Judith Thomson provided one of the most striking and effective thought experiments in the moral realm (see Thomson, 1971). Her example is aimed at a popular anti-abortion argument that goes something like this: The foetus is an innocent person with a right to life. Abortion results in the death of a foetus. Therefore, abortion is morally wrong. In her thought experiment we are asked to imagine a famous violinist falling into a coma. The society of music lovers determines from medical records that you and you alone can save the violinist’s life by being hooked up to him for nine months. The music lovers break into your home while you are asleep and hook the unconscious (and unknowing, hence innocent) violinist to you. You may want to unhook him, but you are then faced with this argument put forward by the music lovers: The violinist is an innocent person with a right to life. Unhooking him will result in his death. Therefore, unhooking him is morally wrong.
However, the argument, even though it has the same structure as the anti-abortion argument, does not seem convincing in this case. You would be very generous to remain attached and in bed for nine months, but you are not morally obliged to do so.
The thought experiment depends on your intuitions or your definition of moral obligations and wrongness, but the experiment doesn’t make these distinctions. It just pretends that everyone has same intuition and as such the experiment should remain analogous regardless (probably because Judith didn’t think anyone else could have different intuitions), and so then you have all these other philosophers and people arguing about this minutia and adding on further qualifications and modifications to the point where that they may as well be talking about actual abortion.
The thought experiment functions as an informal reductio ad absurdum of the argument ‘Fetuses are people. Therefore abortion is immoral.’ or ‘Fetuses are conscious. Therefore abortion is immoral.’ That’s all it’s doing. If you didn’t find the arguments compelling in the first place, then the reductio won’t be relevant to you. Likewise, if you think the whole moral framework underlying these anti-abortion arguments is suspect, then you may want to fight things out at the fundaments rather than getting into nitty-gritty details like this. The significance of the violin thought experiment is that you don’t need to question the anti-abortionist’s premises in order to undermine the most common anti-abortion arguments; they yield consequences all on their own that most anti-abortionists would find unacceptable.
That is the dialectical significance of the above argument. It has nothing to do with assuming that everyone found the original anti-abortion argument plausible. An initially implausible argument that’s sufficiently popular may still be worth analyzing and refuting.
From SEP:
The thought experiment depends on your intuitions or your definition of moral obligations and wrongness, but the experiment doesn’t make these distinctions. It just pretends that everyone has same intuition and as such the experiment should remain analogous regardless (probably because Judith didn’t think anyone else could have different intuitions), and so then you have all these other philosophers and people arguing about this minutia and adding on further qualifications and modifications to the point where that they may as well be talking about actual abortion.
The thought experiment functions as an informal reductio ad absurdum of the argument ‘Fetuses are people. Therefore abortion is immoral.’ or ‘Fetuses are conscious. Therefore abortion is immoral.’ That’s all it’s doing. If you didn’t find the arguments compelling in the first place, then the reductio won’t be relevant to you. Likewise, if you think the whole moral framework underlying these anti-abortion arguments is suspect, then you may want to fight things out at the fundaments rather than getting into nitty-gritty details like this. The significance of the violin thought experiment is that you don’t need to question the anti-abortionist’s premises in order to undermine the most common anti-abortion arguments; they yield consequences all on their own that most anti-abortionists would find unacceptable.
That is the dialectical significance of the above argument. It has nothing to do with assuming that everyone found the original anti-abortion argument plausible. An initially implausible argument that’s sufficiently popular may still be worth analyzing and refuting.