Why restrictions on friendship are wrong, and what it means for monogamy

A reply to Amos Wollen's recent defense of monogamy

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The terrain of the debate

Over the past few years, philosophers have been increasingly debating the moral status of monogamy. In my paper “Is Monogamy Morally Permissible?” I’ve argued that monogamous restrictions on love and sex with additional partners seem analogous to a morally troubling restriction on having additional friends. Just as the goodness of friendship suggests that it’s wrong to restrict your partner from having additional friends, so, too, in my view, does the goodness of romantic and sexual relationships suggest that it’s wrong to restrict your partner from having additional partners. If you wish for your relationship structure to be consonant with the love you have for your partner, you should be open to her having further partners, just as you’re presumably open to her having further friends. I’ve also argued, in the above paper, that none of the classic justifications of monogamy succeed (sexual health, childrearing, specialness, practicality, and jealousy).

In the time since then, other philosophers have come to monogamy’s defense. Foremost in depth of engagement and in influence among recent defenders of monogamy is Kyle York, who, in “Why Monogamy Is Morally Permissible,” has argued in favor of some of the traditional justifications of monogamy, particularly specialness, practicality, and jealousy. I’ve responded in “Monogamy Unredeemed,” to which he, in turn, has responded in “A Couple of Reasons in Favor of Monogamy.” All the while, other philosophers have been weighing in, such as Justin Clardy, Brian Earp, Ole Martin Moen and Aleksander Sørlie, Hallie Liberto¹, Andrew Kirton and Natasha McKeever², and Luke Brunning. Joining them, most recently, is Amos Wollen (who also hosted a very fun YouTube debate between me and York).

Alas, Wollen has joined forces with the dark side (i.e., defending monogamy), so, naturally, I must take this opportunity to respond to his argument. But first, a bit of context. In most of the debate so far, the focus has been on whether the justifications on offer for monogamy stand up to scrutiny. If they do, then monogamy is in the clear, morally speaking; if not, then monogamy ends up being like the restriction on having additional friends, a restriction that many or most would find immoral. In this way, the moral fate of monogamy seems to hinge on how well or poorly these justifications fare. And, if what I’ve argued is at all on the right track, there are serious objections to each of them. It’s in this context that Wollen proposes to put monogamy on firmer ground—in particular, by offering a way of sidestepping the whole debate about how well the attempted justifications of monogamy hold up. Wollen argues, more specifically, that monogamy is not even pro tanto wrong; it doesn’t stand in need of any defense in the first place. And it doesn’t stand in need of any defense because, contra what I’ve proposed, there need not be anything morally wrong with a restriction on having additional friends; thus, even if monogamy does end up being relevantly like such a restriction, that doesn’t pose any moral problem for monogamy.

What Wollen undertakes is, then, a dialectically ambitious way of arguing in favor of monogamy’s permissibility—one that, if successful, would mean that my argument against monogamy doesn’t even get off the ground. So what is Wollen’s argument?

Wollen’s argument for the permissibility of restrictions on friendship

Wollen begins by acknowledging that a restriction on having additional friends is “imprudent and morally risky,” but he rejects that it’s intrinsically wrong. To defend his claim that such a restriction isn’t intrinsically wrong, he imagines a case that meets the following criteria:

1. For aesthetic reasons, both [partners] find friendship-monogamy appealing — perhaps because it affords a certain flavour of specialness that both partners are drawn towards. (Note: by friendship-monogamy, I mean a romantic relationship where the rules are you aren’t allowed outside friends — you can only enjoy your partner’s company. Also, the thought here isn’t that, in this scenario, “specialness” is taken to be morally valuable, or that the “specialness” of monogamy is the only type of “specialness” a person might be drawn towards. The thought is just that both parties find happen to find monogamy’s particular flavour of “specialness” appealing, purely for aesthetic reasons.)

2. For some reason (maybe an abuse-prevention fairy follows them wherever they go), there’s no chance of the couple’s relationship ever sliding into emotional, verbal, or physical abuse.

3. Both partners — neither feeling pressured or by the other — decide that the rules of their relationship are to be such that neither can have any outside friends. This is to ensure maximum specialness. Though there are other types of “specialness” a relationship might have, it’s this flavour of specialness the couple happens to prefer.

4. The relationship shapes up to be a happy one, and both partners derive great satisfaction from the monogamish feeling of specialness.

With such a case in mind, Wollen asks, “[H]as anything immoral transpired?”

His answer, at least, is that there hasn’t. Although such an arrangement is unusual, it doesn’t seem morally wrong. But then why might restrictions on friendship, when described more generally (as in my papers), seem wrong to so many? Wollen proposes that it comes down to two factors:

1. In the vast majority of actual cases where one partner demands that the other can’t have any outside friends, the restriction is being imposed by a controlling partner on a partner who reluctantly accedes.

2. In the vast majority of actual cases where one partner demands that the other can’t have any outside friends, this creates a dynamic that’s easier to exploit with emotional, verbal, and physical abuse. Normally, friends provide people in relationships with networks of support, such that if the relationship slides into abuse, the abuse victim has friends to confide in.

These factors confound our moral intuitions; we’re apt to think that friendship-monogamy itself is immoral, when in fact what’s wrong is the unilateral imposition thereof and the increased vulnerability to abuse—factors that are present in almost all real-world cases of friendship-monogamy. Remove the above factors (as in the case Wollen describes), and we see that friendship-monogamy no longer seems immoral, which suggests that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it.

But is Wollen right? I’d now like to explain why I don’t believe that his argument succeeds.

Why restrictions on friendship are wrong—even in the case Wollen describes

There are a few ways I think Wollen’s argument runs aground. The first has to do with the connection between prudential and moral reasons. As we saw above, Wollen acknowledges that friendship-monogamy is imprudent. However, he suggests that this has no moral implications for friendship-monogamy. As he puts it, “It might be that — by signing up to friendship-monogamy — both partners have denied themselves something good (the good of having more friends). But I take it that it’s generally not immoral to deny yourself something good....” It seems to me, though, that prudential and moral reasons are more closely linked than this. In fact, I’d go so far as to consider prudential reasons a subset of moral reasons. To me, the most elegant, non-gerrymandered view of morality is one according to which morality takes everyone’s well-being into account—including one’s own. The classic, widely-seen-as-decisive objection to ethical egoism is that it’s unacceptably arbitrary to exclude others’ well-being from moral consideration while centering one’s own³; less often noticed is that it seems no less arbitrary to exclude one’s own well-being from moral consideration while centering others’. Thus, insofar as there’s a prudential reason against friendship-monogamy, that strikes me as ipso facto a moral reason against friendship-monogamy.⁴

Granted, prudential reasons’ being a subset of moral reasons is a controversial claim in metaethics,⁵ one that it’d be unsatisfying to have to make the foundation of my whole response to Wollen’s argument. Going forward, then, I’ll set metaethical disputes aside and engage with Wollen’s argument purely on the territory of applied ethics.

Here’s my central disagreement with Wollen: I believe that even when it meets all four conditions he lists, friendship-monogamy remains wrong. To capture it most briefly, I find that what’s wrong with friendship-monogamy, even in cases that meet Wollen’s conditions, is that the partners involved are embracing dispositions that go against love for one another.

To illustrate, let’s imagine a case of friendship-monogamy that meets all four conditions that Wollen describes. That is, the two partners (1) find themselves drawn to friendship-monogamy for aesthetic reasons (possibly involving a sense of “specialness,” about which more below), (2) are guaranteed not to inflict or experience any abuse, (3) do not give or experience any pressure to enter such an arrangement, but enter into it freely and mutually, and (4) go on to be happy with the arrangement.

What could possibly be wrong with a relationship like this? To see what’s wrong with it, we’ll need to briefly imagine another possible world, a world in which one of the partners, despite initially being all in on friendship-monogamy, eventually meets someone new whom she’d like to have as a friend. Suppose also that she brings up this prospect to her partner. Now, if their relationship is to remain friendship-monogamous, her partner must inform her that he’s unwilling to accept her having this new friend; should she go on to make friends with this new person, he (her partner) will end the relationship.

It might at first be unclear what such a case could have to do with the present debate, given that the case doesn’t seem to meet all of Wollen’s conditions (in particular, it’s arguably in some tension with condition 4, and perhaps with condition 3 as well).⁶ However, even in cases that meet all of Wollen’s conditions, a partner committed to friendship-monogamy will have the disposition to act as the restricting partner does in the case I’ve described. That is, anyone who embraces friendship-monogamy will be such that if his partner becomes interested in making an additional friend, he’ll refuse to support the new friendship, instead forcing his partner to choose between making the new friend and preserving their relationship. And that very disposition, I hold—even if it never happens to become activated, never happens to come upon the circumstances that would trigger it—is inconsonant with love for one’s partner. A more loving disposition would be to accept and support it—indeed, to accept and support with gladness for one’s partner—if she were ever to encounter someone new whom she’d like to have as a friend.

As this point makes clear, I believe that our 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. Further thought experiments can, should the need arise, be marshaled to support this claim. For example, we might imagine a mother who’d be unwilling to accept her son—would immediately and unequivocally disown him—if he pursued any career apart from that of being a lawyer. Yet, as luck would have it, and without even any need for pressuring from his mom or anyone else, his career interest happens to lie in (and only in) becoming a lawyer. The two never end up having any tension in their relationship; indeed, by all indications, their relationship is a happy one. Is there a moral problem, though, lurking in such a relationship? Certainly, there is—a grave one. The mother’s disposition not to accept her son if his career aspirations were at all different goes sharply against love—so much so that, to me, it renders it doubtful whether her attitude toward him ever counted as love at all. That the disposition never happens to be triggered is, morally speaking, neither here nor there. The point bears stressing: It’s not just that if the son became interested in being something other than a lawyer, then there would be a moral problem with the mother; rather, there’s already a moral problem present, regardless of what career aspirations the son happens to have or not have.

An important and perhaps surprising upshot of all this is that, even if two partners don’t miss out on any happiness whatsoever from the fact that their relationship is friendship-monogamous, that’s immaterial to whether their embrace of friendship-monogamy is wrong. (I highlight this point because it seems to me that many people assume that if monogamy [whether friendship- or regular monogamy] doesn’t detract from a couple’s happiness, that’s enough to show it to be morally permissible. Such an assumption is mistaken; what’s wrong with monogamy [whether friendship- or regular monogamy] isn’t so much what effect it happens to have on a couple’s happiness, but that it involves restrictions, attitudes, or dispositions that go against love for one’s partner.)

Confronting some objections

As ever, objections arise. Some might object, for instance, that in the case I was describing above—that in which two partners are friendship-monogamous, but one of them eventually becomes interested in making an additional friend—the partners can at that point simply reevaluate and perhaps abandon their friendship-monogamy. Supposing they indeed, in light of the changed circumstances, decide to cease being friendship-monogamous, what would be the moral problem with having been friendship-monogamous beforehand? The trouble I see with this objection is that, if a restriction can be dropped so readily, without penalty, then it was arguably never a real restriction in the first place. For a comparison, imagine that two partners have always, by all indications, embraced (regular) monogamy, but one day, one of them becomes interested in having an additional partner and brings this up to the other. Suppose that this existing partner responds, “Oh, well, I wasn’t open to the idea before, but now that you’ve actually become interested in someone else, it’s fine for you to go ahead and pursue that additional relationship.” Clearly such a response wouldn’t show that their relationship is merely no longer monogamous; it’d show that their relationship wasn’t even monogamous in the first place. Monogamy, whether of the friendship- or regular variety, must be more counterfactually robust than this.

Another potential objection is that I haven’t taken with sufficient seriousness the mutuality of the restrictions involved in friendship-monogamy (or cases thereof that meet Wollen’s conditions, anyway). While it’s easy to see how a restriction being imposed strictly from one direction is wrong—as in the case I described of the mother who’d be unwilling to accept her son if his career aspirations were different—how could a restriction be wrong if it’s mutual? Don’t partners have the right to mutually decide on rules for their relationship? To this latter question, my answer is yes, partners have the right to make such decisions; however, the issue here is not what partners have the right to do, but what the right thing to do is. Second, I believe that the answer to how even a mutual restriction in a relationship could be wrong is simple: It can be wrong by going against love for one another. In cases of friendship-monogamy that meet all of Wollen’s conditions, the mutuality of the restriction just means that we have not one wrong, but two wrongs present. (That is, each partner’s attitude toward the other wrongly falls short of what love calls for. “She’s doing it to me too” doesn’t cancel out the badness; if anything, it multiplies it.)

Further points

A further point that helps show the wrongness of friendship-monogamy (even cases thereof meeting all of Wollen’s conditions) has to do with the well-being of relevant third parties. More specifically, each partner, in restricting the other from having additional friends, would not simply be denying the other the benefits that would come from friendships with new people; she’d be denying those new people the benefits that would come from friendship with her partner. This is a point that I feel significantly adds to the moral cost of friendship-monogamy (as it does, mutatis mutandis, for regular monogamy).

To turn to a final point, Wollen speaks (in condition 1) of an aesthetic sense of “specialness” that the relevant friendship-monogamists value, but it’s not entirely clear to me what this amounts to. Since he explicitly states that it’s not a moral sense of specialness he has in mind, it must not be specialness in the sense of being highly (morally) valuable. Perhaps the “specialness” in question is simply another word for “exclusivity”? But if so, then, since friendship-monogamy just is the relevant form of exclusivity, it’s not clear what the aesthetic reason operating in such a case is. The reason seems to reduce to being aesthetically drawn to friendship-monogamy itself (and not for any feature of friendship monogamy that one can independently specify).

Why does this matter? I’ll admit that it’s tricky to articulate exactly why. However, my best attempt is to say that it suggests that the aesthetic attraction at work is in some sense a shallow one—a form of “no reason, I just happen to like it”—and that the partners would do better to work themselves out of that aesthetic attraction to exclusivity than to embrace friendship-monogamy. More generally, finding exclusivity valuable on aesthetic grounds seems bizarre to me—a bit like enjoying a beautiful painting, but then becoming upset upon discovering that there are other beautiful paintings, or that some of these other beautiful paintings are of the same subject. Were someone disposed to feel that way about paintings, most of us would probably think that he should try to train himself out of feeling that way. And that’s also what we should say, I propose, about being drawn for similar reasons to monogamy (whether friendship- or regular monogamy).

Conclusion

To those who want monogamy to be morally permissible, but who are doubtful of how well monogamy’s traditional justifications hold up, Wollen’s strategy might at first seem to offer a new hope for monogamy. Being able to bypass the whole quagmire of points and counterpoints about (e.g.) whether monogamy is special in a morally valuable way, or to what extent people need or don’t need monogamy in order to overcome jealousy, or how monogamy and non-monogamy compare when it comes to practicality—this would indeed be a great boon to defenders of monogamy. For the reasons I’ve described, though, this attempt to do an end run around the debate over monogamy’s traditional justifications, and to show that monogamy doesn’t stand in need of justification in the first place, is ultimately too ambitious; restrictions on friendship, even those that meet Wollen’s specified conditions, are more morally troubling than Wollen suggests. Thus, if we’re to show that monogamy is morally permissible, we’ll indeed have to find ways of distancing it from restrictions on friendship—a task that takes us right back to the debate over monogamy’s putative good-making features, such as practicality, specialness, and the prevention of jealousy. That is the battlefield on which those in the debate must continue to fight.

Postscript

Those who have been following my debate with Kyle York will know that it’s been some time since the latest published entry therein (York's “A Couple of Reasons in Favor of Monogamy,” 2023). To any who are curious, know that I do intend to respond. Initially, I wanted to respond in the form of a further paper, but my draft of that paper has, alas, ballooned to over 26,000 words—approximately double the length of my previous paper (“Monogamy Unredeemed”), which was itself already pushing the word limit of many or most philosophy journals. Consequently, rather than trying to cram everything into a single paper, I’ve recently decided to try incorporating the present draft into a broader book about the ethics of (non-)monogamy. The book planning and writing are still in the early stages, but stay tuned for more.

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1. I should note, though, that Liberto’s paper was published a few years before my first paper on the subject, and hers puts forth a different anti-monogamy argument.

2. Like Liberto, McKeever was publishing about this subject slightly before I was; see her “Is the Requirement of Sexual Exclusivity Consistent with Romantic Love?” (2017). (Unlike me and Liberto, however, McKeever believes that monogamy is morally permissible.)

3. See James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, ch. 5.

4. Of course, sometimes you can still permissibly “deny yourself something good,” to use Wollen’s framing, though the permissibility will, in my view, hinge largely (possibly entirely) on the extent to which one’s circumstances present one with countervailing reasons.

5. For a fuller defense of the view, see my dissertation, esp. ch. 2, sec. IIIa.

6. One difficulty of evaluating whether the case meets condition 3 is that, although the partners didn’t pressure each other into friendship monogamy at first, or when they were initially laying out the rules for their relationship, it seems plausible that there’s now some such pressure directed at the partner who desires an additional friend. It’s unclear to me whether condition 3 is meant to apply simply to the “initial laying out of rules” phase of the relationship or to apply in a more ongoing way—though, if I had to guess, I'd say it’s probably the latter.