or-less realist fiction (e.g. Melville’s Billy Budd), and science fiction (e.g. Charles Stross’s Glasshouse) for the same purposes. Which kind of story – thought experiment, history, realist or science fiction – works best depends both on the problem and on the students.

Thought-experiments certainly have some problems. For instance, the examples tend to develop ever-more-baroque detail, and obscure the original point; or they’re used to try to force certain conclusions (I’ve seen more than one seminar where someone has tried to use Bernard Williams’s Jim and the Indians case as ‘evidence’ for roughly-Kantian ethics, for instance). But other kinds of stories have their own problems: debating the Hiroshima story can devolve all too easily into an argument about contemporary American foreign policy (not that there’s anything wrong with such argument in general; it’s just not much use when you’ve got a fifty-minute hour to discuss Elizabeth Anscombe on absolute moral duty).

‘this particular thought experiment simply fails to highlight the issue that’s most important in anti-abortion folks in the US.’

But I think this can be an advantage, not a disadvantage of the thought-experiment. Because in fact, if you ask anti-abortion folks, “what issue about abortion is most important to you?” they will probably say something like “the individual fetus’s right to life,” not “the apparent similarity of the shrinking population of my town to historical circumstances where a high birth rate has been needed.”

So the violinist-example, precisely by leaving out some of the important-but-unacknowledged aspects of anti-abortion opinion, forces people to make those aspects explicit (“the situation is different because…”), and thus to examine their own beliefs.

[double post because previous version is in moderation, probably because it contained the word ‘so@ia!isation’]

bianca steele: that’s a very good point. There is a certain, troubling process of so@ia!isation involved in endorsing some responses to a thought-experiment, and rejecting other ones as off-topic. I wonder, though, if it’s just the general process of disciplinary so@ia!isation somehow showing itself more nakedly here than elsewhere, or whether it’s something specific about thought-experiments.

“If I was one of them, I would say that unplugging one violinist would be acceptable, but unplugging a million violinists every year is a completely different story: soon there’s nobody left to play violin.”

But you aren’t one of them and to my knowledge nobody has ever used this argument. Besides, most anti-abortion groups are explicit about opposing abortion in other countries as well and even opposing family planning services in poor countries if abortion is even mentioned (random example: http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=823854).

Right on, Doctor Science.

And to piglet’s comment: the proposition that women are “normal human beings” doesn’t sound like radical feminism to me although historically it may have been.

I don’t think you need to go back to history. There are plenty of people today who — although they might pay lip service to the ideas of equal pay for equal work, the right to vote, etc. — often behave in ways that are counter to this belief.

And bianca makes a good point too:
It seems there is a very narrow range of things one is permitted to consider, and a very narrow range of conclusions one is permitted to draw (for example, wondering about how the situation arose, in a science fiction kind of way, is not permitted, nor is proposing new examples—on the other hand, it is permitted to change the subject to abortion or foreign aid—yet not every change of subject will be allowed).

The very artificiality of the thinking is what put me off these kinds of thought experiments when I first encountered them as a teenager, although I didn’t start to loathe them until online discussions years later.

“But you aren’t one of them and to my knowledge nobody has ever used this argument. ”

I remember a German catholic bishop argueing that a ban on abortion would be great to push the fertility rate upwards.

“if it were certain to prevent more deaths. I wonder if those two positions are related.”

But in real life you are not. In fact in modern western world real life any active violence is always bad due to the degree of uncertainity. The risk that if one think one has found an expectation one is simply wrong is just to high. That was my point a bit above. My theory is that on a sub conscious level, many people might just not buy the model premises, which is good. The abuse done with those torture excuse models is just shocking.

“One wouldn’t construct a law around this sort of thing unless it happened fairly often, which obviously it doesn’t.”

It is amazing how one can so completely miss the point. Unwanted pregnancy is an uncommon condition if one happens to be male. Otherwise, not so uncommon.

“It would be an inefficient use of the world’s resources, I think, to concentrate that many trillion dollars in the tiny republic of Haiti.” Sorry Mathias but you flunked the test. You just argued there is a moral obligation, and it could even be codified in law, to help a stranger in need even if it involves making an unusual sacrifice. If that is your belief, why aren’t you obliged to help Haitians.

hix: “I remember a German catholic bishop arguing that a ban on abortion would be great to push the fertility rate upwards.” No doubt. Otoh I can guarantee that that same bishop would also assert that every single abortion is wrong wherever it happens. Historically

Whose permission exactly is needed to consider certain things and to draw conclusions?

Well, here’s an example. As a teenage student, I was given the hypothetical situation of a child growing up alone on a desert island, and asked: Would it develop its own moral code? Would it be completely amoral?

I thought this was a somewhat ridiculous example, but I doggedly attempted to play along in good faith. I wanted to know how old the child had been when it was abandoned there (there is a big difference between a 15-month-old and a 3-year-old), and under what circumstances. I wanted to know what kind of animals were on the island, and what kind of weather. But the class was not encouraged (read: actively discouraged) from discussing these issues.

So it got farther and farther from anything I could recognize as reality, and more and more untenable (or, to my 19-year-old brain, “stupid”) as a thought experiment. I was already at a loss as to the goal of the exercise (which I freely admit was likely my fault and not the instructor’s), and the artificial constraints being imposed on this already weirdly arbitrary hypothetical just frustrated and exasperated me.

In the same class, I remember citing Wisconsin v. Yoder (the Supreme Court case allowing Amish children to leave school after the 8th grade) to support my contention that the artificial extremes we were arguing on some issue or other could in fact be brought to a workable compromise in the real world.

Does that answer your question?

“It would be an inefficient use of the world’s resources, I think, to concentrate that many trillion dollars in the tiny republic of Haiti.” Sorry Mathias but you flunked the test. You just argued there is a moral obligation, and it could even be codified in law, to help a stranger in need even if it involves making an unusual sacrifice. If that is your belief, why aren’t you obliged to help Haitians.

Uh, where did I say one isn’t obliged to help Haitians? This is a non sequitur.

Are you saying one is obliged? How far does that obligation go? And should that obligation be enforced by law? That question was put to you before and you seemed to reject such an obligation.

Are you saying one is obliged? How far does that obligation go? And should that obligation be enforced by law? That question was put to you before and you seemed to reject such an obligation.

I rejected that it would be a good law for all private US assets be directed towards the very specific end of Haitian relief. This is is not the same as saying one is not obliged to help Haitians, just as, say, a player of string instruments is not a blastocyst.

The analogy is obviously not perfect. I think (as explained in 58) it is a useful one as it conveys how pregnancy differs from other relationships. However if you reject that analogy outright, if you think that the violinist bears no resemblance with any real world moral dilemma, then there is no point in discussing it.

The violinist case is in some ways like pregnancy. It is also like seeing a man drowning, like being stuck in an elevator with someone, like coming down with a terrible illness, and like being infected with vampirism and requiring the blood of the living to remain mobile. Most things are imperfect analogies for a great number of things, not all of which are even imperfect analogies for each other.

Like, okay, here: you’re trapped in an elevator with a little old lady. Between the two of you you have a nanoreplicator which can make you food and magic diapers which avoid any waste management problems, but the rescue crew is going to take 9 months so you’d better get comfortable. Now, it happens that you have just enough telekinetic power that you could sever the elevator from its cord, sending you both to the ground and allowing your escape. You would survive the fall unmolested but the senior citizen would, regretfully, perish in the fall. What do you doooOOOOooooOOO?

83, Right on!*

*LOL

bianca — you’re raising a rather rich and complicated issue about pedagogy (and my post was restricted to the issue of how these examples function as tools in moral theorising). I don’t feel up to responding right now, partly because there’s a lot to say, and partly because I’ve only thought through some of what there is to say! One thing: I mainly teach students who are not, and are not going to be, philosophy majors, and my aim is NOT to enculturate them into Philosophy (not sure I want to do that to anyone, and not sure that I could if I wanted to), but to provide them with intellectual resources not otherwise readily available to think about the kinds of issue that will confront them as citizens and as moral agents in the society they inhabit. I do try to put thought-experiments etc on the table, but also to put them in their place, showing what they can and can’t do.

But your question is worth a long post (not promising one) and some more reflection than I’ve given it (which I do promise, but I may not write it up in a timely manner…)

Harry,
No problem. My concern, though, is whether the effect of these discussions is ever to remove from consideration resources that previously had seemed available. Another has to do with the kind of situation Witt described: surely Witt’s way of approaching the problem is a valid one, and important for scientific progress, yet even beyond questions about socialization, it seems possible that Witt’s classmates concluded that their naive approaches were academically superior to Witt’s in every respect.

The violinist case is in some ways like pregnancy. It is also like seeing a man drowning

Is it very much like making love to a beautiful woman?

I still think people are missing the point of the violinist analogy. The point is not that unplugging a violinist is exactly like abortion (if it were, you might as well just discuss abortion directly), nor that it’s not at all like abortion (in which case it would be irrelevant). The point is that it’s like abortion in some specific ways (you’re being asked to give up your independence to preserve a life; you’re intimately connected to someone you’ve never met; etc.), but unlike it in others (you’re not related to the violinist, unless you are; “you” can be either a man or a woman; it’s a less “natural” situation, in some sense; the violinist is a fully developed person; etc.). So the point isn’t to say “Ha! You wanted to unplug the violinist, so you MUST support the right to abortion!” It’s to make people explain why they would unplug a violinist but not a fetus, or vice versa. Is kinship the important factor? Or the difference between a fetus and an adult? Or a greater willingness to deny women control over their bodies?

And it’s hard to get to those issues without the thought-experiment, because if you just ask people whether they think abortion is wrong (or should be legal), many will explain their answer strictly in terms of right to life/ woman’s right to choose. But the pro-lifer who wants to unplug the violinist has to say “well, I guess kinship is the way I really support my opinions here; do I really think kinship is so important?” or “Hmm, maybe I’m just being unsympathetic because, being male, I’m not at risk of getting pregnant,” or something. Or, I suppose, the pro-choicer who wants the violinist to stay plugged in has to say “Hmm, I guess my opinion really depends on the fetus’ not being a real person, so the biological differences are important,” or something.

1. It was a college Intro to Philosophy class.

2. Part of the problem may well have been that the the instructor failed to “put the thought experiment in its place” — I assume by that Harry means that he should have told the class what we were doing and why. It may also have been that he tried, and I failed to grasp it.

3. One of the great downsides of these artificial hypotheses* is that they are difficult to teach well. By the thoughtfulness and depth of Harry’s CT posts I can make a reasonable assumption that he is equally careful in how he presents these exercises to students. But in the context in which many of us encounter them — such as my own experience in the class above — they are being presented by inexperienced or even incompetent teachers who may themselves have only a limited grasp of the idea behind the exercise.

*I think “artificial hypothesis” is a more accurate term than “thought experiment,” as experiment implies that the answer is not known in advance and that there is not a “right” answer. It has been abundantly clear to me every time I’ve seen the violinist example cited (NOT covered in my class, just to be clear) that at least some of the participants do indeed believe there is a right answer to the scenario.

Or, I suppose, the pro-choicer who wants the violinist to stay plugged in has to say “Hmm, I guess my opinion really depends on the fetus’ not being a real person, so the biological differences are important,” or something.

That’s pretty much how it is for me, although I probably wouldn’t use the phrase “real person”. Someone else put it well, namely that a foetus (especially at an early stage of development) doesn’t have all the trappings of personhood. Until it acquires those trappings, it doesn’t have the same rights as an adult person, as we see in other spheres (eg children). Now, this makes it very difficult to draw a line, morally speaking – my position on the law here is only loosely tied to my moral position.

and if you had prior knowledge that there was a desparate violinist in the neighborhood in the pickle described and you were warned to lock your doors and didnt… either by choice or neglegence ? It would see then you would have more than a “accedental” realtionship to the violinist..

“But the pro-lifer who wants to unplug the violinist has to say “well, I guess kinship is the way I really support my opinions here; do I really think kinship is so important?””

AFAICT pro-lifers regard abortion of an unrelated fetus by a surrogate mother as equally wrong. That doesn’t exclude that kinship plays a role, perhaps on an unconscious level, as concern about fertility also may play a role, but this would not be how the moral principle is explicitly rationalized.

I’ll see ajay at 87 and raise him one: Suppose the person you find plugged into you is . . . John Connor!

As always, I second Doctor Science. Also:

AFAICT pro-lifers regard abortion of an unrelated fetus by a surrogate mother as equally wrong.

That does not surprise me and accords with what I’ve experienced, as they (not all pro-lifers, but a nontrivial percentage of fundamentalist male pro-lifers with whom I’ve talked) hold the doctor morally accountable, in part because they conceptualize the mother as this pitiable hapless thing who somehow got duped out of the greatest thing God has ever given her.

They usually blame the doctor or Planned Parenthood “agents” or etc. for doing the duping — these are the folks they want jailed or executed.

And if a given woman protests this conceptual framework, they say it’s because she’s brainwashed or deluded (ok, they use the word “confused” but what they intend by it is deluded). How could a woman possibly want to choose to not be a mother, given that holy gift of life? An abortionist must have scared her out of motherhood, for profit and to advance the cause of Satan.

Profit, no kidding. Phrases like “murder for money” get bandied about, and a lot of focus in right-wing news coverage of abortionists is on the amount of money a given abortionist charges for the procedure. Like, “so-and-so will murder your child for five thousand dollars.” Charging a lot of money equates to being an extortionist-brainwasher, and charging less money is worse: that equates to being a luring-seductive-brainwasher, a sinister fellow who is in it for the sheer evil of it (profit is secondary), someone who makes you afraid of motherhood and then, silver-tongued, offers the opportunity to back out of it for a modest fee.^1^ I went to a speech in which the person kept saying “Mammon stole this child” and “Mammon is to blame for this genocide — greed is to blame” and folks in the crowd mostly nodded along.

^1^That entire line & other phrases used above are basically stolen, with minimal rephrasing, from different pro-life rallies on campus here — one offered the chance to talk with women who had had abortions and now regretted it; they all talked about how “confused and scared” they were when they went to get an abortion, as if people get an abortion because they are scared and trapped and it’s offered as a way out (explicitly as an alternative to turning to Jesus, which is the appropriate way out).

[trigger warning]

I think the point of the violinist story is to encourage male students to empathise a little with what pregnancy entails. It is a shame that it takes such ludicrous contortions to do this.

Agreed.

…I wanted to say to him ‘What is she guilty of, that you are innocent of?’

Unfortunately, we both know he’d say something horrible like “guilty of fornication without intent to reproduce” and then you and I would end up exasperated and frustrated as he dodged around the question of rape (even though focusing on rape would be giving in to the horrible assertion that sex without intent to reproduce is in any way inherently reprehensible). We’d hear all about how women ask for it with their behavior and their wiles, or we’d hear how rape victims just have to suck it up and accept that life’s unfair sometimes, etc. And, ultimately, he’d be dodging the issue because his worldview just can’t accommodate the existence of rape.

That’s what exasperates me most about this issue: I feel like there’s a 50-50 chance I’ll run into someone who conceptualizes women who have sex wtihout intent to reproduce as agents of evil exploiting the weaknesses of mankind for their own nefarious ends, and a 50-50 chance that I’ll run into someone who cannot possibly see women as moral agents except insofar as they are submissives… and somehow these folks all agree with each other.^2^ Heck, the groups overlap substantially.

^1^Maybe the reason Thomson chose “violinist” is eponymy: it’s a memorably irrelevant word, so everybody who has heard of the thought experiment knows which thought experiment you’re referring to when you refer to the violinist. Same with “fat man” — why does fatness matter? — the word/phrase sticks in memory for being irrelevant and out of place, and ultimately becomes a convenient eponym.

^2^My rather vicious and unfair interpretation of this is: it’s like both camps want to throw women under the bus, but agree to disagree over whether the woman is supposed to like it.

It’s about acknowledging the authority of religious figures.

And of males generally.

And of course, it’s about submitting to that authority (which I guess is what “acknowledging” means in this context). But I agree, and the Ann/Bobbie example encapsulates it perfectly.

Well one great victory this thread has achieved is to dethrone the violin thingy from the status of “experiment” down to mere “analogy” and a poor one at that.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the ultimate summation of philosophical thought experiments:

http://saintgasoline.com/2007/03/04/the-allegory-of-the-trolley-problem-paradox/

It’s remarkable how many different interpretations of the violinist there are in this thread. For instance, I would have denied that the violinist has anything directly to do with abortion at all; the point of the violinist case is simply to argue that the right to life is consistent with killing someone, if certain requirements of justice are already met. This conclusion then, as a further application, has relevance to the matter of abortion insofar as the fetus is thought to have a right to life.

“No doubt. Otoh I can guarantee that that same bishop would also assert that every single abortion is wrong wherever it happens. Historically”

Why does someone that thinks abortion is murder use such minor issues as birthrate as argument against abortions in the first place. That is fishy to me. Maybe there is some strain of cultural imperialism or outright racism along the we have to keep breading white christian babies so that those Muslim immigrants dont outnumber us within the group of abortion opponents. Not dominant, just a part.

“I think the point of the violinist story is to encourage male students to empathise a little with what pregnancy entails.”

Definitily does not work with this male student. I would say one should stay with the violinist and also implement a law that made this manadatory if such things things could happen in real life. The abortion issue is for me is a debate about at which point a fetus become a full human being. Is there really a mainstream debate out there that thinks it should be ok to abort under the premise that the fetus is a full human being (Lawyers bending existing laws dont count, Singer but the fetus doesnt feel pain trolling doesnt count either).

I always thought it was a fat man because the trolley would roll right over a skinny one. Serve me right for thinking there was a logic to it…

Just as with the violinist, there might have been logic behind their inclusion in the story, but the reason they are always in the story is that they became useful handles, not because the logic of their inclusion was so strong.

Why does someone that thinks abortion is murder use such minor issues as birthrate as argument against abortions in the first place. That is fishy to me.

Birthrates are not minor issues at all to important religious figures, especially Catholic ones. “Breed more votes” used to be pretty much the official Catholic political strategy in my country (with the Protestants matching the birthrates every step along the way).

It’s not necessarily the birth rates as such; they conceptualize a group (whites, blacks, Christians, Americans) and then apply their victimization logic to the group. At that point men, women, violinists become irrelevant, it’s the group itself that suffers. Isn’t it quite a common and obvious move?

the point of the violinist case is simply to argue that the right to life is consistent with killing someone, if certain requirements of justice are already met.

I don’t agree, because it’s quite possible to say (as hix does!) something like, “no you do not have the right to exit the situation, you are morally bound to accept your position alongside the violinist” — at which point the case is silent. There’s no argument per se in the thought experiment.

I see the violinist case as a possible way to clarify to someone who is hammering on about “right to life” that maybe they don’t believe in a “right to life” in the way they are claiming — except I’ve never successfully convinced someone of that.

The overarching problem is that “right to life” is a slippery term with no clear concrete meaning, just a charge of emotive content, and (I think) Thomson is attempting to engage with the phrase as if it has a well-defined meaning. (Or maybe she’s trying to help clarify, in a roundabout way, that the concrete meaning is not agreed-upon or well-understood, even by users of that phrase.)

The phrase “right to life” sounds good and feels good to say in an argumentative context, but in that context, it’s just sound and fury. Lots of people who assert “right to life” are OK with the death penalty, and I know this inconsistency gets talked to death all the time, but maintaining both positions strikes me as sufficiently incoherent to clarify that asserting “right to life” is just emoting.

Is there really a mainstream debate out there that thinks it should be ok to abort under the premise that the fetus is a full human being

Yes. That is the mainstream debate, if you want to engage with anti-abortion advocates: one can’t just assert the premise that “full human being”-ness begins at birth or thereabouts, because that’s disputed. (And it’s not a trivial dispute.) The principal difference between baby and fetus that can be asserted in this context is the dependence of that life on the mother: basically, a baby can be raised and sustained by someone else, but a fetus cannot.

I had forgotten about the Patton one. :)

I don’t agree, because it’s quite possible to say (as hix does!) something like, “no you do not have the right to exit the situation, you are morally bound to accept your position alongside the violinist”—at which point the case is silent.

Whatever may be the problem with it, and even if you are right that there is no argument per se in it, I don’t think this can be the problem. The same trouble will arise in things that are obviously arguments as well; if you reject the premises, which is almost always quite possible, at that point the argument is silent. The fact that the whole line of thought can be simply avoided is not a strike against ‘thought experiments’, nor is it enough for us to draw the conclusion that they are not really arguments; arguments constantly have this problem. I’m inclined to think it an argument in the sense that any counterexample is an argument. The violinist is put forward as a counterexample to a claim about the relation between the right to life and killing — one can simply deny that it is really a counterexample, but this is no more and no less than one can do with pretty much any counterexample to any claim on any subject.

I take it that you’re right that Thomson is assuming that there is a (more or less) definite sense to “right to life”; but I’m not sure I understand how it can simultaneously be so indefinite as to be “just a charge of emotive content” and “just sound and fury” and so definite that it can make two positions inconsistent with each other. Purely emotive markers don’t mire anyone in incoherence; so, unless the very idea itself is self-contradictory, if people can hold inconsistent positions on right to life, it would seem to follow that Thomson is right that there is indeed a (more or less) definite sense to the phrase, which can be considered on its own.

@125: that’s ‘cos it’s actually reasoning from the fact of divine dominion. The state, in locum dominis, has the right to strike you dead just like God Himself does. You don’t have the right to do it yourself, because you’re just God’s property, as of course is every fertilised embryo He chooses to give you, which you will dam’ well carry to term unless He chooses to abort it Himself. Hope that helped.

JoB, if you strip the contempt off alex’s response then you probably find the answer. As long as you don’t consider attempted suicide a grave enough infraction to warrant the death penalty, the obligation to the commonwealth to protect the individual — even against their own impulses — is still in place.

It’s not inconsistent, it is simply a conception of a contract that doesn’t gel with our modern conception of a voluntary agreement entered by mutual consent. As an individual you’re born into the contract just like the commonwealth has to accept you into the contract by being born (conceived actually, since we’re discussing abortion). If that’s what you’re stumbling over you can call it “bond” or “social obligation” instead.

That normally is not sufficient to establish consistency, afaik. It is just a fiat.

Why? And in addition, why would one even have to attack the “pro-life, pro-death penalty” position on internal inconsistency grounds? In my experience, 99% of attempts to show up the inconsistency of opposing moral viewpoints are simply the result of an inability to step outside one’s own biases.

ogmb, I took it from 124 – I agree that the argument from internal inconsistency is not a life or death-one, so to speak. But if a certain point of view is in fact internally inconsistent then it’s in my view quite beyond reasonable belief. ‘Being beyond reasonable belief’ doesn’t constrain nut cases, I know. But it does constrain non-nut cases.

I disagree about what Thomson is doing with the phrase “the right to life”. She does think there is a determinate meaning to it, and that people have it, but in this essay she is trying to show (and succeeding admirably in my experience) that most people who invoke it have no idea what they are talking about (the Henry Fonda case, among others in the paper, shows this admirably).

Okay, that sounds more correct than what I said, I agree it is true that we can assign a well-defined, sensible meaning to the phrase “right to life” and that I’ve never seen any relationship between such a definition and right-to-life-based anti-abortion arguments. But I still have some kind of mild technical reservation.

Purely emotive markers don’t mire anyone in incoherence

Here, I guess, is where I technically disagree. For example, it’s perfectly possible to say:

* The violinist has a right to life.

* Regardless of point 1, it’s perfectly moral to detach oneself from the violinist.

* A fetus has a right to life.

* Solely because point 3 is true, it is categorically immoral to abort a fetus.

A purely emotive marker, passing for a meaningful marker when no-one’s looking too closely, does mire someone in incoherence (or at least in logical inconsistency). To assert all four points above, with a well-defined and sensible notion of what “right to life” means, would not be coherent, but you could (and many people do) just choose to be incoherent about it. Consistency is not universally valued, neither is clarity, etc.

That could be taken to say, Thomson’s thought experiment successfully exposes that incoherence/inconsistency: it exposes exactly what Harry said it does about people who invoke the phrase in anti-abortion arguments. I’d agree (and I agree with the OP point about the purpose of thought experiments in general).

I went back just now and reread the Wiki article at the link. I was struck by the specification that the violinist is unconscious. Nobody so far in this thread seems to have focused on this. Does it make a difference? I find, much to my surprise, that it makes a difference to me, as I know very well that I would be unable to look the person in the eye and tell him I have chosen to kill him; whereas I might be capable of getting up and walking away if he will never wake up and know it..

Evidently my aversion to inflicting pain is more deeply rooted than my aversion to killing. Which explains why I can accept abortion but not capital punishment. Can I really be unique? If not, why doesn’t this come up in the debates? (Maybe it does, I am not a student of moral philosophy).

(I think, BTW, that I have just refuted by counterexample the thesis that this particular thought experiment is never useful.)

Would it make a difference to you if the thugs were really nice and didn’t beat you up?

I think, all things considered, I might have to stay plugged in. OTOH, when it was over, boy, those mo-fos better have a good lawyer…

Or, um, … Being John Malkovich.

JoB @ 144: But if you consider two inconsistent beliefs consciously you normally give one up

In that case the only two remaining self-consistent positions are (pro-abortion rights, pro-death penalty) and (anti-abortion rights, anti-death penalty). I’m interested in, but fail to see, a criterion that makes one self-inconsistency (pro-abortion rights, anti-death penalty) an acceptable inconsistency but the other one (anti-abortion rights, pro-death penalty) unacceptable. Nevermind that likely a sizable majority of the population hold one of those two positions.

I was struck by the specification that the violinist is unconscious.

I’d forgotten that (or rather, assumed it implicitly without thinking about it), but it does make sense to assert. It’s not like, analogously, the fetus is communicative. As you said, whole different story if it were possible to hold a conversation…

JoB — It depends whether you can discriminate between a foetus and a person.

It actually depends on whether one considers “Is a foetus a person?” and “Is retributive justice justified?” (and, to go back to your own interest, “Is self-harm sinful?”) questions that are morally linked so that if one answers one question in a certain way one must also answer the others in corresponding ways, or else one falls into the dreaded self-inconsistency trap.

Not a lot of people will be daft enough to be 100% pro abortion and 100% anti death penalty in any super-strict way.

Certainly not, but how would this change our discussion? We seem to be discussing the correlation between commonly held beliefs on two or three moral questions with an unclear linkage. If you add the possibility that beliefs differ in intensity, how would that affect the (in)consistencies between them?

JoB — Obviously, everybody will ask themselves those kinds of questions in slightly different ways, but unless you point me to it I don’t see how different phrasing will affect the underlying question we’re trying to answer — how are those questions linked so that one combination of held beliefs (pro, anti) can be self-consistent while the other (anti, pro) cannot?

LB clearly offers self-consistent explanations for both positions, that’s not what I was asking for.

Prior art notification: Social psychologists Coyle and Sharpe researched an earlier version of this thought experiment in a case they called The Human Leach.

I made a comment on the Violinist in the new thread. However, on some specific points here:

Is the anti-death penalty position premised on a right to life consistent with support for incarceration? After all, I believe most death penalty opponents believe that people normally have the right not to be involuntarily confined, but only the anarchists among them believe that people cannot forfeit this right by their actions. So why is freedom a right subject to forfeit but life not? The anti-abortion position is that the right to life is subject to forfeit on the basis of one’s own actions, and this seems consistent with how rights are treated generally, including by abortion advocates.

Clay Shirky, while the majority favors abortion only in special circumstances, it does not favor *mandatory* abortion in those situations. It is therefore not asserting the claim of society over the individual. Furthermore, the most common cited special case, and the one relevant to the violinist example, is rape, which does not produce children distinguishable from others. The cases where abortion would be permitted seem to be those: 1) where the mother has no moral responsibility for the pregnancy, i.e., rape 2) where the burden on the mother is greater than usual. In the latter case, she has a choice to abort. And the most commonly cited and widely supported case here is where there is a threat to the life of the mother, not where the child is physically impaired. Abortion in the latter case has bare majority support, as opposed to almost 90% support where the mother’s life is threatened (source).