Judith Jarvis Thomson (born 1929) is an American moral philosopher and metaphysician, best known for her use of thought experiments to make philosophical points.
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She attended Hunter College High School in New York and taught at MIT for the majority of her career, remaining there as professor emerita. She is well known for thought experiments. Her ex-husband, James Thomson, was also a professor of philosophy at MIT for many years.
One thought experiment for which Thomson is especially well-known occurs in her paper A Defense of Abortion:
The scenario is meant to push back against the concept that human beings possess an unalienable right to not be killed.
In this paper, Thomson argues on the basis of the violinist thought experiment that "the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly". Therefore, to show that abortion is morally impermissible, "it is by no means enough to show that the fetus is a person and to remind us that all persons have a right to life—we need to be shown also that killing the fetus violates its right to life, i.e., that abortion is unjust killing. And is it?" Thomson's article defends abortion rights and functions primarily as an argument by analogy in regards to the idea of mother/fetus consanguinity.
The paper meets reactions and criticisms from many different philosophers and bioethicists. Philippa Foot, a prominent Aristotelian ethicist argued that negative non-provision of service, as in the case of the violinist, is different from active killing, or interference, as in abortion (see Foot's book Moral Dilemmas, 86-87). Thompson's thought experiment has also been rebuked by Oxford philosopher John Finnis in "The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion: a reply to Judith Thompson"[1]