Nice One. I was wondering where that was going until the 9 months bit; i was thinking politically. Like the UK is the deadbeat hooked upto a far from unwilling but psychopathic glutton, whose behaviour we must excuse to all and sundry, as fervently as we can, for fear the tubes will be removed.
Check this.
Rich, as much as I'm pro-choice, I'm not convinced that employing knee-jerk analogies helps the issue.
It provides 'pro-lifers' with a very easy punch bag: A baby is hardly responsible for its own conception in the same way as Fred is for his situation, the mother (and father) does bear some responsibility for being pregnant unlike myself in Thomson's example, a mother's connection to her baby is hardly one of two strangers being thrown together, and so on. The analogy is weak, and is certainly not a strong case for abortion.
Furthermore, those on the left usually bemoan the kind of selfish attitude that you defend in my case here - "its mine so I can do what I want with it". I'm not sure that 'the right to be selfish' is a good line to take in defending abortion.
There are good arguments against abortion, but Thomson's is not one of them.
Alex
I'm not suggesting that JJT's analogy is full-proof. There are various problems; most importantly in my opinion the issue of Fred's autonomy vs. the fact that fetuses are little more than globs of cells entirely reliant on their mother. (JJT makes this point, albeit less flippantly, at the end of her essay.)
I don't think this is a question of selfisheness vs. altruism. The issue is one of control over one's own body. This is where the analogy is of value because it moves beyond the discussions about life and death. I toyed with idea of rewriting the analogy to make it more obvious that I represented patriachy or perhaps some kind of religious influence (the mysterious cult of Fred), but dumped all that because it just ended up being even sillier than it already was.
On the issue of Fred's culpability that might be true, but that's a fault in my take on the analogy not the original (where the "famous violinist" has some condition). As for the mother, bear in mind that JJT explicitly states that the analogy refers specifically to the question of rape. This obviously limits the analogy's strict applicability.
JJT's essay is flawed (although as I've suggested, not neccesarily for the reasons you cite), but the violinist analogy has stuck with me despite the fact that I originally read the essay something like three years ago. That's why I chose to 'reproduce' it here. If it makes people think then I'll consider that a success.
"The issue is one of control over one's own body. This is where the analogy is of value because it moves beyond the discussions about life and death."
I'm really not convinced that this is the case. I could put a similar argument forward that says "control over my own body" means I must be allowed to use my body to swing a hammer at your head. The only way to provide a disimilarity between that case and abortion is the result effect: is a dead fetus less bad than a dead adult? The life and death debate is a crucial part of abortion, and analogies such as Thomson's gloss over this point.
Thats not to say that there's nothing to say for choice on the part of the woman, but I think we're fooling ourselves if we think it's conclusive.
"JJT explicitly states that the analogy refers specifically to the question of rape. This obviously limits the analogy's strict applicability."
(I confess I haven't read the article for a year or two now, which I why I didn't pick out what you'd changed)
Indeed - and I suspect that she limits it precisely because culpability is another of the key issues to be resolved here. If I sign a contract, and tell Fred that I'll lend him use of by body, but I then back out at later date, the analogy starts to look very different.
"If it makes people think then I'll consider that a success"
I have a lot of sympathy for the "provoke thought rather than conclude it" line, but I'm very wary of spending our time fighting straw men with paper bats.
Alex
"I must be allowed to use my body to swing a hammer at your head"
Indeed there are circumstances where you have the right to do just that.
"is a dead fetus less bad than a dead adult?"
Clearly. Because a living adult is almost certainly subject to other responsibilities than simply being alive and also the subject of the feelings of others who would miss them in a far more visceral way than even the most saintly would miss the intellectual construct that is the potential for life.
"culpability is another of the key issues to be resolved here"
Whether we believe that a person should be blamed for ill thought out action, or understood to have a problem exercising personal responsibility and helped, it is quite clear that our concept of culpability only seeks to punish a person with legally defined abrogation of rights for a minimum of 16 years when they have committed the most serious of criminal offences. I think it's a bit heartless to try to do the same for a spot of ill considered shagging.
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