The Famous Violinist

The Famous Violinist activity set can be found and downloaded here. A 3D printer is required to create this activity set, as well as a pair of scissors and a piece of string or twine.

The Famous Violinist is a 3D-printable activity set that allows learners to interact with a thought experiment from Judith Jarvis Thomson's 1971 paper “A Defense of Abortion”. This thought experiment is designed to test some of our intuitions about the moral permissibility of abortion.  Thomson describes the case as follows:

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. (Thomson 1971)

Some have argued that abortion is morally impermissible because the fetus is a person and thus has a right to life. However, the violinist in Thomson’s thought experiment is indisputably a person, and Thomson expects that many readers will share her intuition that it is permissible to unplug oneself from him even though doing so will cause him to die. By analogy, then, Thomson suggests that there are many circumstances in which it is morally permissible to have an abortion, even if the fetus is (or has the same moral status as) a person.

Learners should be given this activity set with the figures connected to one another via twine or a similar material. After learning about the thought experiment, learners should be given a pair of scissors and asked to decide whether it is morally permissible to sever the connection. In classroom settings, this should be followed by a critical discussion of Thomson’s arguments and the nature of the thought experiment.

The Famous Violinist is a creation of the Make Philosophy open pedagogy project and is released under the Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike license. Contributors to The Famous Violinist are Eli Shupe and Iliana Berenice Martinez.