Roy Orbison and Judith Thomson

Harry, you are a prince. And run a full-service, yes-we-take-requests, kind of blog.

It’s a great story. How often I have thought to myself, lying awake in some agony or another,

“only Roy Orbison, can know the way I feel tonight. Only Roy Orbison knows this feeling, ain’t right.”

I don’t know that he would be my *first* choice to administer the soothing balm on my death-bed, but he is certainly in the top 5.

Okay, I’ll disagree with Judith Thomson. When there are reasonable steps that can be taken to preserve someone’s life, there is a moral obligation to do so. If I came across a gang that is violently attacking her as I walk down the street, I may not be obligated to attempt to save her on my own, jumping into the fray, but I certainly am morally obligated to call 911. Whether or not it worked, Roy Orbison’s gesture was a not unreasonable step for him to take.

I’m pro-choice, but surely to be intellectually honest this example must include the fact that Henry Fonda contributed by action to the situation that the victim finds him-or-herself in to be a proper analogy, excluding abortions after rape and incest, of course. It seems to me that this fact would change a lot of people’s minds about whether Henry Fonda needs to get his ass on a plane.

I understand, Henry, but couldn’t it be restated: does a person have an ethical responsibility to perform an action to save a life if he/she previously committed an act that contributed to the duress in question? Does the soon-to-be-dead-person have a right to demand that the other party perform an act within their power that could fix the situation?

(Yes, I liked the Roy Orbison story.)

I know that Judith Thomson is a famous analytic philosopher, but I have to say that, simply based on the OP, the thought experiment about Henry Fonda strikes me as rather ridiculous.

The only proposition that thought experiment supports is the proposition that “X does not have a right to the bare minimum needed to sustain life when that bare minimum can only be provided by a heroic, supererogatory action carried out by one particular individual.” That says absolutely nothing about whether a “right to life” includes a right to be provided with enough food, water, etc. — the bare minimum — needed to sustain life.

I also don’t understand why an article on abortion even gets into the question of what a general “right to life” entails in terms of duties, etc etc. Surely the relevant questions re abortion in this respect are (1) the moral standing, at various stages, of the fetus, and (2) whether the fetus has a right to life, and if so when it applies, and if so how it interacts w the rights of the mother. W/r/t these specific questions, the general question of what person X having a “right to life” entails would seem almost completely irrelevant.

Thompson’s argument against the right to the bare minimum doesn’t show that there is no such right, but at most that Fonda is not the duty bearer with respect to that right. There would be nothing incoherent in thinking that people have such a right and that the correlative duty is held by states with respect to all persons on their territory, say. We might need to refine and explicate the content of that a bit, but that seems the way to go.

Gabriel@12:

does a person have an ethical responsibility to perform an action to save a life if he/she previously committed an act that contributed to the duress in question?

Two thoughts come to mind: (1) you’re privileging acts of commission over acts of omission: do you mean to do so? And (2) in fact, the “act” is something that only with some small probability contributes to the duress of that other “person”[1] (in the case of pregnancy), right? Because the sex act produces a zygote with low probability, yes? If you want to go down this route, aren’t you also committed to things like demanding that all stockholders in companies that pollute be responsible for all harms to all persons from that pollution? It’s pretty clear that mercury contamination from coal-powered plants is causing all sorts of harms, and yet stockholders are held harmless. The standard dodge of “well, they’re corps, there’s the corporate barrier to liability” is a legalism, and obviously you (and all of us) are talking about -ethical- obligations, right?

[1] In quotes b/c I don’t accept that an embryo is a person in the same sense that a born person is a person.

@Harry
Thank you for the link to the article.

The David Foster Wallace story “Luckily the Account Executive Knew C.P.R.” presents a similar scenario: deserted parking garage, employee morally compelled to perform CPR on his boss until morning (or possibly forever, given the existential nature of sterile modern architecture).

Incidentally, the Kitty Genovese case Thomson cites turns out to be a journalistic fabrication.

So… the more heroic or wonderful acts that people perform (and as Bianca points out, the agency in these thought experiments/anecdotes is all with the male actors) the more we must force women to give birth, just in case the offspring might do something wonderful in future?
This is just the same old “but, you might abort someone who finds the cure for cancer, or thre next Stephen Hawking!” with a respectable ap gloss.

One thing that has always annoyed me about the Thomson example is the fact that the life to be saved is that of a famous violinist, which seems to be morally irrelevant*. It’s great that, in the Orbison story, it’s a famous person taking action to save the life of someone obscure.

* Presumably, no one in Thomson’s target audience thinks it would be OK to kill a random person in order to save the violinist, so how can there be any additional obligation to save the violinist as opposed to a random stranger.

Is there really no failure to a assist a person in danger law that would be applicaple to a magical hand Henry Fonda in the US? (im not accepting for a second Roy Orbisons magical voice is a real life version of that, but just staying within in the hypothetical with the only special single person magical hand, how can there even be a discussion about a duty to use that hand). Im still rather optimistic that outside a strange subculture that takes philosophy classes, abortion support is based on the reasonable assumtion that a fetus is a fetus, not a person instead of a narcistic conception of society where no one has a duty to go through minor inconvenience to save someones life.

Henry,

Possibly I missed it, but I saw nothing in the paper to suggest Thomson believes there should be a law that requires people to put their life in danger to save a crime victim. She says exactly the opposite of that. If we’re meant to assume she supports some supposedly anti-conservative agenda that she explicitly argues against, why should I not suppose she really is opposed to abortion?

I read the paper as suggesting we have very strong intuitions against the Fonda situation, and that our intuitions against the violinist situation are different for interesting reasons, but should not be. I simply don’t believe we could overcome our reluctance to hold a movie star “accountable” in a similar situation. What would give is our readiness to believe a given action would be life-saving.

I actually experienced something very akin to the Kitty Genovese case when I was in graduate school in Toronto many years ago. I had an apartment that was in the front of an apartment building that was very deep, with a school yard from a school on the other side of the block abutting it’s back. I was awakened one night by blood curling screams coming from the general direction of the back of the apartment house — the sort of screams that when you hear them, you know instantly something is terribly wrong. I went to my window, but could not see what was happening. I called the police. They came, and found a woman seriously wounding by stabbing in the school year; if they hadn’t arrived, she would certainly have died. The next day the police called to interview me. There wasn’t much I could tell them — I hadn’t seen anything. But I was sure that I could not have been the only person in the building that awoke to these screams: I am not a light sleeper, and I was at more of a distance from what actually happened those many in the rear of the building, where they might actually have been in a position to observe anything. I had even voices from the back of building saying what is going on. But the police told me mine was the only call. That shocked me: I understood myself as having acted on an universal moral obligation, at virtually no cost or inconvenience to myself.

But — contra Thomson — I don’t see thought experiments of this type as being particularly helpful to decision making around abortion. A right to life is not the same as the right to potential life, where there are at the very least conflicting moral considerations involving the woman carrying the fetus. The question for me is a simple one: who should we trust to as the best judge of those moral considerations, the woman herself or the legislatures of states like Georgia and Missouri, and justices like Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. The question answers itself.

The real life example is enough like the hypothetical to make the hypothetical seem less ridiculous. Or at least that’s what I have always thought.

Which real life example, the emergency room or the kidney?

I don’t see the kidney case as being like the hypothetical at all. There is a big difference between donating a kidney and flying across the country. Or suppose we don’t require Mr. Fonda to fly at all. Suppose the patient is in his home town, not on the East Coast, and Fonda need only drive to the hospital, possibly with a police escort to save time, to administer his touch. Then what?

And if we can inconvenience the surgeon and ER staff, who would rather be taking a coffee break, then why not Fonda?