In my first year of undergrad, I published a paper titled “A New Way to Oppose Abortion” in the Journal of Value Inquiry.
I was pretty hyped at the time, but now some professors say it could hurt my chances at academic employment, at least if I display it on my CV. One philosopher—who writes on controversial topics often—insisted vehemently that even if it does hurt my prosects, I should display it on my CV anyway, at least if freedom of thought matters to me in the long run. If I don’t wear the hot takes on my sleeve, he warned, I might be hired by an ideologically intolerant faculty and find myself professionally cramped.
I suppose should add, for reasons of up-frontness: I am pro-choice, and was at the time I wrote the article. (I was pro-life before that, but eventually talked myself out of it, for reasons I’ll share in a future essay.)
The reason I published a pro-life paper, despite being pro-choice, is that I think it’s good to steelman opposing views. In that spirit, here is my best (and extremely unorthodox!) attempt to shore up the pro-life view against one of its toughest objections.
I. The Violinist Argument
Normally, the abortion debate is assumed to hinge entirely on the question of whether foetuses are people (where “people” means something like: “whichever beings qualify for a moral right to life”.)
In 1971, pro-choice philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson took a match to that assumption, drizzled it in gasoline, and burned the whole thing to ashes. In “A Defense of Abortion”—which is now, apparently, the most anthologised philosophy paper in history—Thomson argued that even if foetuses are people, abortion should still be legal.
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