Judith Jarvis Thomson (born 1929) is an American moral philosopher and metaphysician. Image File history File links Judith_Thomson. ... 1929 (MCMXXIX) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Ethics (from the Ancient Greek Ä“thikos, the adjective of Ä“thos custom, habit), a major branch of philosophy, is the study of values and customs of a person or group and covers the analysis and employment of concepts such as right and wrong, good and evil, and responsibility. ... A philosopher is a person who thinks deeply regarding people, society, the world, and/or the universe. ... Plato and Aristotle (right), by Raphael (Stanza della Segnatura, Rome). ...

She attended Hunter College High School in New York and taught at MIT for the majority of her career, remaining there as professor emeritus. She is well-known for creative and enduring thought experiments. Her husband, James Thomson, also was professor of philosophy at MIT for many years. Hunter College High School, colloquially known as Hunter or HCHS, is a New York City magnet secondary school for gifted students located on Manhattans Upper East Side. ... Nickname: Big Apple, Gotham, NYC, City That Never Sleeps, The Concrete Jungle, The City So Nice They Named It Twice Location in the state of New York Coordinates: Country United States State New York Boroughs The Bronx Brooklyn Manhattan Queens Staten Island Settled 1613  - Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) Area    - City... Mapúa Institute of Technology (MIT, MapúaTech or simply Mapúa) is a private, non-sectarian, Filipino tertiary institute located in Intramuros, Manila. ... In philosophy, physics, and other fields, a thought experiment (from the German Gedankenexperiment) is an attempt to solve a problem using the power of human imagination. ...

One thought experiment for which Thomson is especially well-known occurs in her paper A Defense of Abortion: A Defense of Abortion is a moral philosophical paper by Judith Jarvis Thomson first published in 1971. ...

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. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but in nine months] he will have recovered from his ailment and can safely be unplugged from you.

The scenario is meant to be analogous to at least some cases of pregnancy and is often taken (and is taken by Thomson herself) to support the moral permissibility of induced abortion. The term trimester redirects here. ...

A defense of abortion

Main article: A Defense of Abortion

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. A Defense of Abortion is a moral philosophical paper by Judith Jarvis Thomson first published in 1971. ... Consanguinity, literally meaning common blood, describes how close a person is related to another in the sense of a family. ...

See also

• Violinist (Thought Experiment)

This problem, which is a famous thought experiment, was first posed by Judith Jarvis Thomson in 1971. ...

Writings

• A Defense of Abortion, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1971, pp 47-66.
• Preferential Hiring, (1973)
• The Right to Privacy, (1975)
• Killing, Letting Die and the Trolley Problem, (1976)
• Acts and Other Events, (1977)
• Rights, Restitution, and Risk (Cambridge, 1986)
• The Realm of Rights (1990)
• Abortion, (1995)
• Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (together with Gilbert Harman), (Blackwell 1996)
• Goodness and Advice (2003)

Affirmative action (U.S. English), or positive discrimination (British English), is a policy or a program providing access to systems for people of a minority group who have traditionally been discriminated against, with the aim of creating a more egalitarian society. ... how would you feel if teh govenment could watch you while you were on the toilet? Its getting really bad adn the politicians dont understnad that there are other ways! If you can do something about th eintrusion, do it . ... The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics, first introduced by Philippa Foot, but also extensively analysed by Judith Jarvis Thomson and, more recently, by Peter Unger. ... For the direction right, see left and right or starboard. ... Gilbert Harman (born 1938) is a contemporary philosopher teaching at Princeton University who has published widely in Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics, and the philosophies of Language and Mind. ...

External links

• Thomson's page at MIT