Peter McKnight: Fetishization of life prompts timely examination of our rights

Article content

Consider this slightly modified version of a famous thought experiment from the late MIT philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson:

Article content

Assume you wake up one day and find yourself connected by a series of tubes to an unconscious person. You learn that the person’s friends and family members kidnapped you and hooked you up because the unconscious person needs to use your organs to survive. You also learn that the unconscious person is entirely innocent as he’s been unconscious throughout.

Nonetheless, if you disconnect yourself, the unconscious person will die. But if you tolerate this situation for nine months, you can be detached and the unconscious person will then be able to live on his own.

Are you morally obligated to keep yourself plugged in? How about if it will take nine years instead of nine months, or if you’ll be stuck with and to your involuntary partner for the rest of your life? Are you then morally obliged to remain attached?

Article content

Thomson concludes that most people would consider it “outrageous” to answer in the affirmative. Sure, as she acknowledges, it would be an act of moral goodness to remain attached. After all, the unconscious person is not to blame for your predicament, and he has a right to life.

But you also have rights, including the right to decide what happens to your body. To declare that you are morally obliged to remain attached is to ignore your rights, to state that his right to life always and everywhere trumps your right to control over your body.

It’s not difficult to see that Thomson used this thought experiment as a rough analogy of abortion in cases of rape. And the value of the experiment lies in the fact that it effectively avoids getting mired in debates about when personhood begins because it accepts without argument that the fetus is a person.

Article content

In so doing, it suggests that it might be morally acceptable, in certain circumstances, to intentionally cause the death of a person even when that person doesn’t present a lethal threat. The thought experiment proved tremendously influential, including among many pro-life groups, which in some cases dropped their demands for exception-free anti-abortion laws.

And since the abortion debate primarily concerns laws rather than morals, let’s consider this within a legal framework. As Thomson was writing an ethics paper, her concern was limited to moral acceptability and moral obligation. But we know that the criminal law permits many behaviors we consider morally unacceptable because the blunt instrument of the law is often ill-suited to combating such behaviour.

Article content

Suicide—or at least attempted suicide—was once a criminal offence. Adultery is not a crime, except in some US states, though the laws are rarely enforced. And we’ve recently come to realize that criminalizing illicit drug use merely compounds the problems caused by the drug use itself.

So when we consider Thomson’s thought experiment in a legal context, we can ask: Should the state force you, on pain of criminal penalties, to remain attached for the rest of your life? If it was outrageous to answer the moral question in the affirmative, it seems even more absurd to respond to the legal one similarly.

It’s curious, then, that those exception-free abortion laws appear to be back with a vengeance. News of the leaked US Supreme Court draft decision ostensibly overturning Roe v. Wade has highlighted the fact that at least 17 states currently have exception-free “trigger” laws — laws set to take effect should the Supreme Court issue a final judgment.

Article content

The presence of these laws suggests that proponents believe the right to life always takes precedence over every other right. This amounts not to respect for life but to the fetishization of it — to treating it with obsessive devotion and preserving it at any and all costs.

This fetishization of life is present in other contexts entirely divorced from the abortion debate. Witness supporters of cryonics, who insist it’s better to be frozen until there’s a cure for what “killed” you rather than admit that your life is finite, or the transhumanists, who can’t wait to download their consciousness into a computer.

Given this epidemic of fetishization, the abortion debate might be just what we need to re-examine what rights, life, and the right to life really mean.

[email protected]

More news, fewer ads: Our in-depth journalism is possible thanks to the support of our subscribers. For just $3.50 per week, you can get unlimited, ad-lite access to The Vancouver Sun, The Province, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Vancouver Sun | The Province.