The Relevance (and Irrelevance) of Questions of Personhood (and Mindedness) to the Abortion Debate

Disagreements about abortion are often assumed to reduce to disagreements about fetal personhood (and mindedness). If one believes a fetus is a person (or has a mind), then they are “pro-life.” If one believes a fetus is not a person (or is not minded), they are “pro-choice.” The issue, however, is much more complicated. Not only is it not dichotomous—most everyone believes that abortion is permissible in some circumstances (e.g. to save the mother’s life) and not others (e.g. at nine months of a planned pregnancy)—but scholars on both sides of the issue (e.g. Don Marquis and Judith Thomson) have convincingly argued that fetal personhood (and mindedness) are irrelevant to the debate. To determine the extent to which they are right, this article will define “personhood,” its relationship to mindedness, and explore what science has revealed about the mind before exploring the relevance of both to questions of abortion’s morality and legality. In general, this article does not endorse a particular answer to these questions, but the article should enhance the reader’s ability to develop their own answers in a much more informed way.

Thomson on Goodness

Judith Jarvis Thomson has written extensively on what is usually (though she does not seem much to care for the word) known as ‘metaethics’. Notably in the Thomson half of Harman and Thomson’s 1996 Moral Knowledge and Moral Objectivity, the 1997 Journal of Philosophy paper “The Right and the Good”, and her Tanner Lectures in Goodness and Advice published in 2003. Thomson thinks there is no such thing as being good simpliciter. There is only what she sometimes talks of as being good in a way or being good in some respect. A thing can be good at stuff, good at football or baking or whatever. This critical note analyses what is at stake in Thomson's approach. Keywords: Metaethics, Judith Thomson, Consequentialism, Moral good

Rights and Demands

This book is the first extended treatment of demand-rights, a class of rights apt to be considered rights par excellence. Centrally, to have a demand-right is to have the standing or authority to demand a particular action from another person, who has a correlative obligation to the right-holder. How are demand-rights possible? Linking its response to central themes and positions within rights theory, Rights and Demands argues for two main theses. First, joint commitment, in a sense that is explained, is a ground of demand-rights. Second, it may well be their only ground. The first thesis is developed with special reference to agreements and promises, generally understood to ground demand-rights. It argues that both of these phenomena are constituted by joint commitments, and that this is true of many other central social phenomena also. In relation to the second thesis it considers the possibility of demand-rights whose existence can be demonstrated by moral argument without appeal to any joint commitment, and the possibility of accruing demand-rights through the existence of a given legal system or other institution construed without any such appeal. The relevance of the book’s conclusions to our understanding of human rights is then explained. Classic and contemporary rights theorists whose work is discussed include Wesley Hohfeld, H. L. A. Hart, Joel Feinberg, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Scanlon, Judith Thomson, Joseph Raz, and Stephen Darwall.

Hedonism and the Variety of Goodness

This article defends the project of giving a single pleasure-based account of goodness against what may seem a powerful challenge. Aristotle, Peter Geach and Judith Thomson have argued that there is no such thing as simply being good; there is only (for example) being a good knife or a good painting (Geach), being serene or good to eat (Thomson), or being good in essence or in qualities (Aristotle). But I argue that these philosophers’ evidence is friendly to the hedonist project. For, I argue, hedonistic accounts of goodness tend to imply that the unqualified term ‘good’ has little or no application to the things we talk about; while if we qualify hedonic goodness in certain ways, we generate usable predicates that match the varieties of goodness recognized by the three philosophers. And those qualifications happen to be natural interpretations of signals we do use alongside ‘good’, such as ‘knife’.

Análisis crítico de los razonamientos analógicos de Judith Thomson

Anteriormente se han determinado, interpretado y analizado lógicamente los razonamientos por analogía de la filósofa norteamericana Judith Thomson (Revista de Filología y Lingüística XXXI (2): 249-270, 2005). En este artículo se pretende desarrollar una crítica a tales razonamientos. Este análisis crítico se hará tomando en cuenta todas las analogías, pero clasificadas en conjuntos. Esto debido fundamentalmente a que las analogías coinciden en puntos importantes, que van a ser considerados en esta segunda parte del trabajo. Solo la analogía del violinista será analizada y criticada por aparte, porque ha sido considerada la más fuerte de toda la argumentación.

Culpable Bystanders, Innocent Threats and the Ethics of Self-Defense

The moral right to act in self-defense seems to be unproblematic: you are allowed to kill an aggressor if doing so is necessary for saving your own life. Indeed, it seems that from the moral Standpoint, acting in self-defense is doing the right thing. Thanks, however, to works by George Fletcher and Judith Thomson, it is now well known how unstable the moral basis of the right to self-defense is. We are in the dark with regard to one of the most basic problems raised by this right, namely: the problem of the innocent aggressor. The disturbing question is simple enough: Is a potential victim allowed to kill, in self-defense, a morally innocent aggressor?

The Badness of Death, the Wrongness of Killing, and the Moral Importance of Autonomy

RésuméLa mort d'une personne peut-elle être intrinsèquement mauvaise pour la personne qui meurt? Et pourquoi est-il mal de tuer une autre personne? Je soutiens qu'une réponse adéquate à l'une ou l'autre de ces questions requiert d'apprécier l'importance morale de l'autonomie. J'examine ici la conception dominante de ce qui rend la mort mauvaise — la théorie de la dépossession —, ainsi que deux conceptions rivales de ce qui fait qu'il est mal de tuer — la théorie de la dépossession appliquée à l'acte de tuer, et la thèse des droits liminaux de Judith Thomson. Bien que mon objectif principal dans cet article soit d'établir l'importance de l' autonomie pour expliquer à lafois que la mort est mauvaise et qu'il est mal de tuer, je pense également qu'une réflexion sur ce qui rend la mort mauvaise nous apprend quelque chose au sujet des droits et de leur force, et qu'une réflexion sur les droits nous apprend quelque chose quant à ce qui fait que la mort et l'immortalité sont toutes deux de mauvaises choses.

Commentary

Judith Thomson argues that a fetus may have a right to life yet lack the right to use its mother's body to stay alive. According to Kenneth Einar Himma, Thomson's argument applies only to cases where the parties meet two conditions. First, they must “have a history of physical independence” and, second, they must be “autonomous moral agents, capable of incurring obligations.” Himma devises a case involving conjoined twins to show why the mother–fetus case does not meet these conditions.