Monogamy, Moorean shifting, and commonsense morality

The saga continues

Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

Introduction

Many or most people limit their love too readily. The ways in which they do so are probably several, but one way I've long felt to be especially important is monogamy. Monogamy, I've argued, involves needless restrictions on love—both one's own love and that of one's partner—and is, in that way, inconsonant with the very spirit of love, a spirit of giving and openness and finding delight in new connections, new joys for those whom one loves. To make the point more concrete, I've often framed it around an analogy with friendship: Just as love calls for us to be open to our partner's making additional friends, so, too, does it call for us to be open to our partner's finding additional partners.

As this is something of a contrarian view, it's attracted its fair share of objections.¹ The most recent objections have come from Ari Shtein, who launched his opening salvo in this post; I replied here. And now, ere the dust has started to settle, Shtein has come back for round two:

The Nature and Reality of Objects of Attraction

In his latest piece on the issue, Shtein sets aside his earlier arguments and employs a new maneuver in monogamy's defense: a Moorean shift. The label calls back to British philosopher G. E. Moore's classic response to external world skepticism: that, simply raising his hands, he could be more certain of claims like “here is one hand” and “here is another” than he could be of the premises in arguments for external world skepticism. Thus, rather than simply accepting all the premises of valid arguments for external world skepticism, and consequently being forced to become an external world skeptic, Moore concluded that it was more rational for him to start with what he was most certain of—like “here is a hand”—and then immediately infer that (1) external world skepticism is false and (2) arguments in favor of external world skepticism must, consequently, involve some mistake (even if it's not obvious just where the mistake lies). Or, for a different way of putting the idea, Moore rejected the external world skeptic's modus ponens, a modus ponens we might formulate as the following:

1. I can't know that my whole sensory experience is not an illusion concocted by an evil demon.

2. If I can't know that my whole sensory experience is not an illusion concocted by an evil demon, then I can't know that this is a hand.

3. Thus, I can't know that this is a hand.

Rather than embracing the above modus ponens, Moore opts in favor of a modus tollens, which I'll represent as follows:

1. (I can know that) this is a hand.

2. If I can't know that my whole sensory experience is not an illusion concocted by an evil demon, then I can't know that this is a hand.

3. Thus, I can know that my whole sensory experience is not an illusion concocted by an evil demon.

In a similar way, Shtein argues that the conclusion that monogamy is morally impermissible is so counterintuitive that one can simply modus tollens my argument in its favor. Being more certain that monogamy is the right choice for many people than that the premises in my anti-monogamy argument are true, Shtein concludes that monogamy is morally permissible and that the argument against monogamy must be marred by some flaw. (He goes on to suggest that the flaw in the anti-monogamy argument is that it views friendships and romantic relationships as more analogous to one another than they in fact are.)

In a moment, I'll take a closer look at Shtein's argument and raise some problems I see with it. First, though, I'd like to offer some comments on how Shtein summarizes my own argument.

Shtein's summary of the anti-monogamy argument

Here is how Shtein summarizes my argument against monogamy:

1. Romantic relationships are importantly analogous to friendships.

2. It’s wrong to restrict the number of friends your friends can have.

3. Therefore, by the analogy, it’s wrong to restrict the number of romantic partners your romantic partners can have.

Although this summary certainly gets some things right, I worry that it risks giving a misleading impression of the spirit of the argument. The argument doesn't start with the highly general or abstract claim that “[r]omantic relationships are importantly analogous to friendships”—as if it's an argument that proceeds from some grand first principle. Rather, the argument goes more like this:

1. Restricting your partner to having no friends apart from you seems wrong.²

2. Arguably the prime candidate for the wrong-making feature of the above restriction is that friendships are an important human good, and restricting your partner's access to such goods is pro tanto wrong (such that it needs justification if it's going to be morally permissible). More precisely, in the absence of a sufficiently serious justification, such restrictions are inconsonant with love for your partner.³

3. Sexual and romantic relationships are important human goods as well, given the various ways they enrich our lives.⁴

4. Thus, monogamous restrictions on forming additional sexual and romantic relationships, much like restrictions on forming additional friendships, require justification; in the absence of a sufficiently serious justification, monogamous restrictions are inconsonant with love for one's partner, and thereby wrong.⁵

Shtein's Moorean defense of monogamy

Let's turn now to Shtein's argument for monogamy's permissibility:

1. It is common-sensically true that many people benefit from and enjoy being in monogamous relationships.

2. Therefore restricting the number of romantic partners your romantic partners can have is permissible.

3. Therefore romantic relationships are importantly different from friendships.

In this argument, too, I worry that the wording risks being misleading. For example, the first premise claims that “many people benefit from and enjoy being in monogamous relationships.” In reading this premise, if we're not careful, it's easy to put more emphasis on the final word, “relationships,” than on the “monogamous” that precedes it. Yet this would be a mistake, as the issue at hand isn't so much about whether people who feel drawn to monogamy benefit from being in monogamous relationships; it's whether they benefit from monogamy.⁶ While subtle, the difference is significant; it's much less clear, after all, whether a happy couple benefits from their relationship's being monogamous than whether they benefit from being in their relationship at all. Or, to approach the point in a different way: In setting up premise 1 above as the foundational, commonsense intuition from which the rest of the argument is supposed to follow, the argument implies that I’m committed to disagreeing with premise 1. Yet I need not, and in fact do not, disagree with premise 1; that is, I wholeheartedly agree that “many people benefit from and enjoy being in monogamous relationships.” It’s simply that I think that the benefits and enjoyment being referred to aren’t attributable to monogamy, but instead come from elsewhere (like the fact that many or most people in relationships, including monogamous ones, love each other, spend quality time together, and so on).

To address this worry, we could update the first premise to something like “it is commonsensically true that many people benefit from and enjoy being monogamous.”⁷

There are, however, a few further issues lurking. One of them is that the first premise is framed in terms of whether people “benefit from and enjoy” being monogamous. I find that this framing weakens the argument, particularly when it comes to the jump to premise (or subconclusion) 2: “Therefore restricting the number of romantic partners your romantic partners can have is permissible.” The problem I see here is that, even if a given couple benefits from and enjoys being monogamous, that doesn't seem to settle whether monogamy is permissible for them. For instance, it could be that the stipulated benefits and enjoyment to the couple, considerable as they might be, come at too great or unfair a cost to others (such as third parties who could have had a worthwhile relationship with one of the two partners, if not for the partners' decision to be monogamous).⁸

A further, and perhaps yet deeper, worry I have about the “benefit from and enjoy” framing is that it makes it sound as if monogamy's moral status ultimately hinges on a cost-benefit analysis. As I've argued elsewhere, fully and properly evaluating the moral status of monogamy requires looking beyond the kinds of considerations (e.g., an increase or decrease in happiness) that go into a cost-benefit analysis. What I, at least, find most morally troubling about monogamy is more naturally captured in terms of (in)consonance with love.

The best way I see of revising Shtein's argument in light of these worries involves replacing premise 1 with simply “monogamy is morally permissible”; that, I think, forms no less firm a part of commonsense morality, and therefore serves no less well as a monogamy-friendly intuition to ground the Moorean shift Shtein is attempting, than the earlier version of the premise. Updating the premise in this way would naturally require updates elsewhere, too (especially to premise 2, as leaving it unchanged would more or less repeat the claim about monogamy's permissibility).

Here, then, is a revised version of the argument more generally, one that I feel remains true to Shtein's aim while sidestepping the worries above:

1. Monogamy is morally permissible. (Appeal to commonsense morality)

2. If friendship and romantic relationships are analogous in the way Chalmers suggests, then monogamy is not morally permissible. (See argument above)

3. Therefore, friendship and romantic relationships are not analogous in the way Chalmers suggests. (Modus tollens from 1 and 2)

Problems with Moorean shifting as a defense of monogamy

So what's wrong with using this kind of argument to defend monogamy? I see a few problems with it, each having to do with the provenance of, or at least what are likely to be significant influences on, the intuition that monogamy is permissible.

First, in many or most cases, this intuition seems to stem at least partly from the broader intuition that any restriction in a relationship is permissible, provided simply that the restriction is mutual and consensual. (That this is one important source of the “monogamy is permissible” intuition is suggested by an immediate response my argument commonly receives: “How could monogamy be wrong, when it's what partners choose for themselves?”) And that broader intuition—that simply being mutual and consensual is enough to make a restriction within a relationship permissible—is one that I find we have independent reason to distrust. As a counterexample to it, we might imagine a couple in which each partner holds the other to a “no black friends” restriction: “If you make any black friends, I'm ending our relationship.”⁹ Surely such a restriction would be wrong—in this case, wrong in virtue of being racist—regardless of how mutual and consensual it is. Thus, to whatever extent the “monogamy is permissible” intuition comes from this deeper intuition about the supposed permissibility of any restriction that's mutual and consensual, the “monogamy is permissible” intuition has an untrustworthy source.

Second, and a little more generally, the intuition that monogamy is permissible no doubt owes much of its strength to being inculcated so overwhelmingly through our media and culture. Consider that every relationship in nearly every film, song, TV show, play, advertisement, social media post, meme, book, magazine, and video game is monogamous. Monogamy so thoroughly pervades our cultural representations that being monogamous rarely even needs to be explicitly stated; instead, it's simply assumed as the default state for a relationship. For instance, if one person in a relationship starts developing feelings for a third party, it's immediately depicted as posing a crisis to the existing relationship; the person is at once portrayed as having to choose between loyalty and cheating—the option of consensually, ethically being in a relationship with both parties isn't even considered. It's a noteworthy occasion when a piece of media includes even one non-monogamous character or relationship—more noteworthy still if the non-monogamy is depicted positively, rather than as deviant or degenerate. Even our very language around relationships is often infused with monogamy—like describing someone in a relationship as “taken,” or asking “is he/she single?” to mean “is he/she available?” Taking all this together, it's no surprise that most people have a strong intuition in favor of monogamy's permissibility; in a culture like ours, many or most of us will be bound to have that intuition even if monogamy is not, in fact, permissible. When cultural biases are operating this heavily, I cannot help but find it rather complacent to put much stock in the intuition that monogamy is permissible.

To make this point more concrete, here are some other examples involving intuitions that surely come in large part from cultural biases, and how Moorean shifting in those cases would lead to terrible arguments:

• “Some say that buying meat is wrong because of the suffering factory farms inflict on animals. But, simply from consulting our intuitions, we clearly see there's nothing wrong with just going to the store and buying some ham. Therefore, factory farms must not inflict horrific suffering on animals after all! (Or, if they do, then such suffering must not make a difference to the ethics of buying meat.)”

• “Some argue that spending lots of money on discretionary purchases is wrong because the money could do a lot more good, particularly by preventing suffering, if it were instead given to an effective charity. But, simply from consulting our intuitions, we can clearly see that there's nothing wrong with going to the store and buying (say) an expensive dress that you happen to want (but don't need). Therefore—modus tollens time!—the money must not be able to do a lot more good if given to charity after all (or, if it would, then somehow this must not matter to what my obligations are).”

It takes no great insight to see that such arguments would be epistemically derelict. Indeed, it would not be unfair to call them preposterous—preposterous in the truest sense of the word, from the Latin praeposterus, with the prae (before) and posterus (coming after) together indicating a having gotten things backwards. What's more, such arguments are preposterous even if their conclusions happen to be true; should their conclusions be true, it's due to mere luck rather than any probative virtues of the arguments themselves.

To be clear, I'm not against Moorean shifting in all cases. However, I do believe that Moorean shifting is a bad idea when (1) the arguments against the relevant commonsense intuition are philosophically serious (i.e., the premises seem plausible and seem to support the conclusion, such that it's not obvious what the problem, if any, with the argument is), and (2) the relevant commonsense intuition appears to stem largely if not entirely from unreliable sources (such as further intuitions that have themselves been undermined, along with the sheer weight of cultural programming). Moorean shifting in cases like these seems less like a reasonable philosophical maneuver than a cheap last-ditch effort to avoid following the arguments where they lead.

Of course, if one wants to carry on trusting the commonsense intuition (whatever it may be), one could still try to find independent arguments for the proposition it's in favor of, along with more effective responses to the arguments against it. (This is what I see the traditional defenses of monogamy as attempting to do, in the case of the monogamy debate). If one is sufficiently successful in this, then continuing to trust the intuition (in this case, the intuition that monogamy is permissible) would remain rational. But what would be doing all the philosophical work there would be the further arguments at hand, not simply a foot-stomping insistence on sticking with the intuition in question.

Conclusion

In the course of his argument, Shtein makes a few brief, scattershot appeals to more traditional defenses of monogamy, such as jealousy and stability:

…I think that if people value stability and a mutual arrangement that avoids jealousy… we should probably just respect their choices.

Our brains are mostly wired to prefer stable, uncompetitive, friendly-to-child-rearing arrangements. Even if some people can manage to open their relationships successfully, many cannot.

As these points aren't the stated focus of his post, Shtein doesn't elaborate much on them. Nor will I devote much attention to them here, as I've addressed them in other work (and plan to do so at greater length in future work)—and then, this post has become quite long already. For now, thus, I'll keep the discussion limited to Moorean shifting.

For the reasons expressed above, I find that Moorean shifting fails to be a viable strategy for defending monogamy. Defenders of monogamy would be better served by attempting to reinforce monogamy's more traditional defenses, such as practicality and jealousy. While I'm skeptical that such efforts would succeed in the end, I believe that they at least offer more hope for a philosophically robust defense of monogamy.

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1. See the introduction of this post for some context on the objections that have been published so far.

2. I find this premise to be a much more specific, concrete, plausible starting point for the argument than the one proposed in the above summary. This is not to suggest, of course, that the mere order of an argument's premises matters to the argument's quality. However, starting with premise 1 as I've developed it makes for an easier transition to premises 2 and 3 below—premises which do the work of Shtein's premise 1 and which, taken together, seem more plausible than it. See footnote 4 for more on this point.

3. Admittedly, this last claim, the claim about being inconsonant with love, doesn’t come out very explicitly in the papers I’ve written so far. It has, though, come to be a larger part of my thinking about the argument in the time since writing those papers.

4. Taken together, premises 2 and 3 could be understood to be doing the work of premise 1 in Shtein's summary; that is, premises 2 and 3 in my own summary together suggest that “[r]omantic relationships are importantly analogous to friendships.” Even here, though, the analogy between friendship and romantic relationships isn't being asserted as some kind of freestanding first principle; rather, the analogy is the upshot of looking closely at the bad-making feature of the friendship restriction and seeing that it prima facie applies to restricting romantic and sexual relationships as well. I feel that keeping this in mind makes the argument more formidable; whereas it's easy to reject as vague a premise as “[r]omantic relationships are importantly analogous to friendships,” it strikes me as considerably more difficult to reject premise 2 or 3 here.

5. And from this point, of course, the task for the rest of the argument has been to go through the various proposed justifications of monogamy and show that none of them succeed.

6. Or, to be more precise, whether they sufficiently benefit from monogamy. As I argue in sec. 2 of “Monogamy Unredeemed,” good-making features sufficient to justify monogamy would need to be (individually or together) very weighty.

7. That the premise wasn't worded like this originally is something I attribute simply to sloppy wording rather than to any philosophical confusion on Shtein's part. (I mention this because, later in his post, Shtein puts the point in terms that more closely match the updated premise I've offered: “Still, I’m willing to call it strongly common-sensical that lots of people like being monogamous and benefit from it.”)

8. To take an analogy from another context—one that perhaps doesn't line up perfectly, but arguably still sheds at least some light—two partners might benefit from and enjoy spending their money on non-essential purchases for themselves, yet this surely doesn't settle whether it's permissible for them to spend their money that way (as opposed to, say, giving it to charity).

9. For the most natural way of constructing the thought experiment, I'm imagining, of course, that the two partners are not themselves black. Further, the restriction in the thought experiment could target any race; here I've simply chosen “black” as one example.