Showing posts with label filosofia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label filosofia. Show all posts
Platão no Matrix
"No interior de uma gruta, uns indivíduos permanecem acorrentados de costas para uma fogueira chamejante. Os reclusos só vêem o movimento das sombras projectadas sobre as paredes da caverna, e essas sombras constituem a sua única realidade. Finalmente, um deles liberta-se da clausura e aventura-se a sair da caverna, rumo ao mundo que se estende para além das hipnóticas projeções. Neste relato há um belíssimo convite à dúvida, à não conformação com as aparências, à quebra das amarras e ao abandono dos preconceitos para olhar para a realidade de frente. A saga cinematográfica Matrix adaptou a mensagem rebelde desta alegoria ao mundo contemporâneo da realidade virtual, da aldeia mediática, dos mundos paralelos da publicidade e do consumismo, dos boatos da Internet e das autobiografias maquilhadas que fabricamos para as redes sociais."
Irene Vallejo, O Infinito num Junco [pag 209]
Keeping markets in their proper place... Moray reinvigorating public discourse
Economics should be seen as a sub-field, as a branch of moral and political philosophy.
What's missing is engaging with big ethical questions. Questions about the right way of valuing goods and social practices. So... Why do we shrink from this?
Morally invigorate the terms of public discourse. To overcome the bad habit of outsourcing our moral judgements to markets what we need is a politics of mutual respect that engages with competing views, including competing moral and even spiritual conceptions.
Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life
Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life (1989)
"I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking but, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own."
– What Wittgenstein was saying was, "forget all this nonsense about knowledge and uncertainty and all that stuff. What we all believe, to start with, is fine, and that is all there is to it."
As narrativas do Eu / Fake it till you make it (?) / Difference is everywhere / NLP / o Eterno Retorno da diferença
About Deleuze - Lecture 1 and 2_1
Topics from the lecture on the book "Difference & Repition" (Paul Patton):
Deleuze analysis how 'difference' comes down to us philosophically, as a secondary category. His engaging with the history of philosophy is an engagement seeking to show that the primary way of thinking of difference is as secondary to identities.
Structuralists defend that the 'surface identity' refers to the underlying identity that gives rise to it (ex: problem with authority comes from Oedipus complex).
Post-Structuralists (Foucault, Deleuze) agree that we have surface identities, but they deny that these identities come from some deeper essential core.
For the Post-Structuralists, our identities are not a product of some deep essence. But if our identities are not a product of some deep essence, where did they come from? How is it that these identities came to us, if they didn't come from something deep underneath?
– For Foucault – Our identities are a product of a history in which we are immersed. Who we are, is produced, created, through the 'histories' in which we find ourselves. So, if we have a problem, we should just look inside ourselves (to see what the essential core is and how it has gone wrong), but we should look just as much outside. So if we have a problem, it's not because of who we are, but of the context (narrative) we find ourselves in. So we have to adopt/develop alternative practices :D, alternative ways of seeing the world.
The alternative practice will, ultimately, challenge the identities (the identities that are currently 'on offer'). So, the 'history narrative', people are not 'essentially' normal or not. They 'get produced' as normal, through various practices, as psychotherapy...
So, Foucault tends to reject the idea of ontology as a way of accounting for our identities. So it looks like it's deep, essential and onthological, but it turns out to be (the 'ontology of the present': mentioned by Foucault).
Foucault is not interested in the brain and how it develops. He's interested in the 'history' itself of things that gives us the habits, and not in the biological matter. For Foucault, the brain might as well be a black box because he's not interested in the brain. Brain is whatever it is that can be subject to these habits.
For Foucault, if we are a product of our history, we are exposed to the outside. The outside filters into us, makes us.
Now, this leaves open a question: "Is there any other way to stop thinking of identities being the product of essence?"
Why would anybody turn to ontology if you are trying to resist the idea that our identities are not the product of some deep essence [minuto 1:10:10]? It seems the wrong place to turn. And yet, that's where Deleuze goes.
So, when we see it, when we have a good grip on the development of this Deleuzian ontology, it will present itself as a potentially compelling way to think about who we are, and who we might be. Moving past ideas of identity.
– For Deleuze – Who is a Materialist, rather than working through history (narrative), he works through ontology. What there is, is the material stuff. Deleuze's 'Difference in Repetition'.
Can we think of 'difference' not as difference between things but 'difference' on it's own, simply as difference?
Deleuze says that when we talk about 'difference', we tend to think about difference as secondary and 'identities' as primary. [1:17:00]. Can we think as 'difference', not as the difference between two identities but 'difference' on its own simply as difference? The move Deleuze is going to make is to make 'Difference' primary and 'Identity' secondary. One way to read the book, "Difference & Repetition" is as an ontology of how 'difference' gives rise to 'identities'. Identities are secondary and they are rooted in something that is not an identity, which means it could be a lot of things that it is, currently, not. Not an essence in any way we thought of.
Example: It goes back to infant brain development. The synaptic connections in infant brains, are not yet really formed, and the way it works (roughly), has a lot to do with habit. So the way it happens is that we become a product of the synaptic connections that get formed in our brain, through development. [1:22:55]
So, how shall we think about the brain? The brain is not some essential identity that gets formed through brain development. It can't be that because if it were, there could only be one way that we could develop. And there's so many different ways we can develop. So whatever the brain is, it doesn't hold any potential. The brain cannot either be as if there were a bunch of different possible "me's" in there, and that in the way my synaptic connections formed they would give me one 'me' as opposed to the other 'me'. So we can't think of the infant brain as an identity that just happens and unfolds, on the one hand, and we can't think of it as a set of possible identities, one of which gets chosen, and we cannot either think of the child's brain as a complete blank slate that could become anything, because whatever my brain develops me into, it's not going to develop me into a seagull, or a racoon... So the infants brain has to have some kind of structure but, on the other hand, the structure is not a structure of any possibilities...
So to put it on ontological terms, what is the 'Being' of this thing (this infant brain)? Deleuze's answer is that it's a 'field of difference'.
The "Field of Difference" – [1:36:11] is structured, on the one hand, because if it weren't it could become anything. But it's not structured with any identities, on the other hand, because there are no identities there waiting to come out. So, not a blank slate, not an identity, not a set of potentialities, but something that could be many different things through its exposure to experience (the Foucault side of it...). And, to be noticed about this 'Field of Difference', is that we don't know all of what it can be. Because it's the ways in which it habituates itself, the different things to which it's exposed, the way it takes up those things that it's exposed to, will make it what it is.
Because it's a human brain and because it's a 'field of difference', the identity that gets formed is not the only identity that it might form, not the only identity it might have formed, but it's also not the only identity it might have formed once it gets formed, because people re-habituate themselves. They change their synaptic connections and they become somebody else. They change!
So the 'field of difference' just doesn't go away! It's there within the identity.
And, interesting enough, this thought resonates with cognitive science.
So how do we think about this field of difference and how does it give rise to identities? [1:42:11]
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Repitition [1:42:11]: Things do repeat. Everything repeats... But what repeats is not identity. What repeats, for Deleuze, what keeps coming back, is 'difference'. There is always something ahead of us that repeats, that we find in our future, but it's not the same thing over and over again (like Nietzsche's eternal return). Deleuze's repetition is the 'eternal return of difference'. The 'same thing' that returns is difference. So, as we move through the future, as we move through our world, towards the future, what we are faced with, what keeps coming back to face us, are not simply identities but, in fact, that field of difference. Which means that whatever anything is, it could also be something else and we can't be sure of it can possibly be.
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| [1:51:16] Start by reading from page 50 and read to the end of the chapter (Nietzsche). Skip the note on Heiddeger's philosophy of difference (page 64). Structure of the reading: Aristotle - Hegel - Nietzsche - Plato |
How has difference come down to us philosophically?
– 'Difference' is secondary to 'identity', for Aristotle. For Aristotle, 'identity' is primary.
– For Hegel, 'difference' is secondary to 'identity'.
– Nietzsche is the thinker for whom 'difference' becomes primary.
– As for Plato: oddly enough, after we read Nietzsche, we can see Plato as opening the door to overturning his own philosophy, but we can only see that after having seen Nietzsche.
• Aristotle:
Aristotle's thought is a thought of categories. [2:07:07] For him we have 3 'identity' categories: Genera, Species, and Individuals
Genera identity examples: colours, animals...
Species identity examples: black, white, horse, whale (black is the 'species' of the 'genera' colour; whale is the 'species' of the 'genera' animal)
Individuals identity examples: a white horse, a black whale.
– So, 'this white horse', is a member of a 'species' which is a member of a 'genera'.
[2:08:57] - For Aristotle, difference lies between different 'genera', between different 'species', and between 'different individuals'. In order to have 'difference' you must have 'identities' first. What is primary for Aristotle are the categories themselves. Difference emerges as distinctions within various categories. There's no such thing as difference itself, and difference doesn't generate identity. First we have identities, and difference happens between them.
• Hegel:
Thesis - Antithesis - Synthesis -> dialectic
[2:11:44] Of all of the 'philosophical enemies' Deleuze had, he considered Hegel the one who was his greatest enemy. Hegel's notion of 'dialectic' was what Deleuze criticised the most. Hegel sees himself as working by means of difference. He sees things as unfolding by means of diference. But he still has difference subordinated to identity. That is why 'difference' is opposition.
For Hegel, history does not procede in a linear fashion (step by step by step). It procedes dialectically. The notion of the dialectic in Hegel's hands takes on a certain form which it had not had before:
––– You start with a specific situation, and that situation generates its own opposition. So situations are internally unstable and generate their own opposition. So then there is a conflict that has to be resolved, and it's resolved into a new situation. That new situation will have its own instabilities.
So, in Hegel there is the 'thesis' (the situation). To understand the dialectic we can use the [simple] analogy of stereoscopic vision: two different eyes (two identities) capture two different images that merge into one other final image (the new 'thesis' is the 'synthesis' and the synthesis becomes the new thesis). In Hegel's thought, the negative is primary: – what gets the movement going between identities is opposition.
Examples of dialectics:
1) Relationships develop dialectically.
2) Marx, who was a dialectical thinker. For Marx the economic situation is one that is always in tension: owners vs workers. History, for Marx, is driven by conflict between classes, and if you get rid of the notion of classes, if you end up having a single class, then there isn't going to be this eternal tension. So we will have reached an 'eternal synthesis'. And this is what Marx means by 'the end of History'. So, through the 'dialectic' we do have a movement of differences, but they work by opposition or by negativity. Each movement is a negation of the earlier one (according to Hegel).
Deleuze wants to point out that identities don't have to come from other single identities.
– Can there be a thought of the 'negative' which makes the negative secondary rather than primary?
– Why would one want a thought that makes the
• Nietzsche:
[2:29:42] For Nietzsche there are two forms of negation: one is the Hegelian one, and the other is a form where negation is not primary, but secondary. For Nietzsche there are two types of forces: Active forces and reactive forces. Active forces are not in conflict with the reactive forces. Only reactive forces are in conflict with active forces.
– An active force is a force of creation. It does what it does. It follows its own path.
– A reactive force works by stopping an active force. It reacts to an active force.
The primary way as to think of difference is as secondary to identity.
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Deleuze ontology: Ontology is a matter of relations without positive terms. 'Being' is relations without positive terms.
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Personal change [1:39:37]
People often think that personal change comes from epiphanies. Like, you have this moment, and everything becomes clear. Suddenly the scales fall from your eyes, you see the 'truth', and now you're somebody else. And what studies of folks have shown is that personal change almost never happens like that. Why not? Well, think of how brains develop. They develop through habituation os synaptic connections. So, to become something other than you were is, often, not a matter of realising something in a moment but, rather, habituating yourself. Getting the habit. People change by trying things out, experimenting, etc, etc.
... to be continued...
The Psychiatrist
Notas:
Ontology: the study of what there is (physical... mental... God...). And, what 'Being' is.
Idealists: There is only mental stuff.
One of the qualities of matter, is that it is convertible into energy. But energy is just mass in another state, so it's just more material... Matter has a lot more qualities than we may think.
Utilitarianism: that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness...[or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.It has been applied to social welfare economics, the crisis of global poverty, the ethics of raising animals for food and the importance of avoiding existential risks to humanity. [Jeremy Bentham]
Insight Therapy: a type of psychotherapy in which the therapist helps their patient understand how their feelings, beliefs, actions, and events from the past are influencing their current mindset.
More stuff:
The Harder problem of Consciousness: here
A causalidade em Deleuze: diferença interna e produção de si: aqui
Holographic ontology: holographic ontology highlights a strong quantum characteristic of complexity, uncertainty, and indeterminacy about global life. Instead of a teleological process of homogenization, holographic transition is more multifaceted and dynamic. [...] As global challenges loom, transnational interconnectedness deepens, and a myriad of issues interact in unpredictable ways, it is now time to take the worlds’ holographic existence more seriously.
here
Saussure: “in language there are only differences without positive terms”. Language is a huge contradiction and without these contradictions or differences language would cease to exist. Here
Definition and the Epistemology of Natural Kinds in Aristotle: here
Hegelian Dialectics For Dummies: here
The Philosopher's Zone
The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.
Here
Alternative forms of the market economy / We can't change the world without ideas
"What we need, is to give very large parts of the labour force access to these advanced productive practices. [...] We we do not have, and need, is the example of a decentralised partnership between governments and firms to the end of disseminating these advanced practices to large parts of each national economy. [...] We need a form of education that is ... cooperative. [...] The limited forms of democratic politics that we now have in the world, are forms that require crisis to make a change possible. I want us to organize politics in democracy so that we do not need trauma as the condition for transformation. [...] It's easy to be a realist if you accept everything and it's easy to be a visionary if you confront nothing. What we have to do is accept very little and to confront a great deal. [...] No one knows, today, what socialism means, so why be hung up on these abstractions? [...] I don't want finance to serve itself. I want finance to serve production. [...] We [the Humanity] need to associate the state with civil society."
Sobre Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Caetano Veloso entrevista: Mangabeira Unger
New frontiers in social innovation research: here
A marriage ought to be based on a friendship; not primarily just on physical attraction...
... Well... first and foremost... because the physical attraction is going to go away, sooner or later.
Mary Wollstonecraft - Her Life and Key Ideas
Sobre Mary Wollstonecraft
Mais coisas:
The Love Letters Of Mary Wollstonecraft To Gilbert Imlay
Letters to a Young Poet: aqui e aqui
Maria Popova:
The Difficult Art of Giving Space in Love: Rilke on Freedom, Togetherness, and the Secret to a Good Marriage
The Original Marriage of Equals: The Love Letters of Feminism Founding Mother Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Philosopher William Godwin
"I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation."
Rainer Maria Rilke
Testimonial injustice / The Credibility Gap / How communities evaluate knowledge
"testimonial injustice, wherein a speaker receives an unfair deficit of credibility from a hearer owing to prejudice on the hearer's part."
Aqui
The Credibility Gap: How Sexism Shapes Human Knowledge | Soraya Chemaly | TEDxBarcelonaWomen
It's a man's world...but what does that mean? Today, when you Google "Are Women...?" the most likely suggested answer you'll get is "Evil." What does the suppression of women's experiences and knowledge in culture and media mean in terms of human understanding? How does a global suppression of women's experiences, perspectives and storytelling result in injustice and inequality? This talk dives into the question of what male-centered culture really means.
Defining Implicit Bias:
Also known as implicit social cognition, implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection.
Aqui
The Ten Words Every Girl Should Know: Stop interrupting me; I just said that; No explanation needed.
"You cannot be a feminist unless you have a sense of humour! It's a rule."
Soraya Chemaly
"All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is..." / The difference between money and wealth
"So I always ask the question, 'what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?' Well, it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can't earn any money that way…"
Aqui
Alan Watts on money, possessions and lifestyle
do ócio, da realidade virtual, do dolce far niente
monty python football
"Pode ser que a prosperidade tecnológica torne possível alimentar e manter as massas sem que a estas seja exigido qualquer esforço. Mas como é que se irão ocupar e manter satisfeitas? Se as pessoas não fizerem nada, enlouquecem. Como é que vão ocupar os dias? Uma das soluções pode passar pelas drogas e pelos jogos de computador. Os excedentários poderão passar cada vez mais tempo imersos em mundos de realidade virtual a três dimensões, que lhes proporcionariam emoções mais fortes e um envolvimento muito maior do que a realidade cinzenta lá fora. Mas, a acontecer, isto representaria um golpe fatal para a crença do liberalismo no carácter sagrado da vida e das experiências humanas. O que poderia haver de tão sagrado na vida de parasitas inúteis que passem os dias em experiências virtuais na Terra do Faz-de-Conta?."
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy / Biosphere Consciousness
The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy
On the concept of freedom: minute 1:03:45
On the concept of power: minute 1:05:01
On the concept of community: 1:05:50
On empathy:
The most civilized societies are the ones that can move empathy to larger reigns.
Here.
"Happiness are the blank pages of History, because they are the periods of harmony"
Hegel
The Belt One Road Inniciative: here
What makes things unintelligible? What is the structure of nonsense? Experience is ineffable. / Fallacies of reasoning in circles
Present! - Raymond Moody: The Logic of "Life after Death"
"Nonsense is a highly patterned phenomenon."
Raymond Moody
The question: Is there life after death, is not a scientific question, because you can't think of a way to verify that.
"The most intellectually honest thing to say is that something is going on that we don't understand. And that maybe we don't even yet have fully the logic and intellectual tools to begin to understand it."
"What I think of the external world has to do with the recurrent patterns in my consciousness. But it's just an inference to say that there is an external world. [...] We are dealing with matter, space and time with a philosophical or an abstract system of concepts, which are self-consistant. But to make the philosophical judgements beyond that... Physicalism is a philosophy. Scientism: the only rational way of securing truth and searching for knowledge is by scientific method. [...] How would we know if scientific method is the only rational means of securing knowledge and truth? Because I know it by the scientific method (?) or Because I know it by philosophy, by literary theory (?), by the law (?), by History (?). So scientism is something that a lot of people in this society value very deeply but they've never thought it through, because there have to be other rational means of securing knowledge even to know if the scientific method works. [...] I love science, but to make science your ideology of life is an inherently self-defeating move. To me, science is a wonderful method for capturing the truth about certain areas of existence, but not about other areas of existence."
"Medical doctors should take a few philosophy courses before they start fooling around with the afterlife question."
"Even if you could prove that the soul leaves the body, that wouldn't prove that there's life after death."
"The pseudo-science of parapsychology, in my opinion, is one of the main reasons why we're stuck on the afterlife question."
"What we need in this question of the afterlife is an actual skeptic."
"Since I didn't have a religious background, to me the whole notion of an afterlife was just so incredibly bizarre."
Mais aqui.
mindful nostalgia / the conflict between Nature and Civilization / do reino do limbo / God is dead / trajectórias / o Futurismo já era!
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| Aguirre, The Wrath of God - Werner Herzog |
"Já não há diques que regulem, articulem ou deem ritmo ao fluxo do tempo, que possam detê-lo e guiá-lo, sustentando-o, no tão belo duplo sentido da palavra. Quando o tempo perde o ritmo, quando flui no aberto sem se deter sem rumo algum, desaparece também qualquer tempo apropriado ou bom.
[...] "Morrer a tempo, eis o que ensina Zaratustra. Mas como há-de morrer a tempo quem nunca viveu a tempo?" O homem perdeu completamente o sentido deste a tempo. Cedeu ao destempo.
[...] Tanto Nietzsche como Heidegger se opõem à fragmentação do tempo, que reduz a morte a um perecer a destempo.
[...] Deus funciona como um estabilizador do tempo. Assegura que o presente seja duradouro, eterno.
[...] A promessa, o compromisso ou a lealdade, por exemplo, são práticas temporais autênticas. Formam um vínculo com o futuro e entrecruzando-os. Criam assim uma continuidade temporal estabilizadora.
[...] Os deuses não são mais do que portadores de sentido.
[...] A relação que se narra gera sentido. A narrativa cria mundo do nada. O que está cheio de deuses está cheio de sentido, cheio de narrativa.
[...] Não é a eterna repetição do mesmo o que dota o tempo de sentido, mas a possibilidade de uma mudança.
[...] O curso da história não é determinado pelo progresso, mas pela repetição.
[...] A aceleração só se impõe enquanto tal quando o tempo perde a sua significatividade histórica, o seu sentido. Tematiza-se ou transforma-se em problemática quando o tempo é arrastado para um futuro vazio de significado.
O tempo mítico funciona como uma imagem. O tempo histórico, em contrapartida, tem a forma de uma linha que se dirige, ou se precipita, para um fim. Quando a linha perde a tensão narrativa ou teleológica, decompõe-se em pontos que tropeçam sem direção alguma. No fim da história, gera-se uma atomização do tempo, que o transforma num tempo de pontos. O mito desaparece para sempre da história. A imagem estática transforma-se numa linha sucessiva. A história cede lugar às informações. Estas não têm qualquer amplitude ou duração narrativa. Não estão centradas nem seguem uma direção. De certo modo, apoiam-se sobre nós. A história ilumina, seleciona e canaliza a trama dos acontecimentos, impõe-lhe uma trajectória narrativa linear. Se esta desaparece, forma-se uma amálgama de informações e de acontecimentos que tropeça sem direção. As informações não têm aroma. Nisso diferem da história.
[...] a informação apresenta um novo paradigma. No seu interior, habita outra temporalidade muito diferente. É uma manifestação do tempo atomizado, de um tempo de pontos.
Entre pontos, abre-se necessariamente um vazio, um intervalo vazio, no qual nada sucede, não se produz sensação alguma. O tempo mítico e histórico, em contrapartida, não deixam qualquer vazio, uma vez que a imagem e a linha não têm intervalo algum. Constroem uma continuidade narrativa. Só os pontos deixam um intervalo vazio. Os intervalos, nos quais nada sucede, causam tédio. Ou apresentam-se como uma ameaça, uma vez que onde nada sucede, onde a intencionalidade se reduz a nada, está a morte. Deste modo, o tempo de pontos sente o impulso de suprimir ou encurtar os intervalos vazios.
[...] A falta de tensão narrativa faz com que o tempo atomizado não possa manter a atenção de maneira duradoura. [...] O tempo de pontos não permite qualquer demora contemplativa. [...] A narrativa dá aroma ao tempo.
[...] A falta de uma articulação forte do tempo dá lugar à sensação de que aquele corre mais rapidamente do que antes. Esta sensação intensifica-se porque os acontecimentos se desprendem depressa uns dos outros, sem deixarem marca profunda, sem chegarem a tornar-se uma experiência.
Byung-Chul Han, O Aroma do Tempo
do antifrágil
O Big Data torna visíveis, sobretudo, modelos de comportamento colectivos. O próprio dataísmo intensifica o aumento de igualdade. O data mining não se distingue substancialmente da estatística. As correlações que descobre representam o estatísticamente provável. Assim, o Big Data não tem acesso ao único. O Big Data é totalmente cego perante o acontecimento. Não será o estatisticamente provável, mas o improvável, o singular, o acontecimento, a determinar a história, o futuro humano. Deste modo, por conseguinte, o Big Data é cego perante o futuro.
Byung-Chul Han, Psicopolítica
A favor do aborto
A favor do aborto – o argumento do violinista
O texto abaixo foi retirado do livro Ética Prática, por Peter Singer.
O último dos três argumentos que procuram justificar o aborto sem negar que o feto seja um ser humano inocente é o de que a mulher tem o direito de escolher o que acontece ao seu próprio corpo.
Este argumento tornou-se proeminente com a ascensão do movimento de libertação da mulher e foi elaborado por filósofos americanos simpatizantes do feminismo. Um argumento influente foi apresentado por Judith Jarvis Thomson por meio de uma analogia engenhosa.
Imaginemos, diz ela, que acordamos uma manhã e descobrimos que estamos numa cama de hospital, ligados de uma maneira qualquer a um homem inconsciente deitado numa cama ao lado. Dizem-nos que esse homem é um famoso violinista com uma doença renal. A única forma de ele sobreviver é ligar o seu sistema circulatório ao sistema de outra pessoa com o mesmo grupo sanguíneo e nós somos a única pessoa com o sangue adequado. De modo que uma sociedade de melômanos nos raptou, mandou realizar a operação de ligação e aqui estamos. Como nos encontramos agora num hospital respeitável, poderíamos ordenar a um médico que nos desligasse do violinista; mas, nesse caso, o violinista morreria pela certa. Por outro lado, se nos mantivermos ligados por apenas (apenas?) nove meses, o violinista terá recuperado e podemos então desligar-nos sem o pôr em perigo. Thomson pensa que, se nos encontrássemos nesta dificuldade inesperada, não teríamos a obrigação moral de permitir que o violinista usasse os nossos rins durante nove meses. Poderia ser generoso ou simpático da nossa parte, mas, segundo Thomson, isso é completamente diferente de dizer que estaríamos a fazer um mal se assim não procedêssemos.
Note-se que a conclusão de Thomson não depende de negar que o violinista é um ser humano inocente, com o mesmo direito à vida que qualquer outro ser humano inocente. Pelo contrário, Thomson afirma de fato que o violinista tem direito à vida – mas ter direito à vida não implica, prossegue Thomson, o direito de usar o corpo de outra pessoa, mesmo que sem essa utilização uma pessoa morra. A analogia com a gravidez, em especial com a gravidez resultante de violação, é óbvia. Uma mulher grávida na sequência de uma violação encontra-se, sem que tenha feito uma escolha, ligada a um feto de uma forma comparável à pessoa ligada ao violinista. É verdade que uma mulher grávida não tem normalmente de passar nove meses numa cama, mas os adversários do aborto não encarariam este pormenor como uma justificação suficiente para o aborto.
Oferecer um bebé recém-nascido para adoção pode ser mais difícil, psicologicamente, que separar-se do violinista no final da sua doença; mas, só por si, este fato não parece uma razão suficiente para matar o feto. Aceitando, para fins de argumentação, que o feto conta como um ser humano pleno, fazer um aborto quando o feto não é viável tem o mesmo significado moral que nos desligarmos do violinista. Assim, se concordarmos com Thomson em que não seria um mal no desligarmos do violinista, temos de aceitar também que, qualquer que seja o estatuto do feto, o aborto não é um mal – pelo menos quando a gravidez resulta de estupro.
O argumento de Thomson pode provavelmente alargar-se a casos que ultrapassam o estupro.
Suponhamos que nos vemos ligados ao violinista, não porque fomos raptados por amantes da música, mas porque tínhamos a intenção de ir ao hospital visitar um amigo doente e, quando entramos no elevador, apertamos inadvertidamente no botão errado e fomos parar a uma seção do hospital visitada normalmente apenas por aqueles que se ofereceram como voluntários para serem ligados a pacientes que de outra forma não sobreviveriam. Uma equipe de médicos à espera do voluntário seguinte pensou que este tinha chegado, aplicou-nos a anestesia e ligou-nos. Se o argumento de Thomson era sólido no caso do rapto, provavelmente também o é neste caso, uma vez que nove meses involuntários a apoiar outra pessoa é um preço elevado a pagar por ignorância ou descuido. Deste modo, o argumento podia aplicar-se não só aos casos de violação, mas a um número muito maior de mulheres que engravidam devido à ignorância, descuido ou falha dos métodos de contracepção.
Daqui
