Judith Jarvis Thomson

A Defense of Abortion

Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think, not well. Take, for example, the most common argument. We are asked to notice that the development of a human being from conception through birth into childhood is continuous; then it is said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this development and say “before this point the thing is not a person, after this point it is a person” is to make an arbitrary choice, a choice for which in the nature of things no good reason can be given. It is concluded that the fetus is, or anyway that we had better say it is, a person from the moment of conception. But this conclusion does not follow. Similar things might be said about the development of an acorn into an oak tree, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that we had better say they are. Arguments of this form are sometimes called “slippery slope arguments”—the phrase is perhaps selfexplanatory;—and it is dismaying that opponents of abortion rely on them so heavily and uncritically.

Physician‐Assisted Suicide: Two Moral Arguments*

What I will discuss are two of the moral arguments that have been put forward as reasons for objecting to the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. They have been taken seriously by a great many people and have had a powerful impact on the state of American law in this area.1 I will argue that they are bad arguments. I should say at the outset, however, that even if these are bad arguments, there may be others that are better. Many people oppose the legalizing of physician-assisted suicide on the ground that (as they think) there is no way of constraining the practice so as to provide adequate protections for the poor and the weak. They may be right, and if they are, then all bets are off. Alternatively, they may be wrong. I will simply bypass this issue.

Research on Human Subjects: Academic Freedom and the Institutional Review Board

The report that follows, prepared by a subcommittee of the Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, was approved for publication by Committee A at its meeting in June 2006. The report takes issue with aspects of the federal government’s regulations for research on human subjects that constitute a threat to academic freedom. The application of the federal regulations to research methodologies that present no serious risk of harm to research subjects has long been of concern to Committee A, which will continue to keep this matter and other troubling features of the regulations on its agenda. Committee A welcomes comments on the report from Association members and other interested parties and organizations.

On Some Ways in Which A Thing Can be Good

I There are a great many ways in which a thing can be good. What counts as a way of being good? I leave it to intuition. Let us allow that being a good dancer is being good in a way, and that so also is being a good carpenter. We might group these and similar ways of being good under the name activity goodness , since a good dancer is good at dancing and a good carpenter is good at carpentry. Everything good at doing something D is good in a way, and for each activity D, being good at D-ing falls into the class of ways of being good which I call activity goodness. Again, let us allow that being a good hammer is being good in a way, and that so also is being a good butter knife. We might group these ways of being good under the name equipment goodness , since a good hammer is good for use in hammering nails and a good butter knife is good for use in buttering bread. Everything good for use in achieving a purpose P is good in a way, and for each purpose P, being good for use in achieving P falls into the class of ways of being good which I call equipment goodness. Again, let us allow that tasting good is being good in a way, and so also are looking good, sounding good, and so on. The class here is aesthetic goodness . Is all goodness goodness-in-a-way? Intuitively, the answer is yes: it seems right to think that everything is good only insofar as it is good in one or more ways.

Liability and Individualized Evidence

Cases like Smith v. Rapid Transit, Inc. present a problem to students of tort law. Here is a typical hypothetical case-I will call it Smith v. Red Cab-which presents the problem more cleanly than the actual case does. Mrs. Smith was driving home late one night. A taxi came towards her, weaving wildly from side to side across the road. She had to swerve to avoid it; her swerve took her into a parked car; in the crash, she suffered two broken legs. Mrs. Smith therefore sued Red Cab Company. Her evidence is as follows: she could see that it was a cab which caused her accident by weaving wildly across the road, and there are only two cab companies in town, Red Cab (all of whose cabs are red) and Green Cab (all of whose cabs are green), and of the cabs in town that night, six out of ten were operated by Red Cab. Why is that the only evidence she can produce against Red Cab? She says that although she could see that it was a cab which came at her, she could not see its color, and as it was late, there were no other witnesses to the accident-other than the driver himself, of course, but he has not come forward to confess. If we believe Mrs. Smiths story, and are aware of no further facts that bear on the case, then we shall think it .6 probable that her accident was caused by a cab operated by Red Cab. I think it pays to spell this reasoning out; what follows is one way of doing so. If we believe Mrs. Smiths story, then we believe that a cab, indeed exactly one cab, caused the accident, so that there is such a thing as the cab which caused the accident; and we believe that it was a cab in town that night. Thus we believe:

How not to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’

Two of the steps in Mr Searle’s derivation1 are from: (3) Jones placed himself under (undertook) an obligation to pay Smith five dollars, to: (4) Jones is under an obligation to pay Smith five dollars, and from that to: (5) Jones ought to pay Smith five dollars.

Responses to Critics@@@Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity

Moral absolutism is the view that there is basically a single true morality. I argue that existing moral diversity between societies and within contemporary American society is strong evidence against moral absolutism. Although Blackburn announces near the end of his comments that he is a moral absolutist, he does not indicate how he would respond to what seems to me to be the rather strong case against moral absolutism.

The case for legalised euthanasia

We cannot be sure, until the Supreme Court decides the assisted suicide cases and its decision is published, how far the justices might have accepted or rejected the arguments of the brief published below. In this introduction I shall describe the oral argument before them last January, and offer some suggestions about how, if they decide against the briefs position, as many commentators now think they will, they might do the least damage to constitutional law.

Précis of The Realm of Rights

My project was to construct a theory of rights. All theorizing rests on data, and mine throughout consist of what seem to me-and I hope to the readertrue moral judgments about what people ought or ought not do in this or that set of more or less concretely described circumstances. I suggest in Part I that having a right is reducible in a complex way to what people ought or ought not do; relying on my data, I then draw conclusions in Part II about which rights we have, and make some suggestions about why we have them. My enterprise, then, is not an effort to get at morality from outside it; I wish, rather, to offer a way of getting around within it. The Introduction is primarily an effort to respond to those who object to the use of moral judgments about what people ought or ought not do as data for moral theorizing. I suggest that some of those judgments are necessary truths; that they are not certifiable as truths by appeal to the familiar systems of logic, or by appeal to dictionaries, is compatible with their being statements which could not have been false. On the other hand, nothing in what follows relies on that thesis. Chapter 1 surveys the species of rights. Adapting Hohfelds account of legal rights, I suggest that all rights fall into one or other of the following species: claims, privileges, powers and immunities, and clusters of rights. Claims are fundamental, since a privilege is merely a lack of a claim, a power is an ability to generate claims, privileges, powers, and immunities, and a cluster-right is a more or less fuzzy-bounded group of rights of the other species. So if we have an account of what it is to have a claim, we are on the way to having an account of what it is to have a right. And what is it to have a claim? Legal claims, Hohfeld had said, are the correlatives of legal duties; let us say that Xs having a claim against Y is correlative with, that is, equivalent to, Ys being under a duty toward X. But what is it for Y to be under a duty toward X? Saying that Xs having a claim against Y is equivalent to Ys being under a duty toward X helps us