One of the reasons why most of us feel puzzled about the problem of abortion is that we want, and do not want, to allow to the unborn child the rights that belong to adults and children. When we think of a baby about to be born it seems absurd to think that the next few minutes or even hours could make so radical a difference to its status; yet as we go back in the life of the fetus we (...) are more and more reluctant to say that this is a human being and must be treated as such. No doubt this is the deepest source of our dilemma, but it is not the only one. For we are also confused about the general question of what we may and may not do where the interests of human beings conflict. We have strong intuitions about certain cases; saying, for instance, that it is all right to raise the level of education in our country, though statistics allow us to predict that a rise in the suicide rate will follow, while it is not all right to kill the feeble-minded to aid cancer research. It is not easy, however, to see the principles involved, and one way of throwing light on the abortion issue will be by setting up parallels involving adults or children once born. So we will be able to isolate the “equal rights” issue and should be able to make some advance... (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson; Killing, Letting Die, and The Trolley Problem, The Monist, Volume 59, Issue 2, 1 April 1976, Pages 204–217, https://doi.org/10.5840/monis.

I want to enquire into the relationship between the normative claims of a society and the normative stances of its members. I shall develop a contractarian perspective, as the only one available to persons who may neither expect nor require their fellows to share their own orientation to values and norms. Although I only touch on these matters here, I hope to contribute to an interpretation of the clauses on the establishment and exercise of religion in the First Amendment to (...) the United States constitution, and to suggest guidelines for determining rights and duties in becoming and being a parent. More generally, I offer answers to certain questions about how social practices and institutions may be justified in a democratic society. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the illumination that the theory of rational bargaining sheds on the formulation of principles of justice. I shall first set out the bargaining problem, as treated in the theory of games, and the Nash solution, or solution F. I shall then argue against the axiom, labeled “independence of irrelevant alternatives,” which distinguished solution F, and also against the Zeuthen model of the bargaining process which F formalizes.