Little Swimmers

 

Professor Liz Harman has the common view about pregnancy that choice folk hold.  When welcome it is a precious event that is shared with others and the medium favoured is a sonogram of the little swimmer.  If miscarried at this point there is sadness and loss.

Now if the pregnancy is unwelcome there is a medical situation that needs to be rectified.  There is magically not a pregnancy which would imply in the course of nature a birth.

The strangely normal thing is that the same woman can have both these attitudes at different times.  Objectively the reality of there being a little sportive swimmer is the same in both cases.

What is our likely attitude toward that moral stance?  How would one view such mutability?  As a mother with a favourite child, as a moral imbecile, a confused person, and probably not our first choice as a friend.  They have intrinsic value even if they don’t recognise it.  Would or should you trust them?

Judith Jarvis Thomson and Liz Harman on Abortion

 

Generally a thought experiment is a way of backing a story onto a desired conclusion.  Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist has that science fiction flavor which philosophers love.  It is in every respect a disanalogy, which exploded though it be continues to fascinate.

Actually, if you want to grasp the sort of thinking that is behind the fact of abortion Elizabeth Harman precisely describes its recourse to magic.  Like the pro-life people who never stop talking about the unborn child she recognizes that the intention of abortion, what it is aimed at, is the child that will be born and will demand care. It’s a causal thing - if you want a cold beer you will have to open the door of the fridge to take it. Focusing on just the opening part is pointless, it’s the chilled tin that is the point.  Elizabeth Harman in her Calvinist predestinarian way, similar to the ‘I shall have already been saved’ doctrine, holds that being pregnant , really pregnant, is to expect a child that you hope to bring to term. In the event that you abort then her view is that one shall never have had been pregnant. It was not a pregnancy just a condition that needed medical attention. James Franco I feel your bafflement.

James Franco