Unhooking famous violinist

[joanna bujes]

The best stab I know at sorting out what is going on with popular attitudes 
is with Judith Thompson's famous paper, in which she presents her violinist 
hypothetical. Do folks here know this paper? It's widely taught in intro 
ethical problems classes. You awake and find yourself in a hospital hooked 
intravenously to a famous violinist, who needs to use your bodily fluids 
for nine months, or he will die. Can you unhook him? T suggests that you 
can, even though he's clearly a person, because no person has the right to 
command another's body for that sort of period. T suggests without great 
elaboration that the answer is intuitively different if you volunteered to 
be hooked up, or even if you carelessly put yourself in the situation where 
you might end up hooked up. The analogies to involuntary, voluntray, and 
negligent pregenany are obvious.

So, like, why does it make a difference that it's a famous violinist? That 
little detail is where it ceases to be an "ethical" test case so far as I'm 
concerned. How about, "you wake up and find that you're hooked up to a 
human being"...because this whole shtick about how 
artists/geniuses/blah-blah have more of a right to live than others makes 
me sick to my stomach.

Joanna