Thought experiment 2: the Unconscious Violinist (2024)

In 1971 a new philosophy journal was launched, Philosophy and Public Affairs. Since the Second World War, Anglo-American moral philosophers had largely ignored applied issues. They were more interested in the meaning of ethical terms, such as “right” and “wrong”, and less in what was actually right and wrong. But decolonisation, nuclear proliferation, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism made this stance untenable.

The first edition of Philosophy and Public Affairs had an article, “A Defence of Abortion” by the American ethicist Judith Jarvis Thomson in it. She was raised in New York City, won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge and, after a spell in advertising (writing copy for My-T-Fine chocolate pudding), worked in academic philosophy.

Pedagogically she had a fearsome reputation. Philosophically, what was notable was her striking imagination. Imagine, Thomson writes in her article, that you wake up one morning to discover that a famous violinist is lying unconscious in bed with you.

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.

A hospital apparatchik apologises for this situation. You are free to unplug the violinist, but that would kill him. “It’s only for nine months,” the apparatchik says. “By then he will have recovered from his ailment.”

Philosophy normally privileges logic and argument over narrative. But as Elselijn Kingma, a professor of philosophy at King’s College London, points out, Thomson’s scenario has endured in part because of its descriptive vividness. It contains irrelevant details: “That the man is a violinist is completely arbitrary.”

The UK only legalised abortion in 1967, four years before Thomson’s article appeared. The landmark US Supreme Court decision, Roe vs Wade, which ruled that a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy was protected by the constitution, was still two years away. Beyond the law, the ethics of abortion were fiercely debated. They tended to revolve, then as now, around the status of the foetus. At what stage does it accrue rights?

“That’s a really hard question,” Kingma says. The answer will rest, in part, on some empirical matters. For example, in the first trimester of pregnancy the foetus cannot feel pain. Still, “what’s brilliant about Thomson’s violinist… is that it avoids the complications about exactly when the cells develop into a… moral-rights-holding human. Instead, it focuses on the use of the mother’s body.” Thomson pulls off this intellectual twist through making the most conservative of assumptions: that the foetus, from the moment of conception, has the same rights as an adult human. Even so, she assumes you agree with her – you are not required to stay hooked to the musician, though it might be decent of you to do so. By implication, a woman has rights over her body; there is no obligation to carry the foetus to term.

There are of course some fundamental disanalogies between the violin case and pregnancy. You had no active role in the attachment of the violinist to your body, whereas, so long as the sex has been consensual, a woman has played some part in conception. This is so even if she never intended to become pregnant. The violinist is a random person you’ve never previously met, whereas, says Kingma, “The foetus is as far removed from a stranger as it is possible to be. It’s blood of your blood, it’s flesh of your flesh.” Then there’s the sheer physicality of pregnancy, inadequately represented by a few tubes, as well as its intimacy, invasiveness and what Kingma calls “the wrenching transformation of the heart”.

This interconnectedness is ethically significant and raises other questions. If a mother continues with her pregnancy, what are her obligations to the growing child intertwined with her? “If Thomson were to write the thought experiment today, you wouldn’t just be lying in bed with the violinist, you’d be told you’re not allowed to do this or that: you can’t drink; you must get sunshine for the vitamin D, but cover yourself in sunscreen, and also not use sunscreen because it might be bad for the foetus/violinist!” Still, there’s a limit to what a thought experiment can achieve, and it would be harsh to criticise it for what it fails to cover.

Judith Jarvis Thomson died in 2020. Two years later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. As a result, millions of American women no longer have autonomy over their body.

[See also: Thought experiment 1: The Chinese Room]

This article appears in the 28 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump in turmoil