Judith Jarvis Thomson

Dzieła

• 1971A Defense of Abortion (Obrona aborcji)

  Nawet jeśli płód jest osobą, prawo do życia nie obejmuje prawa do korzystania z cudzego ciała – przypadek skrzypka.

• 1976Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem (Zabijanie, pozwalanie umrzeć i problem wagonika)

  Dlaczego motorniczy może skierować wagonik tak, by zabić jedną osobę, podczas gdy chirurg nie może zabić jednego pacjenta, by ocalić pięciu? Decydują prawa, a nie liczby.

Stanowisko

Her 1971 article “A Defense of Abortion” changed the debate by granting, for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person. Imagine you wake up connected to a famous violinist who will die unless he uses your kidneys for nine months: you would be generous to stay, but you are not obliged to, because the right to life does not include the right to use another person’s body. So abortion can be permissible even if the fetus is a person. In “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” she took up Foot’s runaway tram, named it, and asked why one may divert the trolley to kill one rather than five but may not kill one patient to save five with his organs.

Życie i kontekst

Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929–2020) was born in New York, studied at Barnard, Cambridge and Columbia, and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1964 until her retirement. She was one of the first women to hold a senior position in American analytic philosophy and served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. Her work ranges over metaphysics, the theory of action and, above all, moral philosophy.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Realm of Rights (1990)
• Normativity (2008)

Pojawia się w

• Debata „Prawo do śmierci? Pomoc w umieraniu”