Background

Judith Thomson was born on October 4, 1929, in New York City, New York, United States. She was the second child of Theodore and Helen (Vostrey) Jarvis.

Education

Judith Thomson graduated from Hunter College High School in 1946. She studied at Barnard College where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1950. Thomson attended the University of Cambridge where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1952 and a Master of Arts degree in 1956. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree from Columbia University in 1959.

In 2015, Judith Thomson was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge, and in 2016 by Harvard University.

Career

Judith Thomson started her career as a lecturer at Barnard College in 1956. In 1959, she was appointed an instructor and in 1960 she became an assistant professor. She held this post until 1962 and one year later she took up the same post at Boston University. In 1964 Thomson left Boston University and became an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1969 she was appointed a professor and from 1991 to 1996 she served as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy. In 1996, Thomson again took up the post of a professor and held this post until her retirement in 2004. Thomson worked as a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California at Berkeley Law School and Yale Law School.

Judith Thomson wrote her first book The Time of a Killing in 1971. Later she wrote such books as Acts and Other Events, The Realm of Rights, Designs of a Gentleman and High Heatherton. Her latest book The Distant Hills was published in 2018. Thomson also wrote numerous articles for such journals as Philosophy & Public Affairs, Journal of Philosophy and Social Philosophy & Policy.

Achievements

• Judith Thomson is an American philosopher, educator and writer who in her thirty-five-year career as a philosopher has published important papers in ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of law. Her most famous books are The Realm of Rights, Normativity and Acts and Other Events and A Defense of Abortion. In 2012, Thomson received the Quinn Prize.

Works

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  • The Realm of Rights

    (The concept of a right is fundamental to moral, political...)

    1990
  • Acts and Other Events

    (The purpose of this brilliant book is to answer the philo...)

    1977
  • Goodness and Advice

    (How should we live? What do we owe to other people? In Go...)

    2001
  • Designs of a Gentleman: The Darker Years

    (His life as a dashing young courtier long since jettisone...)

    2014
  • Normativity

    (Judith Jarvis Thomson's Normativity is a study of normati...)

    2008
  • The Orange Autumn

    (England is once more a divided nation...  It is 1688 and ...)

    2017
  • High Heatherton 2016

Views

Judith Thomson's main areas of research are moral philosophy and metaphysics. In moral philosophy, she has made significant contributions to meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. She also wrote books in which she covers basic issues in normative moral theory concerning the basis of moral rights and in particular to questions about when it is morally permissible to infringe another’s right to life. Her most famous essay, A defense of abortion. This essay has been the starting point for most subsequent discussions of the morality of abortion. Her treatment of the Trolley Problem pinpointed essential differences between deflecting a danger onto a different target, thereby causing one death rather than five, and, for instance, forcing someone to sacrifice their life so that they can be an organ donor for five patients who would otherwise die.

Membership

Judith Thomson is a member of the American Philosophical Association, Council for Philosophical Studies, American Association of University Professors, Human Studies Committee of the Department of Health and Hospitals of the City of Boston and Center for the Study of Values at the University of Delaware. She is also a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Interests

• Rights, philosophy of law

Connections

Judith Jarvis Thomson married James Thomson in 1962. They separated in 1976 and divorced in 1980.

Father:

Theodore Jarvis

Mother:

Helen Vostrey

Ex-husband:

James F. Thomson

References

• The Act Itself The Act Itself offers a deeper understanding of what is going on in our own moral thoughts about human behaviour. Many of the descriptions of behaviour on which our moral thoughts are based are confused; others may be free of confusion, but still we are not clear in our minds about what thoughts they are.
  1998
• The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics
  1997
• Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time Lucid, absorbing, and original, this book defends the theory that the material world is composed of temporal as well as spatial parts. Along the way, it addresses many topics on the metaphysics of time and identity. These include the status of past and future objects, the nature of motion and change, the existence of composite objects, and examples involving two things in the same place at the same time.
  2001