Topics Abortion

Question I have been reading about abortion recently and came across a ‘thought experiment’ used by Judis Jarvis Thomson about an expanding baby. The scenario is that you're in your house when your baby starts expanding rapidly. You realise that you have no chance of getting out and the only way to survive is to pop and kill the baby. The idea is that this is an analogy for mothers who will die if an abortion is not performed i.e. is it ok to kill in this form of self-defence? These thought experiments are designed to provoke a moral attitude which can then be applied to discover your true feelings on a particular issue. My instant reaction was that yes, it was ok to pop the baby in order to survive and therefore I believe abortion is ok if it saves the life of the mother. However, imagine that the baby is now an analogy not for abortion but for a virus like AIDS, by the same thought experiment it could be argued that saying yes would justify killing everyone who had AIDS in order to save everyone else in the population. Killing in a form of self-defence. This clearly would not be moral. My question is then, how accurate are these thought experiments if the same answer can provoke the same gut reaction, lead us to the same argument which can be applied in two different situations, one of which is arguably moral and the other which is completely, undoubtedly immoral?

Accepted:
August 8, 2006

Comments

The short answer is that one has to ask whether the analogy is a good one, and my immediate intuition is that it is not a good one in the case of AIDS, at least not as you are using it.

To what, in that case, is the expanding baby supposed to be analogous? The AIDS virus? If so, then what the thought experiment suggests is that one woudl be justified in killing the AIDS virus. But of course we already knew that. If the thought experiment is supposed to "justify killing everyone who had AIDS", then, the expanding baby would have to be analogous to a person who had contracted the AIDS virus. But it isn't: People who have the AIDS virus do not pose an imminent risk of death to those who do not, and killing all such people is (fortunately!) not the only way to save oneself, if one has not contracted the virus.

Whether the analogy is a good one in the other case is a different question, and one's answer to that question will turn upon one's understanding of the relationship between a woman and the fetus she is carrying. The question how we should understand that relationship is, to my mind, the most profound one raised by Thomson's paper.

I agree with Richard that Thomson's analogy doesn't apply to the AIDS victims, as opposed to the virus. I wanted to add something about the reliability of thought experiments in general, though. Philosophers like Thomson (and Kamm) employ imaginary examples in a quasi scientific manner. The example, or rather a consideration of the example, is like an experiment. Our intuitive reactions to the examples are the results of the experiment--the data. We are then supposed to construct moral theories that fit the data. The problem is that our moral intuitions are influenced by all kinds of factors, including ones that those same moral intuitions tell us are morally irrelevant. A pretty good examination of this problem is contained in Peter Unger's excellent (but slightly annoyingly written) book Living High and Letting Die. This doesn't mean that we should abandon imaginary examples altogether. They can serve as a pretty good consistency check on a position, for example. But we certainly shouldn't have a lot of confidence that our intuitive responses to imaginary, and often highly unrealistic, cases are reliable indicators of moral truth.