What Happened to Tom
The feminist philosopher Peg Tittle has written a novella that expands on Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous thought experiment in “A Defense of Abortion”:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?
In Peg’s What Happened to Tom things aren’t even as polite as that. No Society of Music Lovers is involved, and the doctor who attaches Tom to Simon the violinist is not a bit apologetic.
Tom’s an Everyman type, and not particularly likable. He’s a young architect rising in his firm, he has a posh car, a nice flat, a girl friend; he goes drinking with the guys one evening and wakes up in a hospital bed with this tube surgically attached to him – and Simon behind the curtain – in such a way that he can’t yank it out. He’s outraged, and the doctor is indifferent to his outrage. The doctor is a woman.
“I don’t need to think about this. I don’t want…this! How can I put it any more plainly?” His rage was palpable.
“Once your MTS subsides a bit…”
He caught that. “MTS?” Had he contracted some disease?
“Male Testosterone Syndrome.”
“You – you bitch! I’ll show you Male Testosterone Syndrome!” He started flinging his body from side to side against the rails. She had the sedative ready.
He tries to escape. He calls the police, he calls a lawyer, he researches and then calls groups that perform “nephrodesis reversal” – but such groups are few and dwindling and far away.
His life falls apart. He’s stuck in the hospital so he can’t keep up with his work; his girlfriend gets tired of his boring obsession with this connected-to-the-violinist thing, his car is repossessed. His whole life is taken out of his hands such that he can’t control any of it any more.
He didn’t consent to any of it. He doesn’t want any of it. No one cares.
After a few months the violinist wakes up, so Simon the violinist gets the chance to make his case. It’s all very interesting and entertaining, especially if you like thought experiments.
One insight brought me up short. Toward the end of the tethering the two go to Tom’s firm to attend a meeting, because Tom is desperate to hold on to the standing he’d had. Afterward, alone with Simon again, he realizes it was a mistake.
“You don’t get it,” he turned to Simon. “It’s because I let them see me like this. Now, no matter what I do, no matter how hard I work, or even how good or successful I am, they’ll always see me like…a fucking invalid.”
Oh. Ouch. That’s probably all too true of a lot of bosses and colleagues.
Should have guarded his drink more closely.
I enjoy thought experiments, although I am a bit sceptical of whether they get us closer to the truth, for the usual reasons, but I think there is a fundamental flaw in this one unless we are talking only about the particular case of abortion following rape. It’s in the ‘kidnapped’ bit. A better analogy would be ti imagine a person who loved playing lotteries of a certain type. In these lotteries you chose a ball at random with the prize of huge physical pleasure and satisfaction. But you have the choice of choosing from the blue balls or the yellow balls. If the yellow, you understand that every now and then you will find yourself joined to another person whose life will thereafter depend on yours for 9 months etc, etc. If Blue, there is no such risk. Our imaginary person likes to choose from the yellow balls, or sometimes just gets carried away or drunk and doesn’t bother to check.
I’m sure that can be drastically improved on but it gets a bit closer, I think.
Actually, Pinkeen, I think the idea of the kidnapping is not so much about rape, but about the unwanted claiming of your body by the fetus.
Holms – yes, his drink is spiked. It’s the doctor herself who spikes it.
Ah, but what was he wearing?
iknklast: If it’s not about a case involving rape, then this particular analogy ends up getting picked apart by the sorts of assholes who like to do such things. I’ve seen it often enough to boil down the argument–“This isn’t like a pregnancy, because Tom never took an action that caused his situation.”
The variation I’ve heard that cuts that particular approach off is to have Tom get into a no-fault car accident with Simon–obeying the law, but it’s one of those things that does happen from time to time. When Tom wakes up at the hospital, they’ve tethered him to Simon because he was the proximate cause of the accident. That’s about the best ‘fit’ for an unwanted pregnancy stemming from a consensual sexual encounter. (Actually, thinking about it, Simon should be a passenger in the other car, but he and the driver of that car don’t share a blood-type, so that driver can’t be used as the support-system, so the doctors just hook Tom up because he’s convenient.)
Freemage, your version doesn’t work because Simon canr choose to make sure there is no car accident.
The doctor picked up Tom in a bar, and she drugged him. In reply to his half-formed question “Did you put…?” she says not exactly, but when he vaguely remembers her helping him into a car and says “You drugged me!” she doesn’t deny it. She also tells him not to act so surprised.
Does this mirror situations that actually happen?
That’s my point, as an analogy of rape it can just about work, but for the usual abortion cases it doesn’t.
But thought experiments aren’t analogies. Exact correspondence in every particular isn’t required.
That’s true but the disanalogies here stop it being useful as a thought experiment for the majority of cases, it cant help us think about the moral status of abortion because unless we think rape is unexceptional.
It would be clearer if the doctor had offered Tom the drink explaining that it might be drugged and the consequences should he drink it and be knocked out. However, she has a rubber bracelet he can wear to render the drug ineffective if he chooses. That’s closer to a natural abortion scenario, but there’s obviously something amiss because it seems to me he could be morally obliged to serve as the medical surrogate.
Apologies, typing on a phone and sent the last by accident, even less tidy than usual.
Pinkeen: How can Simon do anything? He’s a passenger in the backseat of the other car; he might even be asleep at the time of the accident. He has no influence over anything. Tom didn’t know about the patch of black ice, and the other driver was just going through a normal intersection without any awareness of Tom’s approach.
Yes I muddled Simon with Tom! Tom was unable to prevent the accident and had no idea of the posdible consequences when he got in the car, unlike a pregnancy in usual conditions.
I disagree that it can’t help us think about the moral status of abortion. It zeroes in on the nature of the experience. It’s a fraction of JJT’s argument:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
So, yes, take it as read that consensual sex is radically different from being kidnapped, and focus on that experience.
Here’s an interesting fact: consensual sex does not automatically create maternal attachment feelz that last for the next 30 days.
Pinkeen, it is perhaps going to astound you to hear this, but many people are not that clear on how to avoid pregnancy (especially young people). And most people assume it isn’t going to happen to them (basically the same as someone who drives a car knows about accidents but assumes they will not happen to them).
I think the problem with this is that we are pick, pick, picking at something rather than trying to grasp the larger picture, that one person is having their body used for something and they don’t want to do it.
Maybe it’s like if Simon and Tom go to the doctor together, hold hands in the doctor’s office, and the IV miraculously shoots out of Simon’s arm into Tom’s, hooking them together. The IV was triggered by Tom holding hands with Simon, and he knew Simon needed someone to give blood, and he knew Simon had his “joy buzzer”, but held hands with him anyway, either in support of a friend or because they have a sexual relationship. Would that be enough for this scenario to work? Or do you need more?
The basis of the analogy is that everyone should have full choice over their body. The mere act of sex is not an agreement for a nine-month commitment to put your own life on hold and your life actually at risk. Yes, this is more like rape than consensual sex, but…if you consider Simon to be like the fetus, it is still someone commandeering your body for their use. We can nit pick everything to death, or we can try to have a mature, adult conversation about a serious issue without having to “gotcha” each other at every move.
I think as a way of thinking about the nature of the experience it is worse! Most pregnancies don’t confine anyone to hospital and don’t invite derision from the community. Tom would only need to take four weeks off work and his boss would not be allowed to fire him. More importantly, Tom would likely form a deep emotional attachment to the person he is tied to, in most cases coming to think of them as the most important relationship in his life. All that is missing. This is the trouble with thought experiments!
How about someone who signs an organ donor card who wakes up one morning missing a kidney?
Tom was drunk, and he thought he could drive safely. He was wrong. There’s a car accident, Tom’s at fault, and Simon’s injured.
Simon is not just a talented violinist, he’s a nice sweet jolly guy who spends his spare time reading to the blind and fostering orphaned kittens.
Tom’s kind of a grump.
Tom and Simon won’t be flat on their backs the whole time. They’ll “just” be tethered together, though the last month or so of their tethering will be particularly cumbersome, for reasons. There is a small but nontrivial chance that Tom could die from complications. His longterm health will be affected to some degree not possible to predict exactly.
And hey, maybe Tom will grow to love Simon, and they’ll share a special bond as long as they live.
The question remains: should society be able to legally force Tom to surrender sovereignty of his body?
Notice: the question is not whether or not Tom “should” submit to all this.
Lady M, thst is the question, but it doesn’t seem to yi me to elucidate the abortion question. Tom did not understand the possible consequences of getting in the car and didn’t have a simple means of avoiding them which he rejected. If he had, I think the situation looks different.
The abortion issue has many facets. There are those opposed to abortion who do not support any exceptions for rape or incest, reasoning a baby is a baby. On the pro-choice side, the bodily autonomy argument and others also don’t focus on the circumstances of the pregnancy; it is sufficient that a woman is pregnant and doesn’t want to be. Given these various views, I think it is fine for a fictional work to explore a popular thought experiment about the bodily autonomy issue without making a big deal regarding the origins of the situation.
Pinkeen: That’s just it. In a world of contraceptives, getting pregnant isn’t a predictable ‘consequence’ of consensual sex, so much as a potential one if safeguards fail–much like getting into a car accident, even if you’re doing everything ‘right’ as a driver. And I’d say it’s as unreasonable to tell people to not have sex because babies as it is to tell them to never drive because collisions–ESPECIALLY when that message is targeted only at women.
Sorry, Tom didn’t understand that a possible consequence of getting into a car and driving while drunk would be having an accident?
And he didn’t have a simple means of not getting into the car?
Also, it’s not the case that contraception is automatically and always “a simple means” of avoiding pregnancy. Far from it.
But there is always a simple means of contraception available if you choose to use it, and that makes a big difference to the story. If in this story he had deliberately eschewed a means, simple or otherwise, to avoid the fate before he drank the drink, do you not agree it would be morally relevant?
Rob, the consequences of drink driving, in terms of accident and death, are foreseeable which is why we hold drink drivers responsible for the consequences. That is sort of my point. The fact they enter into it voluntarily with foreseeable consequences changes the moral calculus. A drink driver who hurts someone else can lose the right to bodily autonomy when they are imprisoned for that, and we generally think this is right. This is another reason I think this thought experiment is unhelpful in this particular way.
@ Pinkeen #22
Pinkeen, Freemage, Rob and Ophelia answered you already, but here goes.
I specifically wrote my example to address your objection.Plenty of drunk-driving accidents begin with a person who’s had one or five too many thinking to him or herself, “Odds are it’ll be OK, it’s just this one time, I know what I’m doing.”
Plenty of unplanned pregnancies begin with that same rationalization.
I specifically crafted the scenario to address your objection and the objection of anyone who thinks that “Women need to take responsibility.” In my version of Judith Jarvis Thompson’s thought experiment, the person whose body is being used WAS unambiguously irresponsible.
The question remains the same: should society be able to legally force an individual to surrender sovereignty of their body for the use of another?
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the question that matters. It’s up to the individual to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy. You may find the moral reasoning used in any given instance to be good bad or indifferent, but that is beside the point.
Note that we do not even take organs from corpses without the prior consent of the deceased.
Being imprisoned is not the same thing as having your organs used for the benefit of another.
Lady M, I agree that that is the crux of the matter, I just don’t think this thought experiment does a good job of elucidating. I think in most versions of the experiment the ‘victim’ would have a moral responsibility to support the life he becomes attached to and yet I support the right to abortion.