Love's true measure

Loving actions, loving dispositions, and what it all means for monogamy

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Introduction

The debate over the moral status of monogamy has been heating up on Substack. For some context on the debate, I’ve argued that monogamy’s restriction on having additional partners seems analogous to a morally troubling restriction on having additional friends. Amos Wollen recently came to monogamy’s defense, arguing that even a restriction on having additional friends need not be immoral. I’ve since responded that such a restriction isn’t so readily defensible, as it involves dispositions (even if not necessarily actions) that appear to go against love for one’s partner. But the most recent development in the debate is the appearance of a new participant, Ari Shtein. In both a comment on my post and, at fuller length, in a post of his own, Shtein has put forth a new set of challenges to the anti-monogamy view.

Monogamy Is Mostly Fine

Shtein’s defense of monogamy revolves around his view of love as a union. Here is how he summarizes it:

My favorite way to think about love is as a union. When two lovers love, their love creates a new loving unit of lovability. Two ‘I’s become a ‘we’, their interests and moral considerations merge, and they begin to act on the other’s behalf as much as on their own.

With this union view of love in mind, Shtein advances two criticisms of my argument.

Shtein’s first critique

According to Shtein, the union view of love “strikes against the implicit claim that disposition is relevant even when it doesn’t lead to action.” And it does so in the following way:

When I described love as union before, I mentioned the “moral considerations” of two lovers merging. If you, like me, think “moral consideration” has more to do with our tangible effects on conscious beings’ welfare than with our attitudes toward them, then this means that love consists largely in the actions we take in our partner’s interest.

If dispositions have no moral significance in themselves, and if what matters morally in our relationships is simply how we in fact act toward our partner(s), that would indeed undermine my argument against monogamy.¹ For my argument hinges on the claim that monogamy involves dispositions that go against love for one’s partner (such as the disposition to refuse to support one’s partner in starting an additional relationship, were she to find someone new whom she felt would enrich her life to be with), and that this inconsonance with love is immoral even if the disposition never becomes activated (e.g., if one's partner never happens to meet an additional person whom she's interested in).

So is Shtein right to suggest that it’s only our actions, not our attitudes or dispositions (independently of how they influence our actions), that matter morally in relationships? In response to a comment Shtein left on my previous post on the subject, I offered a reason for being skeptical of such a view:

Here my worry is that rejecting that “disposition is relevant at all outside of action” when it comes to love leads to some tough bullets to bite. We might imagine, for example, two husband-wife couples: one in which the husband would be willing to accept and support his wife in a large variety of circumstances, and the other in which the husband’s acceptance and support of his wife is extremely contingent (say, such that he’d leave her if she put on an extra two pounds, took up a new hobby, or cooked something for dinner that he ended up not liking). Supposing that their relationships end up playing out the same way, and that the wife in the second couple (as sheer luck would have it) never chances to do any of the things that would trigger her husband’s disposition to leave her, it seems to me that your view would have to say that each relationship features an equally loving union. But that strikes me as simply too implausible to accept.

As I put it in my previous post on the subject, “[O]ur dispositions, not just our actions, can speak to ways in which our attitude toward our partner aligns with or falls short of what love calls for”—a point that I believe is reinforced well by cases like the above.

Shtein appears to be somewhat moved by the above reductio, going so far as to call it “compelling.” But he continues, “And yet, I find myself willing to bite this bullet—I think you can keep a red-flag list without undermining our love, even if the list is a bit silly!”

As an initial point in response, I find there to be some rhetorical sleight of hand here. More bluntly, “a bit silly” is far too nice a way of putting the husband’s list of dealbreakers. Were the wife to somehow discover just how absurdly precarious her husband’s attitudes toward her are (e.g., maybe she comes across his list of dealbreakers in his diary, or overhears him talking about them with his friends), then let’s just say that, unless her psychology is downright bizarre, her response would surely not be “Oh, you’re so silly!” She would feel betrayed. And she’d be right to feel that way, as she’d have discovered that it’s not through any genuine loyalty or commitment that she and her husband have managed to stay together thus far, but through sheer luck—in effect, a series of accidents. (In that light, I find this case to touch on a more general problem for Shtein’s view: In focusing so strictly on actual behaviors, and in according little or no significance to unactivated dispositions, the view leaves us with no resources to account for the difference between genuine commitment or loyalty, on one hand, and sheer luck or accident, on the other. Commitment and loyalty are ultimately a matter of what you would or would not be willing to do—that is to say, your dispositions—regardless of whether the relevant circumstances ever in fact present themselves.)

In the comment where I first described the above case, I went on to develop the point a bit further:

[I]magine that the wife in the second couple somehow finds out just how extremely contingent her husband’s warmth toward her is, and that she then feels hurt, as though he doesn’t love her in the way she thought he did. I think that her feelings would make perfect sense, but I take it that your view would have to say that she’s wrong to feel this way. Were the husband to try to defend himself by saying, “But I didn’t actually leave you, so what’s the big deal?” then your view would, if I’m understanding it correctly, have to say that he’s making a good point; as earlier, that seems to me a reductio of the view.

My view now is the same as then: Such a reply from the husband would be an outrageous copout, and that Shtein’s view would render us unable to recognize it as such is a grave problem.

Yet Shtein goes on to argue that, however tough a bullet all this may be for his view to bite, my view seems even worse off:

The alternative strikes me as more worrying: seemingly, Chalmers would need to accept that totally-unconditional love is more loving than love with understandable limits—that is, if I held a norm like “I will leave you if you murder my mother,” he would consider me to be undermining our love, and you would be justified in admonishing me for not supporting you robustly enough.

I’d now like to explain why my view doesn’t have this consequence.

Shtein appears to be thinking of my view as the view that any restriction in a relationship whatsoever goes against love for one’s partner. That, however, has never been my view. Instead, my view is that unjustified restrictions in a relationship go against love for one’s partner. That is the claim that, in its own way, serves as the impetus for the whole ethical critique of monogamy. That is, upon noting that monogamy involves significant restrictions, we’re faced with the question of whether those restrictions are justified. If they are, then the restrictions don’t ultimately go against love for one’s partner, and monogamy is morally permissible. On the other hand, if the restrictions aren’t justified, then they do go against love for one’s partner, and monogamy is morally wrong.

Thus, to address Shtein’s example, “I will leave you if you murder my mother” is among the restrictions that I find not to go against love for one’s partner, as such a restriction is obviously justified.²

More generally, in light of Shtein’s claim that “Chalmers would need to accept that totally-unconditional love is more loving than love with understandable limits,” I feel a need to clarify that I think there are good reasons not to be in favor of unconditional love even on its own merits. By its very nature, unconditional love cannot be grounded in reasons—a fact that has always, to me, made unconditional love seem objectionably arbitrary, arbitrary in a way that undermines the meaningfulness of love. For love to be meaningful, it must be conditional; the key is simply that it be conditional on the right properties (so, not so much properties like one’s appearance or the size of one’s bank account, but properties like one’s personality, wisdom, morality, and so on).³

Shtein’s second critique

In my reply to Wollen, one objection I anticipated was that if one partner in a monogamous couple comes across a new person he’s interested in, then the couple might reevaluate and perhaps abandon being monogamous, and that if they did so, it’d be unclear what the problem with having been monogamous beforehand would have been. In response, I argued that monogamy must have a certain counterfactual robustness to it; if a couple is disposed to relinquish monogamous restrictions any time either partner becomes interested in someone else, then the couple simply wasn’t monogamous in the first place.

Shtein, however, argues that monogamy need not be as counterfactually robust as my discussion perhaps suggests. To show that “a monogamous relationship could become open or poly without admitting that it was never monogamous in the first place,” Shtein begins by imagining four levels of counterfactual robustness:

1. If you call yourself monogamous, and then you get a tingle in your dingle for someone else, you absolutely must ignore it.

2. If you call yourself monogamous, and then you get a tingle in your heart for someone else, you absolutely must ignore it.

3. If you call yourself monogamous, and then your best friend admits their romantic feelings for you, and you realize you have those feelings too, you absolutely must ignore them.

4. If you call yourself monogamous, and then any of the above happens, you talk to your partner about it, and they hint that they’d be willing to open up your relationship, you must admonish them for their infidelity and go back to ignoring your feelings.

While Shtein allows that the sexual and romantic attractions referred to in (1) and (2) are “untrustworthy and common enough” for monogamy to mandate ignoring them, he maintains that those referred to in (3) and (4) need not be ignored. This is because monogamy “isn’t a strictly-held rule—it’s simply a mutually-agreeable arrangement.” Although monogamous partners will go on being monogamous in normal circumstances, there are certain extraordinary circumstances—say, a case in which one partner meets someone new who’s positively wonderful, such that having him as an additional partner would undeniably be life-enriching to an immense degree—where partners might well be willing to renegotiate and relax the rules they’ve hitherto held about exclusivity in their relationship. And, in such cases, it wouldn’t seem correct to conclude that the couple was never truly monogamous in the first place.

In response, let me begin with a concession: I certainly don’t wish to suggest that in any circumstance where a monogamous relationship ends up becoming non-monogamous, that shows that the relationship was never truly monogamous in the first place. To consider a variant of one of my favorite examples, we might imagine a monogamous couple who one day find themselves confronted by powerful aliens; these aliens tell the couple, “You must immediately become non-monogamous, or we’ll blow up the universe.” Were the couple to then decide (as one hopes they would!) to become non-monogamous, that would not at all, to my mind, call into question whether the couple had up to that point been genuinely monogamous.

There are also more realistic cases, cases in the spirit of those Shtein imagines, that would involve a shift from monogamy to non-monogamy without undermining the sense that the couple had been monogamous beforehand. For instance, suppose that you come across someone who’s powerful, beautiful, terrifying, passionate, gorgeous, overwhelming, diligent, vigorous, enchanting, mysterious, sensual, fearless, invincible. You come to realize that being with him would enrich your life in myriad extraordinary ways, and, in the course of thinking through your developing feelings for him, you begin reconsidering some of the beliefs that once undergirded your monogamy (e.g., the belief that one can only truly love one person at a time). Imagine, further, that you talk about all this with your partner, and she, though at first wary of it, and though she wouldn’t allow giving up monogamy for just anyone, eventually comes to see just how wonderful this new person is, how much he means to you, and how greatly being with him would enrich your life. And so, in the end, she decides to be open to your having this person in your life as an additional partner. While I think that partners in many monogamous relationships would not be open to such a change even in these circumstances, and would see their commitment to monogamy as more or less absolute (powerful-aliens-blowing-up-the-universe cases aside), Shtein is surely right to suggest that there are likewise many cases in which partners’ commitment to monogamy is at least slightly more flexible, and that the shift from monogamy to non-monogamy in such cases doesn’t imply that the couple was never truly monogamous in the first place.

Minimum criteria to be considered datable as a man on Tinder in 2025

But, of course, not all worthwhile additional partners to have will be people who overwhelm us with perfection. Many or most of them will be people are merely good. And this is where I see the problem for monogamy. Presumably, if you come across someone new whom you simply feel is good, and who would be worthwhile to have as an additional partner (whether short- or long-term)—but who isn’t some mythic paragon of awesomeness—your partner (if monogamous) won’t allow you to start dating her. If your partner is open to letting you start an additional relationship any time you encounter someone new whom you judge would enrich your life at all to be with, then the allegedly monogamous restrictions at hand would be too flimsy, would be able to be dropped too easily, for the relationship to count as genuinely monogamous.

And if indeed your partner does restrict you from forming additional relationships with people who are merely good, the problem is that those additional relationships, even though they might not enrich your life to the extraordinary degree of those considered earlier, would still (ex hypothesi) enrich your life to a non-negligible extent. Your partner’s monogamous restrictions, then, would be closing you off from that additional enrichment (and likewise for your monogamous restrictions on her)—a fact which makes salient the question of what the justification for such restrictions is. And now we’re back to where we started in the debate, namely trying to find adequate justifications for monogamy’s restrictions.

In the end, then, I don’t believe that the present criticisms of the anti-monogamy argument succeed. The most plausible way for defenders of monogamy to go, in my view, is to try to shore up monogamy’s traditional defenses, such as practicality and the prevention of jealousy.

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1. This sentence might appear to be attributing a stronger claim to Shtein than he makes in the passage above, as his above words include some hedging (e.g., “has more to do with,” as opposed to “has only to do with”; “consists largely in,” as opposed to “consists entirely in”). However, as best as I can tell, Shtein’s arguments in fact end up relying on the stronger claim. Were he to allow that dispositions have some (even if reduced) moral significance independently of action, that would seem to leave the way open for my view that the dispositions involved in monogamy are immoral in virtue of going against love, and that they’re immoral even if they don’t end up influencing one’s actions in a given case.

2. It feels a little odd to even call this a restriction, as there are so many more pressing reasons not to do the relevant action (viz., murder) that go beyond the relationship. But, strictly speaking, I suppose we could consider it a restriction, in that losing one’s partner is one of the reasons not to do it (albeit, again, not even close to being the most important such reason).

3. See this post by Lane Taylor for a nice exposition of this view. I’ve also written about this issue in the context of parental love.