Is Abortion Always Wrong - Essay Example

? Final Exam Zaur D Ravinovich California Los Angeles Section A Judith Jarvis Thomson claims that even if we assume the fetus has a right to life, it does not follow that abortion is always wrong. Explain Jarvis Thomson argument for this claim. What in your view is the strongest objection to her argument? (Explain/show on, why abortion is permissible) For the sake of argument, Thompson grants that the fetus is a person and argues that this does not imply that abortion is entirely impermissible. (P. 47). Each and every person has the right to life and so the fetus to become entitled to this right. Nevertheless, the mother has the right over her body, and can decide on what shall or shall not happen to her body. Every person should be able to grant her will. Is another person’s right to life stronger than a mother’s decision to what shall or shall not happen to her body? Therefore, the fetus will not be killed, and an abortion will not be performed to the mother. To show the example of performing an abortion when pregnancy is as a result of voluntary sex, we take the example of a person waking up in the morning lying in bed with an unconscious violinist, a famous violinist. He has a fatal ailment of the kidney, and the Music Lovers Society has established that she is the person with the right blood type to help. They kidnap her and use her kidney to extract poison from the violinists’ kidney. She later became informed by the hospital’s director that it is the Music Lovers Society that did that to her, and we would have refused if we had known. She gets conjoined to him for 9 months and to unplug her means killing him. She has the right to decide what occurs to her body, but another person’s right to life outweighs yours. This means she can never be unplugged from him. She would see this as outrageous which sounds the same as what I had suggested earlier on a mother’s body. Abortion that gets done to protect a woman’s life occurs, according to the experiments, when the woman has found she has a cardiac condition, and she is pregnant. She will eventually die if she does not undertake abortion. Both the woman and the child have the right to life, so what will happen, should an abortion be undertaken or should the mother be left to die? The experiments above show that the woman has no right over her life, but the other person determines the right for her. Critiques argue that the unplugging of the violinists does not amount to direct killing as she claims. They claim that Thompson is not able to see the argument of rights in both ways. The fetus just like the mother has a claim to the right of being alive, as well. However, if you unplug yourself from the sick violinist, you are totally unjust to him. This is unfair since you gave him no right to use your kidney and nobody else could have given him. Violinists, like all human beings, have the right to life, and by unplugging yourself from him, he will die ad in this case you do what the violinist has a right that you will not do it, but not to act unjustly to him when doing the act. Also, when a woman voluntarily engages in intercourse and gets pregnant, she is responsible for pregnancy and the person inside her. The person inside the body has the right to be there and aborting it, will be denying it of what it has a right over. This will amount to injustice to the thing. If she gets asked to kill it even for the sake of saving her own life, is wrong, since she voluntarily accepted it into her body. Nevertheless, a person who exists from the act of rape has no right to the mothers’ body, and abortion is, therefore, acceptable. Section B 2. David Miller claims that the distributive justice argument for a policy of open borders fails. Explain Miller’s argument for this claim and discuss what you take to be its most serious shortcoming. Distributive justices involve the comparison of how people of different origins fair according to some standard. It is not clear, according to Miller, that the distributive justice applies beyond the borders of the individual states. Why? Because, as Walzer claims, the idea of the distributive justice presupposes that a bounded world within which the distributions occurs; a group of individuals committed to dividing, sharing and exchanging social goods, firstly among themselves. The other reason cited by Miller is that the stock of goods present, at any moment, to be divided will depend on the community’s in the question history, including the decisions about the economic system under which the production will occur. When the national boundaries coincide with the state boundaries, these associative obligations between the different nationals can be defined, assigned and well enforced. Without these national states, citizens’ obligations of distributive justice would still be diffuse and amorphous. It is going to be difficult to know what duties they put on us, and social justice could go unrealized. Miller, therefore, states that there are best reasons to want the nation’s border to coincide with those of the states. This should be made possible without harm, because, in the situation, the social justice prospects are likely to be greater. There are two shortcomings with Miller’s argument from the social justice. He could be wrong about the country’s basis of the distributive justice obligations. Some theorists argue that the obligations of justice are indebted to the fellow citizens and not the different nationals. If Miller could be right, and claims that the distributive justice system is in line with the national basis problems, then it would seem to show that the citizens who do not share a state will have the distributive obligations to each other. This is not true. By removing obligations of the distributive justice in the views about the national identity, Millers allows the possibility that the individuals who cannot identify with the majority country lack the distributive obligations to their fellow countrymen. This is of serious concern to the multinational states, where the members of a sub state country may not identify themselves with the political community. The Miller/Walzer argument for limiting the scope of distributive justice is not strong. Walzer suggests that distributive justice only makes sense within a world that becomes bounded where individuals gets committed to the exchange and sharing of the social goods. This claim is not clear why the world does not count as being bounded. Walzer claims that the bounded world is a world that shares cultural norms and traditions. The persisting issue with this argument is the fact that it underestimates the degree to which traditions are heterogeneous and practiced in different ways by individuals. His response does not acknowledge the fact that, there exists cultural continuity between the different groups, and that it underestimates what people have in common as human beings. The claim by Walzer about cultural communities that get committed to the equitable and fair distribution of the nation’s resources is highly irrelevant. This is only possible if he can prove that the value of culture is of immense significance compared to the values of global equality and justice. Section C 3. G.A. Cohen claims “a certain lack of a person's freedom accompanies the lack of money, whatever the relationships among ability, means, and the freedom may be, and I get excited to assume, here, with the right, and with Berlin and Rawls, that freedom is similar with lack of interference.” Explain Cohen’s argument for this claim. What in your view is the strongest objection to the argument he makes? Cohen argues that lack of money, poverty, becomes associated with lack of freedom. Even though, lack of money is not the only thing that restricts an individual’s freedom, it is the most indispensable of all the reasons. For further emphasis, he states that, since one is poor, poor people are not mobile to do things that the non poor people are free and able to do (p. 2). The daily lives of the poor people provide enough evidence that poverty restricts freedom. A poor individual can say that she is no longer free to go and check on her sister in a distant town, when the bus service became withdrawn. Intellectuals can show this just as a feeling or maybe she feels less free than before but she is not. According to Cohen, a right winger will claim that even though the lady gets prevented from attaining her desired end, the interference in this circumstance is not the same to making the lady free. The lady lacks the resources to exercise her freedom, and, therefore, interference becomes justified in this case. According to Cohen, a person is free to do anything without interference from people, and if the person is not able to afford to participate in an activity that does not imply that he or she lacks the freedom in doing it, but simply lack the means of doing it and hence the ability of doing it. The problem faced by the poor is not the lack of freedom, but they are not able to exercise the freedom they have. According to Cohen, the value of money lies in the fact that it removes interference and gives the individual freedom. The relationship between money and freedom is tight than that of looks and freedom. Being good looking or intelligent will clear interference only for some time. Money, on the other hand, gets rid of the barriers of freedom at all times. The strongest objection to Cohens claim is its clear conceptual character which does not establish any normative conclusions. It does not prove that the right should abandon their political preferences, because they can always use the language of freedom to reformulate them. Both the left and the right are also not right on their claims regarding freedom and liberty. The right is right about their claim on liberty but wrong on their claim about freedom the left are right on their claim about freedom but wrong on the claim about liberty. Freedom is the real possibility of doing something while liberty is the permissibility. The left is only interested in the possibility but refutes that liberty delivers it. The right gets interested in the permissibility but correctly denies that permissibility delivers it. These claims are both the same and both the right and the left are both right about the same thing. The left is, however, wrong when it claims that everything significant that gets meant by liberty to its plausible conception of freedom as a real possibility. The right are also wrong when it claims that everything significant that becomes implied by freedom to its plausible conception of liberty as permissibility. The right opposes interference with the right of the private property, but they tend to support the interference with the availability to access by the poor people to the same property. They, however, cannot support or defend the property rights by bringing up the value of freedom, in a way related to non interference. Read More