"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 have 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 him 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?" (Judith Thompson) Judith Thompson goes on to
argue that the fetus, like the violinist, has no right to use your body unless
you give it to him. Therefore, abortion, in the case of rape at least, is
permissible. Let us grant that one may indeed unplug oneself from the violinist.
May one take a gun and shoot him in the head? May one cut him into pieces? May
one poison him if by doing so he will disconnect in the process? Of course not,
that would be immoral. Possibly, you will ask why, because he will die in both
cases. Yes, you are the cause of his death in either case. However, in spite of
these similarities there is a difference. The man is sick. If you unplug
yourself from him, he will die from his sickness. For if, he was not sick, he
would not die from being disconnected. Nevertheless, if you shoot him, then he
dies of the bullet you have put in his brain, and not of his sickness. For even
if he were well, he would still die of the damage done by the bullet. Moreover,
you are not responsible for this man's sickness from his bad kidneys. If you
were, you would have to let him use yours. However, you are, of course,
responsible for the bullet in his brain, for the damage you caused to his body.
Thus, supposing that the violinist does not have a right to be hooked up to you,
still the case is that you may do whatever you want to him. Judith Thompson,
stated, "The man has a right to his life," She focuses her attention
on whether he has a right to what it would take to sustain his life. However,
what she fails to notice, is that even if he does not have a right, this does
not imply that whatever one does to him is morally permissible. In the same
way-that the fetus does not have a right to use the woman's body unless she
gives it to him-does not imply that whatever one does to the fetus is morally
permissible. Rather, just as one may not stab the violinist in the throat or
shoot him in the head, causing such severe damage to his body that death occurs,
furthermore, one may not cut the fetus into pieces or poison him to death. Thus,
all Judith Thompson can hope to infer from the violinist example is that one may
"disconnect" oneself from the fetus providing one does not fatally
damage his body in the process. This means that of the six methods of abortion
only those cases of prostaglandin chemical abortion (where the woman's uterus is
stimulated to contract and expel the fetus whole) in which the fetus is born
alive and is not decapitated or fatally damaged by the violence of the
contractions, and those cases of cesarean section abortion where the fetus dies
of neglect rather than by the knife, that only these cases are possibly morally
permissible types of abortion. Only those cases where the fetus is not fatally
damaged by the procedure might be permissible (on Judith Thompson's showing),
for only such procedures might be cases of "disconnecting" oneself
from a person. The other methods of abortion, dilation and curettage, dilation
and evacuation, suction or vacuum aspiration, and salt poisoning, cause the
death of the fetus by dismembering him or by poisoning him, and therefore are
parallel to cutting the violinist to pieces or poisoning him to death, both of
which are moral atrocities. As regards the two procedures of abortion which
might be morally permissible, let us consider only the strongest case, that of
cesarean section abortion which invariably leaves the fetus intact? Judith
Thompson argues, "Since a woman owns her body, the fetus can have no right
to use it unless she gives him the right." In cases of rape, she has
clearly not given the fetus the right. Therefore, it is permissible for her to
deprive the fetus of the use of her body by disconnecting herself from it even
if it will surely die, since that does not violate any of the fetus' rights. I
submit that either the first premise is false, or the inference that therefore
it is permissible to deprive someone of the use of something to which it has not
been given the right is false. The thrust of the first premise seems to be that
if you alone own something, then you alone have the rights to it. No one else
has any right to it unless you give it to him or her. Judith Thompson does not
argue that one's body is different from anything else one might own; therefore,
her premise is a particular case of the more general principle: If a person owns
something, then no one can have a right to use that entity unless that person
gives him or her the right. There are many normal intuitive counter-examples to
this claim, such as owning an abundance of food and turning a starving beggar
away. Here a person owns something, and the person has not given the beggar the
right to use it, but it is not permissible to deprive or withhold it from him,
especially if it means his death. In the spirit of Judith Thompson's article, I
feel one must consider this scenario: suppose the woman who has been hooked up
to the violinist owns the air in the room where they are. Suppose she is finical
about what she breathes and has purchased canisters of oxygen. Suppose she
designed a pair of rooms where oxygen is released steadily into, one room while
nitrogen and carbon dioxide are pumped out into the other. After about a month,
the oxygen one breathes in the first room is from the canisters. Any
non-canister oxygen left is insufficient to live on. Suppose the woman and the
violinist are in the first room and that there is plenty of oxygen for both. It
is not morally permissible to shoot, stab, or poison the violinist, which in
turn would fatally damage him. However, it is permissible to suffocate him to
prevent him from turning this woman's breathable oxygen into non-breathable
carbon dioxide if she has not given him the right to do this to her oxygen? He
will die, of course, but she does not mutilate or poison his body by putting a
pillow over his face until he dies. Clearly, the fact that she owns the oxygen,
and the fact that she has not given him the right to breathe it, does not
therefore make it permissible for her to deprive him of it by suffocating him.
Is it permissible, then, for the woman to move the violinist into another room
because it is her oxygen and she has not given him the right to use it? Surely,
this is permissible. It is hers, and she does him no harm. What if the only
other room is one filled with poisonous gases? What if the only other room is
the one filled with nitrogen and carbon dioxide? What if the only other
environment is one in which neither he nor any healthy person can live?
Supposing there is enough oxygen for both of them, she must then allow him to
breathe her oxygen. Because oxygen is a necessity even for healthy people, and
one may not withhold it from someone when there is plenty for all at the cost of
one's life, not even if one owns it. Therefore, either it is false that if a
person owns something, and no one has a right to use that entity unless the
person gives him the right. Or, it is false that it is permissible to deprive
someone of the use of something to which he has not been given the right.
Moreover, we must ask: why may you deprive the violinist of the use of your
kidneys when they are good enough to sustain you both and he will die without
it? For two reasons taken together. First, the violinist can only require the
use of your kidneys for nine months to stay alive if he is ill. If you deprive
him of the use of them, he dies of a sickness for which you are not responsible.
If you were responsible, you could not rightly disconnect him. Second, since to
remain attached to a sick violinist filtering the poisons from his blood for
nine months is as severe a case of extraordinary means of saving a life as one
could hope to imagine, it is not incumbent upon you to accede to this situation
to repair him. However, breathing air is the most ordinary of all means of
sustaining life. Obviously, the fact that someone requires air to sustain his
life does not mean he is sick. Thus, if one deprives him of air, then he dies
not of some sickness for which you are not responsible, but from a deprivation
of necessities for which you are responsible. Thus, it is incumbent upon you to
let him breathe the air that you own. Additionally, let us look at abortion. If
the fetus is not sick, and one removes the fetus from the womb and it dies, the
fetus dies because it has been taken out of that environment which is the
ordinary means for sustaining life. Some fetuses are sick, and they are
spontaneously aborted. The ones, which are deliberately aborted, are healthy,
or, at any rate, die under conditions, which would kill the healthiest of them.
In abortion the fetus dies not of something for which one is not responsible;
the fetus dies either because someone poisons the amniotic fluid it lives in, or
because someone dismembers it, or because the fetus is taken out of the natural
environment in which it lives. Even supposing the fetus does not have a right to
be "hooked up" to a woman, to use her body, still it is outrageous to
suppose she or a doctor may poison, dismember, or let the fetus die in an
environment that cannot support its life.