Both/And

Abstract

Both/And Shivani Radhakrishnan (bio) My research interests are in social philosophy, so I teach ethics often. Sections unfold in an overcrowded seminar room on the top floor of Philosophy Hall, where the lights beep continuously after they're left on for more than 45 minutes. Veterans of the class know that to make it stop, they'll need to slide the dimmers all the way down and then all the way back up. ____ Phil 2702: Contemporary Moral Problems Fall 2016 TA: Shivani Radhakrishnan Course overview: This course introduces students to philosophy through the study of ethical problems that arise in the contemporary world. There are no pre-requisites, and no previous reading in philosophy will be presupposed. The goal is not to provide you with definitive answers to the controversial questions we'll discuss. It is aimed, instead, at improving your ability to think, talk and write about a range of issues. To that end, the assigned texts will advance different perspectives and yield incompatible conclusions. Progress on difficult problems often comes out of serious dialogue. ____ Courses like Contemporary Moral Problems specialize in making philosophy relevant. Relevance, in these circumstances, can feel a bit like applying an iron-on decal. Try as we do, us academics attempt to transfer directly—using the steam iron of philosophy—theory to other objects. We come up with a general frame, and then use it to think through a host of particular scenarios that surround areas like sex, love, or violence. Even death gets treated like a t-shirt, where people inquire about whether our deaths could harm us, or how people could fear what they don't know. I'd found the approach to applied philosophy unsatisfying and too one-directional. I hoped, secretly, that traces of the decal or even the t-shirt would burn permanently onto the iron's cool nonstick coating. There's a set of consensus moral puzzles philosophers reach for, and this semester's syllabus includes a handful: (1) War and Terrorism, (2) The Death Penalty, (3) Animal Ethics, (4) Immigration, and (5) Euthanasia. While other topics are subject to professorial discretion, one issue included on every applied ethics syllabus I've ever seen is (6) Abortion. When I asked the professor I was TA-ing for about this, it was during an organizational lunch. The professor—a kind-eyed British man on the cusp of retirement who often wore a newsboy cap—picked up some kimchi with chopsticks, rendering his signet ring invisible. "Abortion's tractable," he says. "And it provokes discussion." [End Page 182] During the September 14th lecture, I stay in my seat in the far back left of the lecture hall, the room's wooden chairs replete with foldable tray-tables still too small for full-sized notebooks. The professor opens with Judith Jarvis Thomson's article "A Defense of Abortion," the assigned reading for the day's class. In the paper, cited by others 1792 times, Thomson offers a thought experiment that reads like a sci-fi novella, what would serve—for a handful of the elect—as a path to fame in post-1950s Anglo-American philosophy. Imagine that you wake up in a hospital with a famous violinist attached to your kidneys. While you were sleeping, a society of music lovers broke into your home, secretly hooking you up to a comatose musician who needs use of your organs. It will be nine months before the violin player will recover. If you unhook the guy, the man will die, and you'll have to answer to the music lovers. As for the violin player, the argument goes, so too for the pregnant woman. Even granting that the musician has a right to go on living, that settles nothing. A philosophical side-step, one meant to leave the reader wondering. Even if the violin player and the fetus have rights to life, what should be done? ____ After the Thomson lecture but before I distributed the professor's paper topics, my Danish friend Ida called to tell me she was pregnant. She did not cry. Hardly six months earlier, in spring, she'd rung at 7 am, knowing...