> 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.
I'm sure T has no such prejudice. She just wants you to suppose that the fetus has as strong a right to life as you can imagine. Where the violinist thing comes from I have no clue. Why a violinist and not a piccolo player or a blues harpist? But it does stick in the head. T's theory does have the merit, though I think it is wrong, of making sense of the attitudes that ordinary people have, statistically speaking, actually have, as opposed to the views held by the pro-choice and pro-life activists at the extremes. I don't mean to criticize views merely because they are extreme, and in fact I am an extremist pro-choice person myself, but we have to recognize two things (whichevfer side we are on): first, ours or minority views and we are not doing well at moving the middle, and second, the extremist views are both difficult to maintain intellectually. The reason for this, I think, is the following. There is a slippery slope argument taht cuts both ways. Anti-choice/pro-life: it's wrong (murder) to kill newborns. But there is no significant difference between newborns and not-quite yet-borns. So late term abortions are wrong. Moreover, there is no nice point at which one can draw a line between the status of a late term fertus and a less-developed one such that one would feel confident that killing it is OK. So abortion is always wrong. However, one can run the argument the other way. Killing an embryo is clearly OK; it has none of the properties such that, if one found something with those properties outside the womb, would make think it was wrong to kill it. It isn't self-conscious, isn't even conscious, can't talk, locomote, etc. But there's no significant line that can be drawn between an embryo and a late term fetus, so abortion is OK up to birth. The problem with the pro-life view is that it takes in things that are clearly OK and calls them wrong. 16 week old embryos re manifestly not people. The problemw ith the pro-choice view is that there's no logical reason to stop at birth. On that view, infanticide up to, say 3 months, is OK. Newborns are clearly less cognitively developed than, say, adult cats. While no one thinks it is OK to kill adult cats for fun, no one thinks it is worse than sad if you have to put one down. But we are not willing to say this about newborns. (Contrary to the views of, for example. Michael Tooley.) The problem for us pro-choice types is to explain why birth is the significant line. jks
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