Judith Jarvis Thomson

Judith Jarvis Thomson (born 1929) is an American moral philosopher and metaphysician, best known for her use of thought experiments to make philosophical points.

Career

She attended Hunter College High School in New York and taught at MIT for the majority of her career, remaining there as professor emerita. She is well known for thought experiments. Her ex-husband, James Thomson, was also a professor of philosophy at MIT for many years.

In 2012, she was awarded the Quinn Prize by the American Philosophical Association.

A Defense of Abortion

Main article: A Defense of Abortion

One thought experiment for which Thomson is especially well-known occurs in her paper A Defense of Abortion:

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. ... 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.

The scenario is meant to push back against the concept that human beings possess an unalienable right not to be killed.

In this paper, Thomson argues on the basis of the violinist thought experiment that "the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly." Therefore, to show that abortion is morally impermissible, "it is by no means enough to show that the fetus is a person and to remind us that all persons have a right to life—we need to be shown also that killing the fetus violates its right to life, i.e., that abortion is unjust killing. And is it?" Thomson's article defends abortion rights and functions primarily as an argument by analogy in regards to the idea of mother/fetus consanguinity.

The paper meets reactions and criticisms from many different philosophers and bioethicists. Philippa Foot, a prominent Aristotelian ethicist argued that negative non-provision of service, as in the case of the violinist, is different from active killing, or interference, as in abortion (see Foot's book Moral Dilemmas, 86-87). Thompson's thought experiment has also been replied to by Oxford philosopher John Finnis in "The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion: a reply to Judith Thompson". Thomson in turn turn replied to Finnis in her paper, "Rights and Death", reprinted in her volume of essays, _Rights, Restitution, & Risk_.

Writings

• Normativity (2008)
• Goodness and Advice (2003)
• Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (1996)
• The Realm of Rights (1990)
• Rights, Restitution, and Risk (1986)
• Acts and Other Events (1977)
• Killing, Letting Die and the Trolley Problem (1976)
• The Right to Privacy (1975)
• Preferential Hiring (1973)

See also

• American philosophy
• The fat man version of the trolley problem
• Violinist (Thought Experiment)
• List of American philosophers

External links

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.)-- Judith J. Thomson
• Boston Review (1995)-- "Abortion", Judith J. Thomson