It's wrong to disconnect from the violinist

Take Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous violinist case. Here is a quick and simple argument for why it’s wrong to disconnect from the violinist in order not to be connected to them for nine months.

1. It’s wrong to perform a positive action known to cause an innocent person’s death without a reason proportionate to the harm of death to someone who can be expected to live many years of a normal life otherwise.

2. The harm of death to someone who can be expected to live many years of a normal life otherwise is clearly disproportionate to being free for nine months from being connected to someone.

3. Disconnecting from the violinist is a positive action known to cause the death of an innocent person who can be expected to live many years of a normal life otherwise.

4. Thus, it is wrong to disconnect from the violinist in order not to be connected to them for nine months.

Premise 1 is a consequence of most versions of the Principle of Double Effect, but is also independently extremely plausible. Premise 3 is part of the story.

Why believe premise 2? Here’s one criterion of disproportionateness. A sufficient condition for a harm H₁ to be disproportionate to a harm H₂ is that a reasonable person would with little hesitation accept a harm that’s twice as bad as H₂ to avoid H₁. But a reasonable person would with little hesitation accept 18 months of being connected to someone to save their life, assuming they can be expected to live many years of a normal life if saved.

To see this, imagine you are the violinist, and you are about to die of kidney problems. But then someone shows up who offers to hook themselves up to you for 18 months, after which you will be cured. You might hesitate whether to accept their generosity. But you wouldn’t hesitate much before concluding they are offering you a great benefit, and if you were to hesitate much to accept it, that would only be because you might be concerned about being so much in debt to the generous benefactor. The fact that you would have to live for 18 months hooked up to them, a quite significant burden admittedly, would be a price well worth paying for your life.

Or imagine this. You have just been conceived. An angel now miraculously gives you the intelligence of a reasonable adult, and informs you that you have a cancer that will kill you within a few days. However, the angel tells you that if you just ask, you will be cured of that cancer, and can expect a normal human life. But there is a price to be paid for the cure: For the next 9 months you will be confined to a small space within another human being, after which for the next 9 months you will be unable to walk, talk, or exercise any significant personal freedom. This is a price well worth paying for life! It is a price we have all paid involuntarily, but surely anyone who is fortunate enough to live a normal human life will think that price would have been worth paying voluntarily. And yet those 18 months of dependency and lack of freedom are more constraining than 18 months of being hooked up to the violinist would be.

I can now argue as follows:

5. If it is wrong to disconnect from the violinist in the “standard scenario” above, abortion is wrong in the case of a normal pregnancy.

6. Therefore, abortion is wrong in the case of a normal pregnancy.

Now, one could vary the violinist story so that the analogue of premise 2 will no longer hold. Perhaps if the nine months were filled with torture, or if the violinist were to live only for a few months after the nine month period was over, then the analogue of premise 2 wouldn’t hold. In those cases, the Principle of Double Effect might well allow disconnecting from the violinist, and in those cases, the above argument against abortion fails.

Does it follow that in such hard cases of pregnancy, an abortion would be permissible? It does not follow, since there are further wrong-making features in the abortion case, including: (a) the parent-child relationship, (b) the fact that the abortion requires a lethal direct attack on another human being’s body (the analogue to the “tubes” connecting one to the violinist in the case of pregnancy may be the umbilical cord, which is the child’s organ), and (c) the fact that living in utero constitutes ordinary life-support for someone in the first nine months of their life. But that would be material for another post.