Risk and Blame
We have seen that Marquis thinks that establishing that fetuses have the feature that makes it wrong to kill normal adult human beings suffices to establish that abortion is nearly always wrong, but that Thomson thinks that her Famous Violinist case shows that it can be morally permissible to have an abortion even if fetuses have the very same moral status as adult human beings.
What remains to be seen, is whether most abortions are in fact relevantly like the famous violinist case. Thomson believes that many abortions are relevantly like this case, while Marquis, presumably, believes that only few at most abortions are relevantly similar to the case of the famous violinist. For example, Marquis may believe that the famous violinist case is relevantly similar to abortion due to rape, because in this case the pregnancy is beyond the woman's control or responsibility, while maintaining that pregnancies that do not result from rape are never beyond the woman's control or responsibility.
So in order to evaluate the ultimate significance of Thomson's example, we need to better understand how many cases of abortion are relevantly similar.
People Seeds
Thomson's People Seeds case is designed to bridge this gap. But the issues are complex and the arguments go by very, very quickly. So we are going to devote an entire class session to this topic. So for this class, make sure to re-read section 4 of Thomson's article, from pages 56-59. Think about: what problem is Thomson trying to solve in this section of her article? How does the People Seeds case address that problem? Does it matter that the example is very science fiction? And does it work?
Course Video #6: Reconstructing Arguments
Our next main skill for using arguments in philosophy is to recognize arguments even when an author does not put what they say in premise-conclusion form. You'll eventually be asked to do this for Assignment #3 and ultimately in your paper, and this video introduces the most important skills for doing this well. I'm including it in this class's assignment because the reading is light, but there is no rush - the most important thing is that you watch it this week and try a couple of simple examples for yourself before you get the next video and the instructions for Assignment #3.
