Friday, December 25, 2020

Why the Virgin of Guadalupe is more than a religious icon to Catholics in Mexico
AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
A statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico City.

The Conversation December 14, 2020

Each year, as many as 10 million people travel to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, in what is believed to be the largest Catholic pilgrimage in the Americas. Due to COVID-19 concerns, the pilgrimage, which is due to take place on Dec. 12, will instead be held online this year.

Normally, multiple pilgrimages take place around this time of the year throughout the country that end at the basilica – a church building specially recognized by the Catholic pope – of Our Lady of Guadalupe, an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Mexico.

In fact, images and statues of her are everywhere in Mexico. She is on altars in people's homes, altars on street corners, posters in mechanic shops and restaurants. Even in the U.S., many Catholic churches with parishioners who have ties to Mexico include a small chapel to her.

The first time I went to Mexico City in 2011 as a Ph.D. student, I visited the shrine to the Virgin. Later, I wrote about her importance in novels, short stories and movies – beyond a religious icon.

This pilgrimage is only one part of Mexican people's connection to the Virgin of Guadalupe

Apparition of the Virgin

During the pilgrimage in Mexico, people visit the shrine on a hill near where Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to an Aztec man named Juan Diego who had converted to Christianity in 1531.

The legend goes that when Juan Diego told the bishop about it, he demanded proof. Juan Diego then went back to the shrine and the Virgin told him about a place he could pick some roses.

Juan Diego went back to the bishop, with his cloak full of roses. But when the bishop looked at the roses, it is said that an image of the Virgin appeared. In the belief that this was a miraculous occurrence, a shrine to the Virgin was built in Tepeyac in the northern part of Mexico City.

Today, this shrine is part of a large complex which includes several church buildings, a larger-than-life group of statues that portray the Virgin's apparition to Juan Diego and a large space for outdoor Mass, a Catholic worship service.

Over the years, the shrine has undergone changes. A new basilica constructed in 1974 is now used for most services, although the older church constructed in 1709 still stands.


The most important object in the shrine is the miraculous image of the Virgin that appeared on Juan Diego's cloak, which is displayed in front of a moving sidewalk in the new construction.

Combining faith

The story about how the Virgin appeared in Mexico has resemblance to reports of her apparitions in Spain. In the 14th century, the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared to a peasant near the river of Guadalupe in western Spain. The Virgin is believed to have told him to dig up an image of her that had allegedly been buried for several centuries.

Some of those involved in the Spanish conquest, such as Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés, reportedly prayed at her shrine in Spain before setting off for the Americas.

When Spaniards colonized the Americas, which included the Aztec empire in central Mexico, in the early 16th century, they brought the image and story of Our Lady of Guadalupe with them.

What is noteworthy is that she is said to have appeared to Juan Diego in the same place where the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs had worshiped the goddess Tonantzin.

The Spanish colonial administration, together with church officials, encouraged people to replace worshiping Tonantzin in Tepeyac with worshiping the Virgin of Guadalupe in Tepeyac. In this way, they could appear to replace Indigenous beliefs with Catholic ones.

While a church was built on the site in 1556, the Virgin of Guadalupe did not attract a large following until the mid-17th century, when church leaders collected sworn statements regarding miracles she is said to have performed. Her feast day was moved at the time from September to December.

Larger pilgrimages to Tepeyac began in the late 17th century, one of many such pilgrimages in the larger Catholic tradition of thanking a saint or apparition of the Virgin for answering their prayers.


The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has been used in various ways to create a sense of community.
Ricardo Castelan Cruz / Eyepix Group/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Over the centuries, her image has been used in various ways to create a sense of community or to advance specific political goals. For example, during Mexico's 19th-century independence movement, Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo used her image on his banners. In this way, he successfully united many Mexicans in their fight against Spain. Mexicans commemorate this in their Independence Day celebrations each September.

About 40 years later, Catholic Church leaders would use her image to attract Mexican people to their cause, as they fought against the 1857 liberal reforms that encouraged increasing separation of church and state.

[You're smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]

Similarly, in the early 20th century, Mexico's government enacted such strict secularism laws that Catholic bishops suspended Mass for three years. Catholic leaders again used images of the Virgin of Guadalupe on their banners to encourage the soldiers fighting against the anti-Catholic laws.

Today, her image is as varied as the Mexican experience. One of these is the light-skinned child-like “Virgencita plis" on everything from small statues to face masks. It was designed in 2003 by a gift and toy company, Distroller corporation. In this image, the Virgin does not look Mexican and plays to very traditional and often outdated ideas of femininity: innocent, nonthreatening, almost like children. The statue of the Virgin at the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is dark-skinned, physically imposing and has Mexican features.

For each, she has her own meaning and a way of worship. And even if many people are not able to travel to her sanctuary, they will find other ways to honor the Lady of Guadalupe this year.

Rebecca Janzen, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, University of South Carolina

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Outrage as police training materials label Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization

PDBVerlag / Pixabay
Meaghan Ellis December 05, 2020

One law enforcement training group is facing backlash after circulating guidance that included false claims and conspiracy theories about Black Lives Matter (BLM).

According to KOLD, the guidance, titled "Understanding Antifa and Urban Guerrilla Warfare," has been distributed by the Indiana-based law enforcement training organization, International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA)). Its verbiage has come under fire as it contains various falsehoods about the Black Lives Matter movement while labeling its activists as terrorists.

One of the conspiracy theories suggests that the activist organization is "supposedly funded by China and that money is then donated to the Democratic Party."

"Antifa and Black Lives Matter have no intentions to negotiate," the document reads. "These are revolutionary movements whose aims are to overthrow the U.S. government."

The document also includes more demeaning remarks about BLM activists describing those who participated in the nationwide protests for civil rights over the summer as "useful idiots" who were working for "hard-core, terrorist trained troops," according to The Hill.00:0201:34

Phillip Atiba Goff, a Yale University professor and expert on racial bias in law enforcement, has described the dangerous document being used as training guidance for law enforcement as "stunning" and "distressing."

"It's stunning. It's distressing in many ways. It's untethered to reality," said Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity. "I worry that it leads to people dying unnecessarily."

Harvey Hedden, ILEETA's executive director, defended the document as he dismissed the concerns as "differences of opinion."

"There will always be differences of opinion on training issues but so long as the disagreements remain professional and not personal we do not censor these ideas," Hedden said. "I am willing to allow the trainer to evaluate the information themselves."

He added, "Just like law enforcement, I am afraid BLM has earned some of these criticisms and others might be overgeneralizations."

But criminal justice activists argue otherwise. Despite Hedden's defense, Scott Roberts, senior director of criminal justice campaigns for the racial justice advocacy organization Color of Change expressed concerns about how this type of guidance could intensify an already-troubling police culture.

Sherice Nelson, assistant professor of political science at Southern University and A&M College, also expressed concern about the robust amount of "wildly outlandish" misinformation in the document. Nelson said, "This document is below the belt because of how much misinformation there is, how many conspiracy theories there are, how much violence it promotes and how many reasons it gives to justify dehumanizing people."
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Trump plan to revive the gallows, electric chair, gas chamber and firing squad recalls a troubled history



The way the federal government can kill death row prisoners will soon be expanded to ghoulish methods that include hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber and the firing squad.

Set to take effect on Christmas Eve, the new regulations authorizing an alternative to lethal injections – the method currently used in federal executions – were announced by the Justice Department on Nov. 27.

The federal move follows the example of several states, including Oklahoma and Tennessee, that have revived alternative methods in the face of challenges to their lethal injection protocols and problems in the supply of drugs needed in the process.

It is not clear whether the administration actually intends to employ the newly announced methods. It may only want to have them in reserve if any of the individuals scheduled for execution before January’s inauguration – five, according to the Department of Justice – should succeed in challenging the current execution protocol.

What is clear is that these new regulations send a message about the lengths the administration will go to kill as many death row inmates as possible before Joe Biden takes office and, as expected, halts the federal death penalty.

If the president and Department of Justice succeed in their plan, the period from July 14, 2020, the date of the first of Trump’s federal executions, through January 20, 2021 will be the deadliest in the history of federal capital punishment in nearly a century.

As someone who has studied execution methods in the U.S., I see in the new regulations echoes of a troubled history of less-than-perfect execution methods.

To grasp their full significance, it is necessary to look at the record of hanging, the electric chair, the gas chamber and firing squads. Each of them has been touted as humane only to be sidelined because its use was found to be gruesome and offensive. Given that history, there are questions over whether the administration’s plans serve any purpose other than continuing a death penalty system deemed to be a cruel outlier among modern societies.
The noose and the chair

Let’s start with hanging.

Hanging was the execution method of choice throughout most of American history, and it was used in America’s last public execution in 1936, when Rainey Bethea was put to death in Owensboro, Kentucky. When done correctly, the noose killed by severing the spinal column, causing near instantaneous death
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Crowds watch as attendants adjust a black hood over Rainey Bethea. AP File Photo

But, all too often, hanging resulted in a slow death by strangulation and sometimes even a beheading. Given this gruesome record and hanging’s association with the lynching of mainly Black men, by the end of the 19th century the search for other execution methods began in earnest.

The first of those alternatives was the electric chair. At the time it was adopted, it was regarded as a truly modern instrument of death, a technological marvel in the business of state killing. Hailed by penal reformers as a humane alternative to hanging, the electric chair was first authorized in 1888 by New York state following the report of a commission that concluded, “The most potent agent known for the destruction of human life is electricity…The velocity of the electric current is so great that the brain is paralyzed; it is indeed dead before the nerves can communicate a sense of shock.”

Yet, right from the start, electrocution’s potency was a problem. Its first use in the 1890 execution of convicted murderer William Kemmler was horribly botched. Reports of the execution say that “After 2 minutes the execution chamber filled with the smell of burning flesh.” Newspapers called the execution a “historic bungle” and “disgusting, sickening and inhuman.”

In spite of the Kemmler debacle, the electric chair quickly became popular, being seen as more efficient and less brutal than hanging. From the start of the 20th century until the 1980s, the number of death sentences carried out by this method far outstripped those of any other method.

But electrocutions continued to go wrong, and eventually several dramatic botched executions in Florida helped turn the tide. Included were two executions, one in 1990, the other in 1997, in which the condemned inmates caught fire.

The gas chamber

By the start of the 21st century, states all over the country were abandoning the electric chair. As Justice Carol W. Hunstein of the Supreme Court of Georgia explained, “Death by electrocution, with its specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains and blistered bodies,” was no longer compatible with contemporary standards of decency.
A gas chamber at San Quentin prison from 1959. AP Photo/Clarence Hamm

One alternative to electrocution was the gas chamber, but it too has its own history of problems. First adopted in Nevada in 1922, executions using lethal gas were to take place while the condemned slept. Death row inmates were supposed to be housed in airtight, leak-proof prison cells, separate from other prisoners. On the day of the execution, valves would be opened that would fill the chamber with gas, killing the prisoner painlessly.

This plan was soon abandoned because officials decided it would be impractical to implement it, and states constructed special gas chambers fitted with pipes, exhaust fans and glass windows on the front and back walls for witness viewing. But deaths by lethal gas were never pretty or easy to watch.

Inmates regularly fought against breathing the gas as it entered the chamber. They convulsed, jerked, coughed, twisted and turned blue for several minutes before they died.

Far from solving the problems associated with hangings or electrocutions, lethal gas introduced its own set of horrors to the institution of capital punishment. In fact, by the end of the 20th century, 5% of executions by lethal gas had been botched.

As a result, states used gas as the sole method of execution only from 1924 to 1977, and it was last used in 1999. By then, the gas chamber had become a relic of the past because of its inability to deliver on its promise to be “swift and painless” and its association with the Nazi use of gas to kill millions during the Holocaust.

The firing sqaud

Finally, the firing squad. Of all of America’s methods of execution, it has been least often used. From 1900 to 2010, only 35 of America’s 8,776 executions were carried out using this method, and since 1976 just three people have faced a firing squad, with the last one carried out in Utah in 2010
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The execution chamber at Utah State Prison used in the U.S.‘s last firing squad execution. AP Photo/Trent Nelson, Pool, File

Critics point out that because death by guns evokes images of raw, frontier justice in a society awash in gun violence, this method mimicked something that the law wished to discourage. Nonetheless, Utah revived the firing squad in 2015 due to challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocol.

While it has some contemporary proponents who claim it is the least cruel of all execution methods, the history of the firing squad is marked by gruesome mistakes when marksmen missed their target. In the 1951 execution of Eliseo Mares, for example, four executioners all shot into the wrong side of his chest, and he died slowly from blood loss.

A cruel history, revived

While Trump’s Department of Justice is now holding out the prospect of using these previously discredited methods of execution, it cannot erase the cruelty that marks their history. That history stands as a reminder of America’s failed quest to find a method of execution that is safe, reliable and humane.















December 3, 2020 
Author
Austin Sarat
Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty and Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College
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LOCKEOCRACY IN AMERICA

On the morning of Saturday, October 28th, 1704, in a room in the household of Sir Francis Masham, John Locke died. He had no immediate kin. His ideas, however, would play a profound role in the political organization of the Western world for many centuries to come. It was to be 71 years, 8 months, and 6 days from his death, however, that the greatest of Locke’s inheritors and ideological heirs were to make their lasting mark. Crowded in at 520 Chestnut Street between 5th and 6th streets in Philadelphia, also known at the time as the Pennsylvania State House, a group of disgruntled delegates from all across the Thirteen colonies agreed, on July 4th, 1776, to adopt one of the most profound statements of Locke’s Enlightenment political thought theretofore produced since his death: the United States Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration opens with the famous words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” This hearkens back to the second chapter of the Treatise, entitled Of the State of Nature: “We must consider,” Locke says, “what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.” He continues, saying that it must be a “state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another,” and states that there is “nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.” (¶4)

The Declaration then progresses, stating (about the men concerned above, namely, all men) that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Here again the Founders echo Locke. In the fourth chapter of his Treatise, called Of Slavery, Locke argues that “This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to […] a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together.” Thus, Locke says, every man must have these unalienable rights, immune to arbitrary power, and he may only give them up as he loses his own life. Locke concludes, “No body [sic] can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it.” (¶23) Hence even man cannot alienate himself from his own rights without also losing his life.

Next in the Declaration comes the great statement concerning the purpose of government and the source of its authority: “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” A more Lockean sentence is not to be found in the entire document. As Locke argues in the tenth chapter of his Treatise, “The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” (¶124) In his eighth chapter, Of the Beginning of Political Societies, Locke discusses at length the question of consent of the governed. Given “that men are naturally free, and the examples of history shewing [sic], that the governments of the world, that were begun in peace, had their beginning laid on that foundation, and were made by the consent of the people;” given all that, Locke says, “there can be little room for doubt, either where the right is, or what has been the opinion, or practice of mankind, about the first erecting of governments.” (¶104) He continues, saying that “I affirm, viz. that the beginning of politic society depends upon the consent of the individuals, to join into, and make one society; who, when they are thus incorporated, might set up what form of government they thought fit.” (¶106)

Then, in the body of the second paragraph of the Declaration, the Founders get to the real meat of their purpose – they justify their revolution.

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. […] [W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Here the gloves come off. They appeal heavily to Locke’s Enlightenment political philosophy, to his justification and purpose of government, and therefore also to his defense of just revolution. Locke’s defense, coming again from his Second Treatise in the twenty-ninth chapter (somewhat ominously titled Of the Dissolution of Government) is a dead ringer for the language and spirit of the Declaration. Thus Sayeth Locke:

[W]henever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People […]. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; […] By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty. (¶222)

Locke was also heavily present, ideologically speaking, the formation of the United States Constitution. Locke believed that

[T]he first and fundamental positive law of all commonwealths is the establishing of the legislative power; […] This legislative is not only the supreme power of the common-wealth, but sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have once placed it; nor can any edict of any body else […] have the force and obligation of a law, which has not its sanction from that legislative which the public has chosen and appointed: for without this the law could not have […] the consent of the society, over whom no body can have a power to make laws, but by their own consent, and by authority received from them. (¶134)

Here Locke is emphasizing the importance of the legislative power in a government over all other forms of governmental power and authority. His reasoning for this authority, as is evident, hearkens back to the same reasoning he justifies government in the first place: the approval and consent of those governed. This is reflected in the very structure of the United States Constitution – the first power enumerated in the government is the legislative, and it receives at least twice as much space as any other power; indeed, in a document of about 4500 words, about 2270 words are devoted to the legislative branch alone, which is more than half of the document (roughly 50.44% ).

Now, it has been aptly shown through the documents of the American founding that John Locke did indeed a great impact on the American Founders; however, it remains to be shown that John Locke’s thought, and by extension the thought of the American Founders, is consistent with the ideals of the Enlightenment. This we will endeavor to show in the remainder of this paper.

Among the core ideas of the Enlightenment are devotion to reason, appreciation of method, love of liberty, belief in the primacy of utility, belief in the knowability of nature, worship of progress, critique of tradition, belief in deism, and acceptance of universalistic individualism. Locke and the American Founders adopted nearly all these ideas, as evidenced by the documents, and they were, therefore, participants in the Enlightenment.

For example: reason, rationality, and method all permeate both the Second Treatise and the American Founding documents – everything is treated with scrupulous examination and logical argument. Liberty is everywhere praised as a natural and unalienable right, and as a necessary means, or a thing that must be utilized to bring about the ultimate Good: true human happiness. Tradition is only justified through consent – in both sources, it may be thrown off like shackles through revolution if it is tyrannical or unwanted by those whom it governs. There are references to God in Locke and to a Creator in the Declaration, but not to any particular religious practices – God is seen as the source of rights, but not as a personal or acting agent in the world.

The American Experiment, then, is not a wholly American thing. This great country which has bred and raised so many of us operates not on principles of uniquely American origin, but on the axioms of the Enlightenment as espoused by a resident of the very kingdom from which we severed ourselves and found our freedom. American Exceptionalism must, it seems, make an exception, if only for a slim, gaunt old Englishman from a bygone century whose scribblings gave our revolution its start.

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The legacy of philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson: Moral pioneer who wrote 'A Defense of Abortion' dies at 91

Judith Jarvis Thomson // Berkeley Graduate Division Videos
Cody Fenwick December 07, 2020


Just as the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade was headed before the United States Supreme Court, a new journal of academic philosophy prepared to publish its inaugural issue including an innovative argument from Judith Jarvis Thomson. 

That 1971 paper, "A Defense of Abortion," published in Philosophy & Public Affairs became one of the most influential pieces of contemporary applied ethics, an enduring part of the legacy left behind when she died at 91 on Nov. 20, 2020.

"It has had such an incredible impact on people who have taken philosophy classes," Sally Haslanger, a professor of philosophy and women's and gender studies at MIT, where she worked alongside Professor Thomson, told me. "Almost anybody who teaches contemporary moral problems or an intro to moral philosophy is likely to teach that paper."

"I imagine you would regard this as outrageous," she told her readers, counting on the widely shared view that the kidnapped person would not be obligated to give over their body in this way.

The paper goes on to argue that this case, along with increasingly fanciful examples that illuminate different features of pregnancy and address potential counterarguments, show something perhaps unexpected about our moral intuitions: A right to life is not always the end of an ethical argument. We are not morally required to forfeit control over our bodies, even if death of another may be the foreseeable result. Abortion, therefore, may be permissible, even if pro-life arguments about the moral status of the fetus are correct.

It was an impressive argument, and it resonates today in the feminist rallying cry "My body, my choice."

"It's had a huge influence in the field. No argument about abortion can proceed without taking her arguments really seriously, even if it ends up opposing abortion," Kate Manne, a philosophy professor at Cornell University who worked with Thomson while studying at MIT, told me.

Despite its remarkable impact, though, Manne argued the central thesis of "A Defense of Abortion" is still underappreciated.

"I actually think it should have had more influence than it did," she said. "We're still at this annoying dialectical point where the personhood of the fetus is taken establish the impermissibility of abortion in wider culture. So it's still a very good thing that Judy's piece showed that that's far too quick. But in a way, I wish it had had more uptake."

Thomson's paper isn't just notable for its influence or the importance of its ideas about morality. As a piece of philosophy, it's exceptionally inventive and lucid. It's also particularly memorable. The structure of the thought experiment she used didn't need the patient with a kidney ailment be a violinist, as opposed to an unidentified person, but these kinds of details add color and life to what could otherwise be a stark examples. Her personal humor and charm were reflected in her writing.

"She's quite witty about it," Manne said of Thomson's argumentation style. "She says if she needed Henry Fonda's cooling touch upon her fevered brow, it would be 'frightfully nice for him to fly in from the West Coast to apply it' and save her life. But she isn't owed that by him."

Of course, excessively creative thought experiments in an argument have the potential to bog a paper down or complicate an argument unnecessarily, if not deployed right. But Thomson was a master of the form, using a series of whimsical examples to convince the reader of the plausibility of her view while never abandoning or distracting from the rigor of her argument.

But while it's undoubtedly her best-known contribution to philosophy, the paper on abortion didn't define her career. Within academia, Thomson wasn't known solely as a philosopher of applied ethics. Much of her work focused on foundational issues in philosophy and metaphysics, such as the nature of normativity, moral objectivity, composition, and action.

In its own way, Thomson's presence in these debates was perhaps as bold and unflinching as her views on abortion.

"Philosophy is male-dominated, but metaphysics is the most-male dominated, even now," Haslanger explained. "I came up in a period in grad school in the '80s, mainly. Judy was already producing really stunning work. And I started my career in analytic metaphysics. This remains a field where there are not very many women. And I would look in the bibliographies of the books I was encouraged to read or the articles I was encouraged to read, just looking for any name of a woman. And there were always only two, pretty much: Ruth Barcan Marcus and Judith Jarvis Thomson."

Thomson made significant contributions, for example, to debates about the concept of goodness, which she leveraged to make nuanced arguments against one of the most dominant theories in philosophical ethics.

In Thomson's view, good "isn't the kind of thing appropriately applied to states of affairs," said Haslanger. Something can't merely be good, simpliciter. It has to be good in some way. "So you can have a good toaster, or a good breakfast, or a good person. But a good state of affairs — states of affairs don't have criteria of goodness built into them."

This conclusion, she argued, was a big problem for utilitarianism and other consequentialist theories, which hold, more or less, that actions are to be judged by the consequences or states of affairs that they bring about. For Thomson, this view wasn't even really coherent, Haslanger said.

But she could be surprisingly effusive about views she didn't hold. Once, in a talk of hers I heard addressing another objection to utilitarianism, Thomson began by emphasizing the strengths of the view, arguing that there were many things about the theory to recommend it. "Many things," she stressed, repeating herself for emphasis.

First and foremost, the best reason to be impressed with utilitarianism was the simplest: "It's a theory!" she exclaimed.

Thomson made clear that many of the alternatives to utilitarianism that have been proposed over the years wouldn't merit this designation. And for her, utilitarianism's status as a full-fledged theory was undoubtedly high praise.

Her firm opposition to utilitarianism, though, was manifest in another of her philosophical contributions that has reached far beyond the academy and into the popular imagination: Trolley problems.

She actually credited the invention of the problem type to philosopher Philippa Foot, but it was Thomson who clarified and popularized the topic, which has become a sub-field of ethics in its own right known as trolleyology. In her first paper laying out the problem, she put forward the now-standard formulation:

Suppose you are the driver of a trolley. The trolley rounds a bend, and there come into view ahead five track workmen, who have been repairing the track. The track goes through a bit of a valley at that point, and the sides are steep, so you must stop the trolley if you are to avoid running the five men down. You step on the brakes, but alas they don't work. Now you suddenly see a spur of track leading off to the right. You can turn the trolley onto it, and thus save the five men on the straight track ahead. Unfortunately, Mrs. Foot has arranged that there is one track workman on that spur of track. He can no more get off the track in time than the five can, so you will kill him if you turn the trolley onto him. Is it morally permissible for you to turn the trolley?

Almost everyone seems to agree that it's permissible to turn the trolley, she explained. More debate breaks out when you ask whether you are morally required to turn the trolley. But the structure of the case lends itself to endless variation: What if you're not the driver, but just a bystander able to pull a lever and divert the trolley? What if the trolley loops around, such that the crushing of the one person isn't just an alternative to the deaths of the five, but would actually slow the trolley and thus be the means by which the others are saved? And why does this case strike us so differently than a case of a surgeon who kills one unsuspecting healthy person to harvest organs that will save the lives of five patients who would otherwise die?

On an austere consequentialist or utilitarian approach to moral reasoning, all these problems have simple answers: make the choice that results in the most lives saved, that does the most good. But Thomson reveled in complexities and qualifications of our moral commitments, and she rejected simplistic solutions. This wasn't mere pedantry for its own sake — she was deeply concerned with the principles that underlie our intuitions in these cases and what they can tell us about morality.

Her work on the topic eventually led her to change her mind about a key part of the problem, which she explained once in a seminar at MIT in 2013 that I was lucky enough to attend. She argued that a bystander watching the trolley would not be permitted, despite what she had previously believed and argued, to pull a switch to save the five people and kill the one.

How did she reach this startling conclusion? She imagined a new scenario in which the bystander had the opportunity to flip the switch to direct the trolley away from the five people and toward herself. Were she so noble, she might be willing to make that choice. But in Thomson's view, she wasn't obligated to make this choice. In an argumentative move that echoes the insight from "A Defense of Abortion," she posited that morality doesn't require us to sacrifice our lives for the lives of five others.

But if that's the case, she reasoned, then how can the bystander in the original case make the decision for the one person on the track to sacrifice her life for the other five? The bystander can't justify that choice, in Thomson's view. Despite what most people's intuition tells them, it's not permissible to flip the switch to kill one and save five from the oncoming trolley.

Her views weren't unforgiving or completely absolutist, though. If the cost were high enough, you might be obligated to flip the switch. Were the trolley carrying a bomb and on a course to destroy New York City, you ought to kill the one person to save the lives of millions.

"We must save New York!" she said.

One characteristic about Thomson that came through both in her writing and when she spoke was a firm belief that when discussing these kinds of ethical questions, there is a correct answer, even if it's hard to discern. In one seminar I attended at MIT, the group discussed whether the concept of "ought" is objective or subjective. Does it make sense to think of what we "ought" to do in a moral dilemma as reflecting the objective conditions, or our subjective perception of those conditions?

Debating this question, naturally, brings up more clever thought experiments, some of which seem to suggest that "ought" must be interpreted objectively, while others suggest a subjective interpretation of "ought" is best. It seemed to me that the solution is to simply stipulate that sometimes "ought" is used in a subjective sense, and sometimes it is used in an objective sense.

Thomson disagreed. She believed "ought" is objective — end of story. The clever counterexamples that suggest otherwise were certainly worth considering for her, but they weren't a reason to back down from the idea that there was a definitive answer to the puzzle.

This conviction stood out, especially because it was matched by fierce wit.

"There was just no one like her," said Haslanger. "To have a woman being really right in the thick of it, out-arguing others and making her way. It was really inspiring to me."

Thomson's confidence, fortitude and toughness were undoubtedly necessary for the career she had. Without this disposition, she may not have lasted in the world of academic philosophy or had such an impact at the time she entered the field.

"I found it in the eighties and nineties just awful to try to survive in mainstream analytic metaphysics," Haslanger explained. "It was just grueling. And that Judy did that a whole generation ahead of me is just mind-boggling. And she would comment on that now and then. She wasn't someone to complain or make a fuss about things that happened to her along the way. But you can't survive it unless you're very strong-minded and very determined, and brilliant. And she was all those things."

But if that toughness helped her survive, she didn't feel a need to abandon it once she had reached the pinnacle of her career. She was known as a fierce critic of students' papers. Getting the mechanics of a philosophical paper right — not just the argument, but the structure and the presentation of the ideas, down to the level of the sentence — was a top priority for her.

Manne remembered how Thomson subjected her work as a grad student to exacting standards. Those lessons stayed with Manne and influence her writing to this day, though she doubted that Thomson would always be satisfied with the results.

"She brought me into her office," Manne recounted, "having read a paper of mine, and very plainly said, in a tone that was genuinely warm: 'This paper is terrible!'"

Manne added: "She was incredibly tough, but I always got the sense that she was tough in the service of making people better philosophers. She was never just mean."

For Haslanger, this side of Thomson was an asset. Haslanger joined the philosophy department faculty at MIT when Thomson was the only other woman.

"I'm known for my strong feminist, anti-racist views, and I express them often and loudly. And I came to MIT, and it was the first time in my career where I could be the feminist 'good cop,' because Judy had spent so many years already being the feminist 'bad cop.' So we kind of worked together quite well. And it was such a relief," said Haslanger. "We definitely worked well together on encouraging people, and insisting, in fact, that people take women seriously."

She added: "She really was a symbol, an icon for many of us, who gave us hope and gave us courage to carry on."

It's notable, though, that — with the one clear exception — Thomson's work itself wasn't feminist philosophy. She generally worked on the traditional types of ethical and metaphysical questions handed down in the canon of philosophy, a canon that was historically fashioned by men. Questions that male philosophers have tended to ignore, such as those about the nature of gender oppression, say, didn't draw Thomson's scrutiny in the way traditional questions about the relationship between the statue and the clay or personal identity over time did.

The exception, of course, is her defense of abortion — what she's best known for.

"The fact that she just did what she did was a powerful feminist intervention. Her being who she was was a feminist intervention. I don't think that her work draws on gendered experience, or shows herself to draw on her feminist commitments to intervene in a debate, except for the abortion paper," said Haslanger.

"Whether or not she would have avowed it, I do think there's something feminist about her tough and unapologetic stance on bodily autonomy being something that is important, and that people have a right to, within limits," said Manne. "It really is about ways in which we've perhaps been myopic about the fact that women are entitled to bodily control, even if others depend upon them for their lives, which really is a deeply feminist point."




A DEFENSE OF THOMPSON

Abortion and the Right to Not Be Pregnant

https://philpapers.org/archive/MAHAAT-4.pdf · PDF file

Judith Jarvis Thomson s A Defense of Abortion was published in the very rst issue of the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, in 1971. The article that immediately followed it was Understanding the Abortion Argument , by Roger Wertheimer ( 1971 ).


Philosophical Arguments for Abortion – Political Animal ...

https://www.politicalanimalmagazine.com/2019/08/23/philosophical...

2019-08-23 · Some think that this clearly makes abortion wrong. Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson famously argued in 1971 [“A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 47-66] that this isn’t so. She observes that people often have a naive understanding of what the right to life is a right to. She makes her case with a number ...


The Singer and the Violinist: When Pro-Abortion Ethicists Are Out of Tune

Browse the contents of this issue of CedarEthics: A Journal of Critical Thinking in Bioethics.

Abstract

In the fall of 1971, Philosophy & Public Affairs published an essay by feminist moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson that would have the entire nation talking. Her piece soon became one of the most widely cited and reprinted essays in the Western world, and one of the most influential essays on the issue of abortion. In her essay, “A Defense of Abortion,” Thomson undertook the seemingly impossible task of explaining why, in her view, it is morally permissible to abort a human fetus even if the fetus is granted the status of personhood. The essay has received both support and recognition from many pro-choice ethicists, clearly seen just by virtue of the article’s overwhelming popularity. Yet prominent Australian-American ethicist and moral philosopher Peter Singer finds the argument to be deeply and irredeemably flawed. Some may be puzzled to know that thesame scholar that believes that both infanticide and euthanasia are obvious necessities also believes that themost prominent abortion argument in history is an extremely weak one.


"Philosophy is male-dominated, but metaphysics is the most-male dominated, even now," 



An Alternative Defense of Abortion. A critique of Judith Jarvis 

Thomson’s "A Defense of Abortion"

Term Paper, 2018

17 Pages, Grade: 1,0

 

Excerpt

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Position
1.1 Abortion as Self-Defense
1.2 The Right to Your Own Body
1.3 The Good vs. the Minimally Decent Samaritan

2. Problems with Thomson’s Position
2.1 The Moral Status of the Fetus and the Obligation to Provide Care
2.2 Bodily Autonomy and Thomson’s Terminology

Conclusion

References

Introduction

One of the main issues that the second wave feminists addressed was the right of women to decide if and when they want to have children.[1] Women in the sixties and seventies protested for their reproductive rights and demanded the legal access to abortion with slogans like “my body, my choice”. Although many countries liberalized their laws concerning abortion, the debate about the moral permissibility still remains one of the most heated debates across different societies.

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s essay “A Defense of Abortion” was published in 1971 and has had a great impact on the philosophical debate on abortion and its moral permissibility. Moral philosophers who are pro- or anti-choice alike have argued about the argumentative strategy that is best to support one’s claims concerning abortion. Thomson’s essay has been critiqued for various different reasons and this papers goal is to work out how Thomson’s position could be rethought after over forty years of its first publishing. My main thesis is virtually the same as Thomson’s: abortion is not always impermissible. However, I disagree with her methodology and I argue that the details of different cases and the societal context they happen in ought to decide whether abortion is morally permissible or not. My critique is especially aimed at Thomson’s strategy to assume – for the sake of the argument – that the fetus is a person, her conception of bodily autonomy and her terminology.

In the first part of the paper I summarize Thomson’s position while focusing on the most important aspects for the following critique. In the second part, I mainly use the theories of Gina Schouten and Rosalind Hursthouse to criticize some of Thomson’s assumptions. Gina Schouten has argued (from a feminist perspective) for considering that there is a societal moral obligation for caring and protecting the most vulnerable which means that depending on the moral status of fetus’, there is an obligation to care for them. Another interesting critique can be made by questioning of the role that (bodily) autonomy plays in bioethics and how Thomson uses it to justify abortion. Rosalind Hursthouse has attacked Thomson’s violinist example for being too different from an actual pregnancy and found her terminology too imprecise.

1. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Position

Judith Jarvis Thomson starts her piece by pointing out the premise that most theories who are against the permissibility of abortion are based on: the unborn child is a person from the moment of conception and to kill persons is wrong, therefore abortion is always impermissible. Conservative views on abortion stress the continuity in the development of a human being and that it is not possible to draw a line at one point where the cells become a person. Therefore, in this line of argument, the fetus must be considered as a person from the moment of conception. Thomson critiques this view by employing the analogy of an acorn turning into oak tree: nobody would say that an acorn is the exact same thing as the tree.[2] Although it is true that drawing a line in the development of a human being is very difficult, this does not mean that it isn’t possible to argue for the permissibility of abortion. Proceeding from that thought, Thomson starts her argumentation by taking on the premise of her opponents and acting as though it were true.[3] This is a strategically important point since this way she opens another way of thinking about the topic that does not divide people into two camps that have unbridgeable differences in their premises. Instead of trying to prove that a fetus is not a person, her plan is to prove why it is possible to argue for the permissibility of abortions even if fetus’ are granted the status of personhood. Following Thomson’s argument, whether the fetus is a person or not is not the defining moment of the argument. More important than the question of personhood is the question why granting the fetus personhood should necessarily lead to the conclusion that abortion is impermissible.

In her effort to explain why the right to life cannot easily trump the right to decide what happens to one’s own body, Thomson introduces her famous violinist thought experiment.

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.[4]

She wants you (the reader) to imagine that the doctor in this scenario would explain to you that because the violinist would die, if they unplugged you and because his right to life stands above all, you will have to wait for nine months until they can safely unplug you. Thomson then asks what this situation would be like if it were for example nine years or for the rest of your life. Should you be obligated to keep the violinist alive? The thought of being obligated to stay in this situation wouldn’t satisfy a lot of people because it seems to be unfair. Therefore, Thomson concludes that there must be something wrong with the assumption that the right to life is more important than any other right.[5] Proceeding from the thought experiment, Thompson thinks about objections against her position, mainly focusing on the thought of abortion as self-defense and the argument of bodily autonomy.

1.1 Abortion as self defense

In the case that a pregnant person’s life is in danger because of pregnancy, there is a conflict between the right to life of the pregnant person and that of the fetus. The extremely conservative view on abortion would say that in order to solve this conflict, one has to acknowledge the difference between killing and letting die. To perform an abortion would be to directly kill the fetus but to do nothing would only be letting the pregnant person die.[6] Furthermore, the fetus is an innocent being because it did not intend to harm the pregnant person and it did not choose to be in the situation. Thomson’s response to this is that even if the child is innocent and does not intentionally harm the pregnant person, it is permissible for her to perform an abortion herself. The reason being that it is self-defense, because it cannot be expected of the pregnant person to just endure her suffering and die. She is not directly killing the fetus if she is saving herself and the fetus dies in the process of that. Likewise, in the violinist example it would be justifiable if you unplugged yourself, because you would be defending yourself and not directly trying to kill the violinist. Thomson grants that you cannot justify anything with the claim of self-defense, but in this case the pregnant person and the fetus are both innocent because they did not enter the situation with the purpose of killing the other. If this critique is granted validity and it is morally permissible for the pregnant person to save herself by aborting the fetus, then another problem arises: the third party problem.

1.2 The right to your own body

Thomson advocates for the fact that the pregnant person owns her body.[7] She draws a comparison to a situation where two people are freezing and one of them owns a coat. It would not be impartial to say that it is impossible to choose who should get the coat. Thomson emphasizes that justice requires that the person who owns the coat also gets the coat. The pregnant person who owns her body therefore has the right to decide what happens to her body. “My own view is that if a human being has any just, prior claim to anything at all, he has a just, prior claim to his own body.”[8] The bodily autonomy of the pregnant person is one of the central aspects of Thomson’s argument, which she sees as a fundamental right of people that often gets lost in arguments against abortion. Especially in cases where the pregnant person’s life is not in danger, the bodily autonomy gets dismissed fairly quickly. The fetus’ right to life seems to trump anything (other than the pregnant person’s right to life) immediately. Thomson’s critique of these arguments is that the right to life is problematic in itself and does not suffice as an argument against the permissibility of abortion.[9] It has to be questioned what the right to life includes. Does it include other people providing the bare minimum of what is necessary for you to survive? And what happens if that one thing is something you have no right to be given? “I am arguing only that having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person's body-even if one needs it for life itself.”[10] If you are a kind person and consent to giving someone the right to use your body to survive that is very nice of you but you are not morally obligated to do it.

Thomson argues that there are cases of people getting killed unjustly which is morally wrong but in the violinist case you could unplug yourself and it still wouldn’t be killing the violinist unjustly. The right to life consist of the right not to be killed unjustly and by unplugging yourself you do kill the violinist but not unjustly. You never gave him the right to use your body and killing him is not the main goal of your actions but saving yourself is.[11] The question then is: Is abortion unjust killing?

[...]

[1] I want to mention that abortion is a very central debate in women’s liberation movements but not only women can get pregnant. The issue is just as important for people who do not conform to the binary system. For this reason, I will refrain from using terms like mother and will rather speak of pregnant persons.

[2] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion."Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 47.

[3] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion.": 48.

[4] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion." Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 48.

[5] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion.": 49.

[6] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion.": 50.

[7] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion.": 53.

[8] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion.": 54.

[9] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion.": 55.

[10] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion.": 56.

[11] Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion.": 57.

Excerpt out of 17 pages

Details

Title
An Alternative Defense of Abortion. A critique of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s "A Defense of Abortion"
College
University of Frankfurt (Main)
Course
Biomedical Ethics
Grade
1,0
Author
Year
2018
Pages
17
Catalog Number
V493621
ISBN (eBook)
9783668986770
ISBN (Book)
9783668986787
Language
English
Tags
Abortion, Abtreibung, Ethik, Ethics, Biomedical, Feminist

Quote paper
Isil Ceren Yildirim (Author), 2018, An Alternative Defense of Abortion. A critique of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s "A Defense of Abortion", Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/493621


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