A Response!

In what is the first of what will hopefully be many responses on this page, Sadeghi commented on my discussion of (uh oh!) abortion. Since I want to encourage as much dialogue as possible on this site, I'm dedicating today's column to responding to him or her (hopefully, Sadeghi, you won't mind having your comment featured so prominently!).

Here's what Sadeghi had to say about the Violinist Example:

From an evolutionary perspective, you are not in the same position as the woman impregnated by rape. Perhaps the most basic instinct of man is to reproduce replicas of him/herself. Being that this baby carries half of the mother's genes, can we really say that the rape victim and I are in the same position? I have no biological connection to this disgusting violinist hooked up to me, yet I have reason to want to save the baby carrying my DNA.

While I'm not endorsing either side of the debate, I think Sadeghi's got an interesting point: in the case of pregnancy by rape, the woman has a particular, special relationship to the fetus--she's the mother. I'm not sure it's a consideration of evolution, as Sadeghi suggests, but nonetheless it's not hard to see how the parental relationship imparts certain obligations that wouldn't otherwise exist. Since in the example I posed previously you didn't have any special relationship to the talented violinist, there's certainly an important difference.

But it's moral philosophy! We can always amend our example: let's say that the violinist is your child; would you have an obligation then? That, I think, makes Judith Jarvis Thomson's example quite a bit more controversial, but I leave it to you to consider....