LUCBOVENS COHERENCE ARGUMENTS AND CYCLICAL MORAL RANKINGS* (Received in revised form 21 June 1993) Coherence arguments are a common tool in applied ethics. The applied ethicist appeals to moral judgments about specific choice-situations that can count on a reasonable level of consensus and constructs a theory - i.e. a set of general principles - on the basis of these judgments. The theory will then guide moral judgments about more controversial choice-situations. Such theories tend to have a particular format. Let us consider a paradigm study in applied ethics with the aim of determining this format. In 'A Defense of Abortion', 1 J. J. Thomson grants that the fetus is a person from at least some point during pregnancy. On this assumption the clash between the fetus' right to life and the mother's right to determine what shall happen in and to her body is what constitutes the moral problem of abortion. To determine which of these values is more stringent, Thomson resorts to a coherence argument. She considers the following choice-situation which is constituted by a clash between the same pair of values. You find yourself waking up one morning in a hospital bed laying next to an unconscious person who happens to be a famous violinist suffering from a fatal kidney disease. The Society for Music Lovers has kidnapped you overnight and plugged your circulatory system up to his. You are told that, considering your blood type, you are the only person in the world who can save the life of the violinist. To do so, you will need to remain plugged up to him for the next nine months. Then you can safely be unplugged and he will have recovered from his disease. Thomson contends that most of us would not find Philosophical Studies 74: 369-384, 1994. © 1994 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.