It seems to me like your metaethical objection is strong enough to stand alone against Amos' case as he formulated it, but I do still have some thoughts...
I guess, firstly, I'm not sure that it'd *always* be imprudent to engage in friendship-monogamy. If two partners happen to be predisposed to (very psychotherapy-resistant) extreme jealousy, then it really could be a mutually beneficial arrangement for them. Probably, though, in real-world cases, efforts to overcome jealous feelings can be expected to accomplish more good than imposing restrictions on yourself and your partner. Still, this seems like enough to rescue Amos' defense of pro tanto permissibility.
> 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.
Amos is more deontologically inclined than I am, so probably would consider this objection pretty strong, but I'm not a huge fan. Some time ago, I looked into different conceptions of love, and found myself most attracted to views of love as union. When two partners love one another, they begin to integrate consideration for the other's welfare as their own, and together form a 'we' that acts in increasingly-perfect harmony with their mutual interest.
On a consequentialist reading of this, it doesn't seem like disposition is relevant at all outside of action. If my love for partner implies only that I'll act in her interest as if it was my own, all I need to do is the acting like it! If my partner actually does become interested in maintaining an external friendship, I'll reevaluate my stance and act accordingly. Ah, but you write:
> 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.
I think monogamy *is* more counterfactually robust than your example, because your example is a bit of a strawman. Again, in this play-world where two partners are extremely and irrevocably jealous of one another, it would take a very strong external interest for the expected utility of de-monogamizing to become positive for either partner.
The wonderful thing about the union view is that it explains how love can solve coordination problems like this seems to be—monogamy might be better conceived of as an emergent result of certain preferences for exclusivity, not a strictly-followed rule in most relationships. Seemingly, most people who describe themselves as monogamous could imagine a situation in which they opened up their relationship if they found sufficiently great additional partners and were able to keep their jealousies at bay.
I think you have a strong case for most people reflecting on what it would take for them to abandon monogamy (and probably updating strongly toward openness to polyamory), but it seems like calling it morally wrong in general is unwarranted.
Ah, I also want to defend the aesthetics of specialness a little bit:
> 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.
This seems wrong to me! Most people would probably think an original Picasso to be more valuable than any copies, even an expertly-done counterfeit. I think this preference is related directly to aesthetics (and any extra benefits like signaling wealth are downstream of that), and that the value is derived directly from scarcity (read: specialness).
The scarcity bit is easiest to defend—there's really nothing separating an original Picasso from its many imitations than the fact that it's the only one of its kind. Of course, maybe I'm delineating "kind" too arbitrarily—what separates "Guernica-looking thing by Picasso" from "Guernica-looking thing by Shtein"? But that's stupid, we care about intellectual property for a reason. Clearly the artist has a special relationship to his work, even if it's difficult to express exactly what it is.
Why does "value" in the general sense relate to aesthetics? This one is harder for me to justify, but I think the right answer has something to do with revealed preference. If society puts a higher price tag on an original piece of art, it seems like we should assume that the many individuals responsible for creating such high demand have appraised that originality to be aesthetically worthwhile. Maybe this is all a signaling game—but, if so, I'm not sure we have any reason to think of aesthetics as more than a signaling game! Whatever it is that causes people to like a Picasso also causes them to like an original Picasso even more.
Hi Ari, thanks for the very thoughtful and in-depth comment. I'm not sure I'll be able to fully address all the points you made, but I want to at least reply to some of them.
On your first point (about how friendship-monogamy might not *always* be imprudent), I suppose we agree more than it might seem. I certainly wouldn't want to make my moral opposition to friendship-monogamy hinge on any prudential claim. Instead, I'm morally opposed to friendship-monogamy primarily because I think that it goes against love for one's partner. So even if some conceivable cases of friendship-monogamy turn out to be prudent, I'd see that as compatible with my critique. Of course, if we make extreme-enough stipulations about the psychology of the agents in question, such as in your example of extreme, therapy-resistant jealousy, perhaps that could be enough to make a given instance of friendship-monogamy permissible. But then I'd return to your point about how such extreme stipulations make the case arguably disanalogous to real-life cases. (And that, too, aligns well with my broader view, as my broader view is not that monogamy is morally impermissible in every possible case, but simply that it's morally impermissible in normal circumstances.)
A further point about the above is that, to the extent that friendship-monogamy intuitively needs to be justified by something like jealousy in the first place, that suggests that there's something pro tanto bad or regrettable about friendship-monogamy, something that makes it stand in need of justification. I take this to matter for Wollen's argument, since Wollen is trying to show that friendship-monogamy (and, ultimately, regular monogamy) doesn't even require justification in the first place.
> On a consequentialist reading of [the union theory of love], it doesn't seem like disposition is relevant at all outside of action. If my love for partner implies only that I'll act in her interest as if it was my own, all I need to do is the acting like it! If my partner actually does become interested in maintaining an external friendship, I'll reevaluate my stance and act accordingly.
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. (To take the example further, imagine 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.)
> I think monogamy *is* more counterfactually robust than your example, because your example is a bit of a strawman. Again, in this play-world where two partners are extremely and irrevocably jealous of one another, it would take a very strong external interest for the expected utility of de-monogamizing to become positive for either partner.
I'm not sure whom you believe I'm strawmanning; my post was responding to Wollen, and his example had nothing to do with jealousy. The responses I'd offer to this point are otherwise the same as I offered above re: prudence and jealousy.
> This [the point about the painting example] seems wrong to me! Most people would probably think an original Picasso to be more valuable than any copies, even an expertly-done counterfeit. I think this preference is related directly to aesthetics (and any extra benefits like signaling wealth are downstream of that), and that the value is derived directly from scarcity (read: specialness).
Eh, I don't know about that. It seems to me that if we had two original Picassos depicting the same scene, and only a single (expertly done) counterfeit depicting that same scene, either of the two original Picassos would remain more valuable than the counterfeit, even though there are two of the originals and only one counterfeit. I take this to suggest that what's doing the work re: specialness here is not so much scarcity, but something involving having a direct causal relation to a great artist.
Anyway, this comment has gotten quite long, so I should probably pause here. But feel free to follow up on any of these points if you'd like. In any case, thanks again for the enjoyable comment/discussion.
This is in the ballpark of Benjamin Hause's question, but I'll ask it on a separate thread.
It seems to me that the question of whether we should approve or disapprove of monogamy norms should be much more engaged with sociology, history, and evolutionary psychology than this discussion suggests. The classic defenses of property rights that I find plausible--e.g., in Hume--treat them as a kind of social technology for enabling long-term, costly investment. E.g., you want land to be cultivated. That won't happen if, after you've reaped and sowed, anyone can come along and take your harvest. But if people have exclusive rights to the fruits of their land, which will be defended by courts, then society will be much richer, as land will be cultivated, and there will be more food to go around. So if we're thinking about the morality of theft, we should really think about the institution of property, and what value it does or doesn't serve, rather than just directly consulting our intuitions about acts of theft.
Similarly, it seems to me that we should see monogamy norms as a kind of social technology for producing various goods, especially in light of the fact that the historical alternative to monogamy has tended to be polygyny, and there's reason to think that's a kind of default equilibrium in the absence of norms to the contrary. If in the past that involved harems, even today, online dating markets often look de facto polygynous; a few men get lots of dates and don't commit to anyone they date, and most men getting few or no dates, and most women dating some of the highly in demand men. Two of the main advantages of monogamy relative to alternatives:
1. Reducing competition among males: when a few men have lots of partners, and most men have none, you tend to see a lot of conflict and competition, often violent, among men. Polygynous societies historically tend to see a lot of internal conflict and war, perhaps sometimes as a mechanism to remove surplus men. Relatedly, polgynous societies tend to be pretty patriarchal.
2. Investment in children: when children are raised in monogamous pairings, fathers are much more likely to invest in their upbringing. Historically, children in polygynous societies see a lot less paternal investment. Certainly of time, if not resources. What might things look like under contemporary ethical polyamory? Who knows, but my guess is that there will probably be a lot less paternal investment in children than under monogamy.
Obviously there's lots to say here, and I'm just gesturing at complex and contested considerations, but it seems to me that if we're thinking about what our attitude towards the institution of monogamy norms should be, these are the sorts of questions we have to address. We shouldn't treat the question by thinking about couples in isolation, and consulting our intuitions about whether they'd be treating each other fairly by imposing monogamy requirements on each other. Maybe your approach to ethics is deeply intuitionist/deontological?
Hi Daniel, thanks for this well-thought-out comment. I think that the considerations you've gestured at certainly do raise some important challenges to my view. As you've acknowledged, these are complex and contested matters, and, like you, I'll only be able to speak about them briefly here. I'll try, though, to gesture in some directions that are at least somewhat helpful.
> We shouldn't treat the question by thinking about couples in isolation, and consulting our intuitions about whether they'd be treating each other fairly by imposing monogamy requirements on each other.
In a way, I agree: I certainly don't want to suggest that consulting our intuitions about couples in isolation is enough to *complete* the ethical critique of monogamy. Such consultation of intuitions is simply the starting point--the point at which, if I'm correct, we should see that monogamy is pro tanto wrong. Since pro tanto wrongness can be outweighed, the question then becomes whether monogamy has good-making features (e.g., practicality, specialness, jealousy prevention, etc.) that are sufficient to justify monogamy in the end. Confronting monogamy's allegedly good-making features is, in fact, where I think the most interesting and challenging part of the debate is, and is where I spend most of the text in my papers on the subject. As I see it, the points you've brought up (about social stability and investment in children) fit well into this way of looking at the debate, as they are proposed good-making features of monogamy. (The reason why I didn't discuss these or other proposed good-making features of monogamy in my post is simply that my post was responding to Wollen, who argues that monogamy isn't even pro tanto wrong, and that we thus don't need to posit any good-making features of monogamy to rescue it from my anti-monogamy argument in the first place.)
That said, to address something you brought up near the end of your comment, I think it's fair to call my ethics broadly intuitionistic. Perhaps one way this comes up is that, even if non-monogamy does have the kinds of negative externalities (e.g., exacerbating unequal mating patterns) described in your post, I'm doubtful of how much that should move any given couple who's deciding whether to be monogamous. To me, that non-monogamy seems more consonant with love for my partner intuitively carries a good deal more moral weight than does the fact (if it is one) that our being non-monogamous would make a teensy contribution to the negative externalities to which you've referred.
While the above is a somewhat concessive response, I think that there's room to supplement it with a less concessive response, namely one which challenges whether an increase in non-monogamy would in fact exacerbate the relevant social harms. However much non-monogamy might have taken the form of polygyny in our species' past, there's reason to doubt that that would be true to the same extent in current developed countries. With the much greater economic and social power of women compared to before, there's less of a sense of "I must find a rich, high-status husband and become part of his harem to ensure my survival and the survival of my children." Likewise plausibly making a difference here would be increased egalitarianism in gender norms (e.g., less slut-shaming for women, such that women need not have as much fear of reduced social status from having multiple male partners). And I'd add that, when it comes to children raised in contemporary polyamorous families, Elisabeth Sheff's work (see her book *The Polyamorists Next Door*) suggests that such children actually do quite well.
Your point about de facto polygyny in online dating is an interesting one, though it's not clear to me whether that's in part because the interface of much online dating encourages a quick, looks-based evaluation, and is also largely geared toward casual relationships and hookups. It'd be interesting to see whether the same patterns hold when examining serious, long-term relationships. (This is an area that I admit I need to look into more myself.)
To the extent that non-monogamy still does contribute to polygyny and its associated social harms (e.g., violence from sexless young men), there could be ways of addressing such harms apart from monogamy. For instance, when it comes to the risk of incel violence, having increasingly technologically sophisticated and immersive video games and pornography plausibly helps. Legalizing prostitution would also be an imporant help here.
A final point one might raise is that, if our species seems to have a certain difficulty with doing non-monogamy well, the same seems to hold true for monogamy, particularly when we examine rates of cheating and divorce. When we consider the tensions that monogamy introduces or exacerbates for many people, it's not obvious to me that those alleged to be introduced or exacerbated by non-monogamy would be any worse on balance.
Anyway, those are, again, just a few broad directions a response might go; I hope to explore these issues more fully in future writing. In the meantime, thanks again for your comment, and please feel free to follow up on any of these points if you'd like.
Interesting discourse! How does your argument interface with the empirical evidence? It sounds like ultimately you're saying monogamy is wrong insofar as it deprives people of various welfare goods. But that almost sounds like an empirical claim. Does this mean that if there were evidence that people were happier in monogamous relationships, it would undermine your view? (In that case, non-monogamy would deprive people of well-being, on average.)
Hi Ben, thanks for the question. While I certainly wouldn't say that empirical considerations fail to bear on the argument at all (e.g., the argument relies on the observation that sexual and romantic relationships at least tend to enrich people's lives), I think that there's also an important sense in which the argument isn't as readily subject to purely empirical objections as one might think. For instance, when it comes to your tentative framing of the argument--"monogamy is wrong insofar as it deprives people of various welfare goods"--I actually wouldn't put it this way. I think that monogamy would be wrong even if (just to give a concrete example) a particular couple were the last people on earth. In such a case, being monogamous would, ex hypothesi, not deprive them of any welfare goods (in the form of or stemming from additional relationships) that they might have experienced if they were non-monogamous. Yet being monogamous would still be wrong for them, in my view, because it would involve dispositions that go against love for one another; that is, each partner would still be such that *if* the other encountered someone that she was interested in starting a relationship with, he (the existing partner) would not support it (which seems to me to be inconsonant with love).
(Of course, one might wonder why a couple would even bother with committing themselves to monogamy if they were the last people on earth. But maybe we can bracket this out by imagining that they don't know that they're the last people on earth.)
> Does this mean that if there were evidence that people were happier in monogamous relationships, it would undermine your view?
I think that evidence to that effect *could* undermine my view (e.g., the appeals to jealousy and practicality are, in a crucial way, arguments that for at least some people, a monogamous relationship will be a happier one). However, there are a few factors that I think would heavily bear on how probative such evidence would be. For instance, if it turned out that people were generally happier in monogamous relationships, but that this was simply because people *mistakenly* thought that monogamous relationships were valuable in a certain way (e.g., carrying a sense of "specialness" that [let's say] doesn't stand up to philosophical scrutiny), then the greater happiness wouldn't seem robust enough, or to be sufficiently a matter of anything intrinsic to monogamy, to be all that much a point in monogamy's favor. Likewise if people in general have (at least up to now) turned out to be happier in monogamous relationships simply because, say, it fits with what their friends are doing and they like conforming, or because non-monogamy is still in certain ways stigmatized, or because non-monogamy hasn't yet had time to build up the same level of shared scripts, cultural permeation, etc. that monogamy has. To the extent that greater happiness in monogamy were a matter of relatively shallow or contingent features like these, I'd see that as greatly reducing its moral import. But to the extent that people are generally happier in monogamy because of features that monogamy's defenders would argue are more deeply a part of monogamy, like practicality and preventing jealousy, that would be much more a point in monogamy's favor (which is why those are the kinds of objections I tend to put the most effort into engaging with).
Not everything is philosophical. Some things just Are.
Humans trend towards monogamy because human reproduction is incredibly resource-intensive. We see this across the animal kingdom. The more resources it takes to make offspring, the more likely a species is to trend towards monogamy.
It’s amoral. It’s just one element of our evolutionary development. For thousands of years, the children of monogamous parents had a measurable advantage at surviving to then reproduce.
Now, deviating from that biological norm is *also* amoral. It’s not some ethical edict, just “what we’re prone to, because inherited instincts passed it on”. But we aren’t machines. We have higher reasoning, we get to make choices.
So honey, I know I agreed with you on having new friends, but these people really smell! They sure resemble street people. The kids are terrified and even the dog- you know, the gross one always lucking his balls- makes himself scarce.
I also wasn't too fond of that guy who was always leering at our 15 yr old girl and making lurid suggestions to her. Sure, I know, he's your friend, settle down...
Ok, just one more thing to bring up. You know the cash I usually keep in my top drawer? Yeah, that cash. It's gone, not spent, just gone. I'm wondering if that couple you befriended- yeah, the strung-out looking ones- I wondered if they took it. Along with my welder, motorcycle and pistol. No No No, I'm just wondering, not accusing.
Now just settle down. I'm sorry, I take it all back. Bring your friends by anytime. I just read a substack referencing the sanctity of friendship and how it can never be questioned. I think I have that right- it's not easy to tell, as the author and many of the comment section twisted themselves in knots trying to explain it all.
Anyhow, I've asked a couple of old girl friends to come by for a nooner. Do you think you could grab the kids and make yourselves scarce for a few hours? That is, unless you want to watch......
> if not, then monogamy ends up being like the restriction on having additional friends, a restriction that many or most would find immoral
I don't have a moral intuition that this would be immoral. If anything I have a weak moral intuition that assuming _no_ restrictions on making additional friends is immoral.
> 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.
I'll have to side with Amos on this one. As I keep saying when things like these come up, life is weird and varied, and a life well lived most likely includes a certain amount of experimentation and brushing against the edges of acceptability or morality. Much of life is an interplay between the demands of wider groups vs your individual (or smaller group) desires and interests, and mature cultures worldwide usually have some understanding and toleration of this kind of exploration.
Then, people are are also varied at the individual level, and there's a long tail of people with uncommon tastes. By default I'd say it's a good thing that they can find each other and do their thing together. The clubbers with the clubbers, the meditators with the meditators, the thespians with the thespians... what do I know, some people even go for corporate jobs.
So if two people can get together in Amos' ideal case and decide to explore being each other's only friend, weird and insane as it may sound, I'll refrain from judging them. As long as no coercion is involved, for all I care they can well decide to spend every available moment gazing into the other's eyes — who knows, maybe some amazing writing or art could come out of the experience!
And I don't think that essentialist arguments of "sin against love", or careful appeals to the precautionary principle, can properly counter that.
To go wider: if I understand correctly your general argument goes:
1. Friendships and romantic relationships are sufficiently alike that intuitions on one should transfer to the other
2. Restricting one partner's friendships seems wrong
3. Therefore restricting one partner's romantic prospects also seems wrong.
While I agree with Amos' basic skepticism on #2, I also find claim #1 very interesting to explore, and I don't see many comments going into that one. IMO to go for the core of #1, it's not so much a question of individual rights and wrongs, but a question of human ethology.
We're a social species with strong pair bonding, these are two core aspects of our nature, long before culture and personal choice sets in. So the question of whether friendship deprivation functions similarly to romantic deprivation is a relatively contingent, empirical one. If our evolutionary lineage on the way to technological domination of the planet had been slightly different, our answer could be quite different too.
We can get a decent idea of the boundaries of these two types of deprivations by looking at circumstances where they actually are applied. We see that romantic restrictions are ubiquitous and often entered willingly; our prototypical mating pattern is medium-term exclusive pair bonding, and our evolutionary line gave us the tendency to fall in love, which makes us (typically) enjoy that. Not so surpisingly, this is expressed in most cultures, and when Western liberal culture decides to free up people from traditional constraints, serial imperfect monogamy is still the biggest model that emerges. We also find other, unrelated contexts where people accept sexual/romantic deprivation: from historically important and stable institutions like monasticism, to the fact that many cultures (try to) impose sexual abstinence on young adults ("bachelors").
OTOH, depriving people of socialization and friendship is extremely rare. Even in traditional, patriarchal cultures that don't allow cross-sex friendships, and put lots of restrictions on women, they usually still have ways to have other women as friends. And when they don't, it's seen as inhuman. In the modern world, as far as I can tell, you only find restrictions on socialization in such extreme situations as solitary confinement (a punishment seen as so terrible that it's mostly given to protect others from the individual), and emergency situations like temporary restrictions on hospital visits at the height of the COVID pandemic.
So without going further, at a glance it doesn't seem to me like intuitions about friendship limitations should transfer as-is to romantic limitations, because those are two quite distinct elements of our repertoire, and they seem to function quite differently too.
Hi Skaladom, thanks for the well-thought-out comment. You've brought up a fairly novel way of putting pressure on the argument, which is something I always appreciate. Here are a few thoughts in response:
> By default I'd say it's a good thing that they can find each other and do their thing together. The clubbers with the clubbers, the meditators with the meditators, the thespians with the thespians... what do I know, some people even go for corporate jobs.
I agree that it's a good thing that such people "can find each other and do their thing together." But that's because none of those examples seem to me to involve restrictions that go against love for one's partner(s). The challenge for your view, as I see it, is to find a case of restrictions that go against love, but intuitively don't seem immoral (a case apart from monogamous restrictions, since that's the issue we're differing on). If you can find such a case, then I agree that that would indeed do a good deal to undermine my argument.
Here's a case to help illustrate what I mean. Suppose that two partners regularly insult each other, saying things that are outright gratuitously nasty (and where this isn't simply playful banter, but expressing real hostility). Unless there's some sufficiently important compensating benefit they derive from this practice (which we can, without any need for great imagination, stipulate that there's not), their practice of nastily insulting one another strikes me as immoral. And a plausible explanation of why it's immoral is that such a practice goes against love for one another--this despite the fact that both partners, in continuing to be in a relationship where they know they'll go on receiving such treatment, arguably (at least tacitly) consent to it.
> As long as no coercion is involved, for all I care they can well decide to spend every available moment gazing into the other's eyes — who knows, maybe some amazing writing or art could come out of the experience!
To me, this very framing (particularly the last clause) suggests that you're thinking of all this in terms of good-making features that might justify such a restriction. If that's the thought, then I agree that even a restriction that might seem to go against love at first glance can, if it turns out to have sufficiently important good-making features, be justified in the end. In the case of monogamy, then, I'm happy to concede that if monogamy were to have sufficiently important good-making features, monogamous restrictions would be justified. I simply don't think that monogamy does have sufficiently important good-making features to justify its restrictions.
When it comes to formulating my argument (re: your second comment), I'd frame it a little differently. In particular, I'd go with something like the following:
2. The *reason* why restricting one's partner's friendships seems wrong--i.e., that given the goodness of friendship, restricting one's partner from additional friendships, unless there are sufficiently important good-making features at stake, goes against love--applies in a parallel way to monogamous restrictions (i.e., given the goodness of sexual and romantic relationships, restricting one's partner from having more of them, unless there are sufficiently important good-making features at stake, goes against love).
3. Therefore, monogamous restrictions, unless they have sufficiently important good-making features, are wrong.
I acknowledge, of course, that friendships and romantic relationships need not be the same in all ways. However, the two seem to me to be similar enough in the *relevant* ways for the argument to go through.
That said, I agree with what I take to be the spirit of much of your second comment, namely that friendship restrictions are more extreme and are morally worse than monogamous restrictions. But I think that my argument still suggests that, unless sufficiently important good-making features are provided, monogamous restrictions are still wrong (just not *as* wrong as friendship restrictions).
A few final points: First, even if I conceded the point that monogamous restrictions are not outright morally wrong, it would still seem to me that non-monogamous relationships, in virtue of being more consonant with love, are morally *better* than monogamous ones. That going against love for one's partner has *some* moral disvalue, even if it's not sufficient for wrongness, seems to me hard to deny; if you indeed deny this, then I'd say that we have a more or less bedrock clash of intuitions.
Lastly, surely almost all people in relationships in fact want to conduct them in a manner that's consonant with love for their partner. And so, even if I conceded all your points when it comes to morality, I think that we'd still have the result that holding one's partner to monogamous restrictions is practically irrational for almost all people (given its inconsonance with love). This seems to me like a conclusion that defenders of monogamy probably wouldn't be comfortable with.
Anyway, those are some of my main thoughts at the moment, but please feel free to respond if there are any points you want to follow up on. And, in any case, thanks again for the thought-provoking comment.
> The challenge for your view, as I see it, is to find a case of restrictions that go against love, but intuitively don't seem immoral
Challenge accepted! We haven't really discussed exactly what you mean by "going against love", but from the way you're using the phrase, it seems to me that any assertion of boundaries that impinges on your partner's will, freedom or identity would count. If that's what you mean, then there are many examples: "I love this guy/girl, but I can't live with a smoker / an atheist / a vegan / a hunter / a gamer / a squanderer / etc."
If not, then please clarify the contours of your idea of love, to see what it means to go against it.
In my other comment I tried to hint towards the biological origins of love, as a first step towards understanding what it calls for, but that would probably be a long discussion to bring to full fruition. At the very least we'd have to go from the ethology up to the psychology of human love, and probably into some game theory too, to be able to properly look at its normative aspects.
EDIT: To clarify, my approach here is that "all abstractions are leaky", so I don't think it makes much sense to talk about the demands of love in some abstract or ideal way, without going into the nitty gritty of how it actually works for us humans.
> Challenge accepted! We haven't really discussed exactly what you mean by "going against love", but from the way you're using the phrase, it seems to me that any assertion of boundaries that impinges on your partner's will, freedom or identity would count. If that's what you mean, then there are many examples: "I love this guy/girl, but I can't live with a smoker / an atheist / a vegan / a hunter / a gamer / a squanderer / etc." If not, then please clarify the contours of your idea of love, to see what it means to go against it.
Sure, I'd be happy to clarify here. As an initial point, I'd reject the claim that "any assertion of boundaries that impinges on your partner's will, freedom or identity would count [as going against love]." If that were the claim I was relying on, then I agree the claim would be way too strong, and there'd be legions of counterexamples to my argument (such as some of the ones you've gestured at).
What I *would* claim is that, the more a given boundary impinges on your partner's freedom, and the more the restricted behavior seems as if it would (or at least plausibly could) further your partner's well-being, the more justification that boundary is going to require; to the extent that it lacks such justification, the boundary is going to be inconsonant with love for your partner, and will in that way be immoral.
I make this claim because it seems to me that love involves having a favorable disposition toward your loved one's freedom and well-being. That is, love calls for not restricting your loved one's activities--especially when they're activities that would plausibly further your loved one's well-being--unless there's a good reason for so restricting them. If there is a sufficient reason for restricting them in a given case, then it seems to me that the restriction does not ultimately go against love for one's partner.
Thus, in the case of monogamous restrictions, the whole moral issue seems to me to turn on whether monogamous restrictions have a sufficiently weighty justification. If (as I think) they lack such a justification, then they are to that extent inconsonant with love for one's partner, and thereby immoral.
Thanks for the reply! I was getting ready to sketch arguments showing that at least some kinds of mutual restrictions or boundaries are acceptable and probably inevitable in a relationship, but you don't deny that, so we're on the same page globally. And *some* difference has to be drawn somewhere, if we want to distinguish abusive restrictions from sane ones. I don't share the intuition that monogamy falls on the bad side of the line, but I'm happy to leave the discussion here.
Pardon me for inserting myself in this discussion out of the blue, but I wanted to share a few thoughts on the matter. It occurred to me that there have been other instances where certain practices and dynamics have been regarded, prima facie, as opposite to a proper disposition to love, and a noteworthy response to this is that what is consistent with love can be mediated or complicated by the perceptions of the loved party.
Let's bring in the practices, rituals and dynamics englobed within BDSM (Bondage, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and Masochism):
It has been contended that practices like using physical force against a partner contradict the love precept of caring for the well-being of a person. After all, impact play not only implies eliciting physical pain but often leads to noticeable (even if mild) physical damage (like bruising). Conversely, it could be said that asking a partner to inflict physical force upon us is concerning too, since we would be asking our partner to act in a manner contrary to love.
Something similar can be argued for humiliation plays and control dynamics, where we deliberately say harmful or insulting things to our partner, put them in humiliating situations and order them around. Why would be partake in this?
Well, the response would be that not only the other party is consenting to this, but that they find those practices and dynamics desirable themselves because of the “paradoxical” positive feelings they produce or highlight. And insofar as this is true, then those practices seem more consonant with love.
There is evidence that pain can elicit the release of endorphins (the “pleasure hormone”) and accentuate subsequent subjective sensations of pleasure. For humiliation and control games or scenes, it’s mentioned that such situations put you in a deeply vulnerable position, and vulnerability can be exhilarating or appealing because of how intense it can feel. Pushing your limits can feel good. And conversely, it feels good to be “in charge” or have someone willingly assume a vulnerable position at your hand.
Now, why don't simply experience pleasure without the pain or look for other less extreme experiences of vulnerability? It could be that for both parties, the pleasure without the pain and the less extreme vulnerability wouldn't be exactly the same. Then, it seems that these practices and dynamics suggest something interesting: that negative affects and experiences (which include things like being restricted) can uniquely elicit or intensify positive ones.
Now, more relevant to this discussion: what changes for BDSM dynamics and scenes is not necessarily the acts in themselves but how the partner responds to them. Abusive partners historically have claimed that they hit their partner “out of love,” and in many cases, the victims could agree due to abuse internalization. We will quickly contest that regardless of whether they think that they are acting in “accordance to love,” inflicting pain and damage is wrong, especially to a loved one. Yet, from a BDSM-informed ethical framework, it strikes me that what is wrong with the abusive condition isn't inflicting or eliciting something negative on the other person per se (even when consented), but that the other person didn't find that pain or damage in any way desirable and pleasurable on its own.
Another important point is that not all people merely indulge in these acts occasionally or by happenstance. Some kinksters deliberately seek partnerships that contain these practices and dynamics and sometimes organize their relationship and sexuality around them such that they would avoid or terminate a relationship that doesn't involve these practices or dynamics (anymore). This is especially the case with 24/7 or Total Power Exchange dynamics where the BDSM element structure is a critical part of the relationship.
Now, by ending my exposition here I will admit that it surely would look half-baked, and probably it wouldn't be as obvious how all this relates to monogamy, but it would be impolite to leave even a lengthier comment unprompted—since for that matter, I would probably need to compose an entire article.
Hi Bataille's Idol, thanks for sharing your thoughts. The BDSM comparison is an interesting one. I can see how there's a need for my view to be careful here, as it might seem that the principle about acting in a manner consonant with love for one's partner risks condemning all BDSM (on the grounds that BDSM, in involving the infliction of pain, etc., isn't consonant with love for one's partner). And, while your comment doesn't put it quite this way, what I take to be the spirit of at least part of your comment is that such an implication would be unduly conservative and implausible. If that's indeed the thought, then I agree with that assessment. The anti-monogamy view, then, needs to have something to say about why BDSM is okay while monogamy isn't.
I think that the crucial feature here is something your comment nicely goes into, namely that for those who practice it, BDSM has sufficiently important good-making features, good-making features that couldn't feasibly be had in other ways (e.g., a certain kind or intensity of pleasure resulting from vulnerability). And so, as long as such practices remain consensual, there appears to be no inconsonance with love there in the end.
With monogamy, by contrast, it seems to me that there are no sufficiently important good-making features to justify the restrictions at issue. (If I'm mistaken about this, then monogamy is consonant with love after all, and is morally justified--or, at least, if there is something wrong with monogamy, it'd have to lie elsewhere than in the argument I've given.)
Anyway, if I understand your view correctly, it seems to me that the above take on BDSM is more or less in agreement with what you've suggested (particularly the part where you helpfully note, "[F]rom a BDSM-informed ethical framework, it strikes me that what is wrong with the abusive condition isn't inflicting or eliciting something negative on the other person per se (even when consented), but that the other person didn't find that pain or damage in any way desirable and pleasurable on its own"). But let me know if I've misunderstood some aspect of your view.
I agree with most of this post. But this is an interesting line:
> 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.
Part of what a right is, in my view, is that it's always morally permissible to exercise it. This line, along with your comments about how prudential factors affect morality, make me think that you're working with a slightly different conception of "morally permissible".
Here, the phrase "right thing to do" seems to have a more positive conception to it: "do this, and everyone will be better off". It's the right thing to do in the sense that selecting Pareto-optimal choices is the right thing to do. It doesn't seem to have a negative conception to it, the same way it does when we say "the right thong to do is not to to steal or kill or abuse people". In that case, we seem to be actively branding people who fail to follow through with a kind of resolute unacceptability, a mark of sin that degrades their moral character and renders them blameworthy and open to criticism.
That is, the way I see it, you seem to be arguing that monogamy is not the right thing to do the same way I'd tell a student that playing video games every day instead of studying is not the right thing to do. It shows a neglect for their well-being, reflects poorly on their moral character (in the same way that the predisposition to extreme jealousy Ari Shtein brings up might reflect poorly on someone), and is overall a Bad Idea. But it doesn't make them a Bad Person or indicate that eg. we have a duty to intervene and stop the behavior whenever we see it, the way we would if we saw someone stealing or killing. (There are extreme utilitarians who insist that everyone who doesn't pick the most prudent option is a Bad Person, but I assume you aren't one of them.)
Hi Jessie, thanks for the question. Of the two senses of "right thing to do" that you've described in your final paragraph, I'd say that the sense I have in mind is indeed closer to the first. That is, while I think that being monogamous isn't the right thing to do, I don't think that being monogamous is enough to make someone a bad person (as that kind of label would need to be based on a more comprehensive evaluation of a person's actions and qualities). I also don't think that "we have a duty to intervene and stop the behavior whenever we see it, the way we would if we saw someone stealing or killing" (whatever such a duty would mean in practice, when it came to monogamy). At the same time, I see the sense in which monogamy is not the "right thing to do" as perhaps a bit more serious than the one involved in your example of the student who plays video games every day instead of studying. In that example, the badness seems primarily prudential (though I suppose this could depend on how we fill out the details of the case), but with monogamy, the badness, as I see it, is primarily a matter of how one is relating to someone else, namely one's partner (someone to whom one might think that there are special duties to relate to in a manner consonant with love); this plausibly lends a greater seriousness to the moral issues involved in monogamy.
In the end, then, I'm not sure whether the sense of "right thing to do" that I have in mind fits neatly within either of the senses you've described. But I can say a bit about one area where our approaches differ, namely when it comes to what it is to have a right to do something. You write, "Part of what a right is, in my view, is that it's always morally permissible to exercise it." On the way I prefer to use the term "right," a right is something that one ought not to be coercively prevented from doing. On this conception, a person could have the right to do something even if doing that thing is morally impermissible. For example, I could say something needlessly rude to someone else; while doing so would be immoral, arguably I shouldn't be coercively prevented from doing so, as the (moral) right to freedom of speech includes the right to say (at least certain) things that are bad.
Anyway, I'm not sure to what extent all that helps answer your question, but I hope it does at least somewhat. If there are any points you'd like to follow up on, please of course feel free.
One question: you say that people have a special duty to love their partners. By this I presume you mean moral duty. Is this true? If I fall out of love with my partner (due to no fault of either of us, just naturally growing apart, or perhaps something like suddenly realizing I'm gay), am I morally in the wrong for not immediately breaking up with them?
Good question! I'm a little wary about saying that people have a special duty to love their partners, though I'm okay with the weaker claim (which is all I think my broader view requires) that there's a duty for one's behaviors and dispositions toward one's partner to be consonant with love (i.e., not to go against love), at least as far as one is able to make them.
In the case you've described (of naturally or inevitably falling out of love), I'd say that one need not be morally in the wrong for not immediately breaking up with one's partner. I think that even one who falls out of love can, in an important sense, go on relating to one's partner in a manner consonant with love. For instance, love calls for being honest with the person one loves, which, in turn, would mean that the person who's fallen out of love with her partner should be upfront with her partner that this has happened. The two can then decide on next steps (whether that be trying to rekindle the relationship or departing on hopefully amicable terms).
When I speak of there being a duty to relate to one's partner in a manner consonant with love, I have in mind not so much a duty to always feel a certain emotion toward one's partner, but a duty to embrace actions and action-dispositions (roughly, things like being honest, compassionate, etc.) that are importantly linked with love.
This is less relevant to the points that have been brought up thus far, and if you’ve addressed this at some other point I apologize, but I think there is an argument that monogamy is permissible:
While polyamorous couples are generally happier than monogamous ones, those in the middle of the two extremes, “monogamish” or open relationships or swingers and the like, generally have lower self-reported relationships satisfaction than either of the other groups.
I would speculate that this is something similar to sexual orientation: one with a disposition towards monogamy cannot trivially switch to polyamory, and an attempt to do so, especially out of moral obligation, would likely struggle greatly with the new relationship standards and invite suffering upon themself (jealousy, resentment, FOMO, etc.) and their partner (as experiencing those things makes being a supportive partner more difficult). While I agree that polyamory is a superior form of relationship in many aspects, that does not oblige people who lack the disposition for it to engage in it.
Hi Roko Maria, thanks for the thought. I think it's an interesting question whether people have "relationship orientations" (in a manner similar to sexual orientation). I'm ultimately skeptical, though, that there are relationship orientations in anything like the manner of sexual orientations. One key difference is that which relationship structure one feels drawn to seems much more cognitively mediated than does sexual orientation. Even the reasons you yourself have gestured at for some people's disinclination to non-monogamy ("jealousy, resentment, FOMO, etc.") seem to me to be largely or predominantly a matter of which thoughts people are having (e.g., "Does the fact that my partner is on a date with someone else mean that I'm not enough for him? Is he doing things with his other partner that he won't do with me? If he ends up liking the other more, does that mean I'm undesirable?" Etc.). With sexual orientation, by contrast, there seems to be very little if any cognitive mediation; one experiences it simply as a brute attraction (or lack of attraction) to certain kinds of bodies. To the extent, then, that people can change their thoughts, that should offer much more hope of being able to switch from monogamy to non-monogamy than there is of being able to switch one's sexual orientation.
One thing I would say about the point on prudential reasons: I agree that prudential reasons are a subset of moral reasons, but I don't think that the prudential reasons against friendship-monogamy apply to regular monogamy. Regular monogamy *doesn't* cut off your support network, and in cases where a monogamous person does try to cut off their partner's support network (e.g., if your SO tried to get you to disassociate from your friends), just about everyone recognizes that as bad. Similarly, most monogamous relationships, unlike most cases of friendship-monogamy, don't lead to abuse, and it's not clear that they're any more likely to lead to abuse than polyamory.
Hi Plasma, thanks for the thought. I'd say there's a fair amount we agree on here. I at least agree, for instance, that that monogamy doesn't *completely* cut off one's support network; a person can be in a monogamous relationship but (unlike with friendship-monogamy) still have a robust network of friends. However, it seems to me that monogamy does cut off *a* source of support, namely whatever support one might have received from additional partners if one were non-monogamous. Thus, I'd agree that the prudential considerations against friendship-monogamy don't apply *to as large an extent* to regular monogamy, though I think that they do still apply to some extent.
I guess that depends on whether the people who would potentially become romantic partners if you were non-monogamous end up becoming regular friends when you're monogamous, or just not becoming close acquaintances at all. Under the former scenario, it doesn't really seem like monogamy cuts off any support, though in the latter it does. I think, though, that even if monogamy cuts off some small amount of support, that wouldn't be enough to make it intrinsically wrong or imprudent. Plenty of decisions that you make might lead to you or someone you know having fewer friends, for example, but we don't automatically consider that immoral for reducing people's support networks.
Fair point--when I said that monogamy cuts off "whatever support one might have received from additional partners if one were non-monogamous," that (particularly the "whatever support") was a bit of an overstatement, since, as you've pointed out, there's still the possibility of being friends with the people who might otherwise have been one's additional partners. Looking back, I suppose a better way of formulating my point would have been to say that monogamy cuts off a *kind* of support one might receive from people aside from one's partner, namely whatever kind of support is distinctive to sexual and romantic relationships as opposed to mere friendships. It's admittedly tricky to draw lines precisely when it comes to how these forms of support differ from one another, though I think that one way of gesturing at the potential stakes involved is to imagine (for one who is already in a relationship) that one's partner(s) was/were instead simply friends. I think that many or most people would feel that this would be a significant downgrade, and would perhaps even feel some distress at the thought of it, which suggests that the stakes involved aren't trivial.
> I think, though, that even if monogamy cuts off some small amount of support, that wouldn't be enough to make it intrinsically wrong or imprudent. Plenty of decisions that you make might lead to you or someone you know having fewer friends, for example, but we don't automatically consider that immoral for reducing people's support networks.
Likewise a fair point, particularly when it comes to the (im)prudence. While I'd see the cutting off of the additional kind of support referred to above as a prudential *reason* against monogamy, that's certainly not enough to suggest that monogamy is imprudent on balance. It could be, for all that's been said in this brief exchange, that other considerations tip the scales in favor of monogamy's being prudent (or at least not imprudent) after all. This is a large part of why I wouldn't want to ground my ethical critique of monogamy on considerations of prudence alone (they're at most an adjunct), but instead on considerations of relating to one's partner in a manner that's consonant with love.
"Plenty of decisions that you make might lead to you or someone you know having fewer friends, for example, but we don't automatically consider that immoral for reducing people's support networks."--Yes, that seems right, though I think a key point here is whether the reducing of support networks is simply a more or less accidental byproduct of one's decisions (as in, e.g., if one decides to go on vacation with a friend, which ends up preventing that friend from meeting a new friend they'd otherwise have met), or whether one is restricting another from receiving a certain kind of support in principle (as in monogamy). The latter strikes me as much more open to ethical critique.
It seems to me like your metaethical objection is strong enough to stand alone against Amos' case as he formulated it, but I do still have some thoughts...
I guess, firstly, I'm not sure that it'd *always* be imprudent to engage in friendship-monogamy. If two partners happen to be predisposed to (very psychotherapy-resistant) extreme jealousy, then it really could be a mutually beneficial arrangement for them. Probably, though, in real-world cases, efforts to overcome jealous feelings can be expected to accomplish more good than imposing restrictions on yourself and your partner. Still, this seems like enough to rescue Amos' defense of pro tanto permissibility.
> 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.
Amos is more deontologically inclined than I am, so probably would consider this objection pretty strong, but I'm not a huge fan. Some time ago, I looked into different conceptions of love, and found myself most attracted to views of love as union. When two partners love one another, they begin to integrate consideration for the other's welfare as their own, and together form a 'we' that acts in increasingly-perfect harmony with their mutual interest.
On a consequentialist reading of this, it doesn't seem like disposition is relevant at all outside of action. If my love for partner implies only that I'll act in her interest as if it was my own, all I need to do is the acting like it! If my partner actually does become interested in maintaining an external friendship, I'll reevaluate my stance and act accordingly. Ah, but you write:
> 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.
I think monogamy *is* more counterfactually robust than your example, because your example is a bit of a strawman. Again, in this play-world where two partners are extremely and irrevocably jealous of one another, it would take a very strong external interest for the expected utility of de-monogamizing to become positive for either partner.
The wonderful thing about the union view is that it explains how love can solve coordination problems like this seems to be—monogamy might be better conceived of as an emergent result of certain preferences for exclusivity, not a strictly-followed rule in most relationships. Seemingly, most people who describe themselves as monogamous could imagine a situation in which they opened up their relationship if they found sufficiently great additional partners and were able to keep their jealousies at bay.
I think you have a strong case for most people reflecting on what it would take for them to abandon monogamy (and probably updating strongly toward openness to polyamory), but it seems like calling it morally wrong in general is unwarranted.
Ah, I also want to defend the aesthetics of specialness a little bit:
> 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.
This seems wrong to me! Most people would probably think an original Picasso to be more valuable than any copies, even an expertly-done counterfeit. I think this preference is related directly to aesthetics (and any extra benefits like signaling wealth are downstream of that), and that the value is derived directly from scarcity (read: specialness).
The scarcity bit is easiest to defend—there's really nothing separating an original Picasso from its many imitations than the fact that it's the only one of its kind. Of course, maybe I'm delineating "kind" too arbitrarily—what separates "Guernica-looking thing by Picasso" from "Guernica-looking thing by Shtein"? But that's stupid, we care about intellectual property for a reason. Clearly the artist has a special relationship to his work, even if it's difficult to express exactly what it is.
Why does "value" in the general sense relate to aesthetics? This one is harder for me to justify, but I think the right answer has something to do with revealed preference. If society puts a higher price tag on an original piece of art, it seems like we should assume that the many individuals responsible for creating such high demand have appraised that originality to be aesthetically worthwhile. Maybe this is all a signaling game—but, if so, I'm not sure we have any reason to think of aesthetics as more than a signaling game! Whatever it is that causes people to like a Picasso also causes them to like an original Picasso even more.
Hi Ari, thanks for the very thoughtful and in-depth comment. I'm not sure I'll be able to fully address all the points you made, but I want to at least reply to some of them.
On your first point (about how friendship-monogamy might not *always* be imprudent), I suppose we agree more than it might seem. I certainly wouldn't want to make my moral opposition to friendship-monogamy hinge on any prudential claim. Instead, I'm morally opposed to friendship-monogamy primarily because I think that it goes against love for one's partner. So even if some conceivable cases of friendship-monogamy turn out to be prudent, I'd see that as compatible with my critique. Of course, if we make extreme-enough stipulations about the psychology of the agents in question, such as in your example of extreme, therapy-resistant jealousy, perhaps that could be enough to make a given instance of friendship-monogamy permissible. But then I'd return to your point about how such extreme stipulations make the case arguably disanalogous to real-life cases. (And that, too, aligns well with my broader view, as my broader view is not that monogamy is morally impermissible in every possible case, but simply that it's morally impermissible in normal circumstances.)
A further point about the above is that, to the extent that friendship-monogamy intuitively needs to be justified by something like jealousy in the first place, that suggests that there's something pro tanto bad or regrettable about friendship-monogamy, something that makes it stand in need of justification. I take this to matter for Wollen's argument, since Wollen is trying to show that friendship-monogamy (and, ultimately, regular monogamy) doesn't even require justification in the first place.
> On a consequentialist reading of [the union theory of love], it doesn't seem like disposition is relevant at all outside of action. If my love for partner implies only that I'll act in her interest as if it was my own, all I need to do is the acting like it! If my partner actually does become interested in maintaining an external friendship, I'll reevaluate my stance and act accordingly.
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. (To take the example further, imagine 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.)
> I think monogamy *is* more counterfactually robust than your example, because your example is a bit of a strawman. Again, in this play-world where two partners are extremely and irrevocably jealous of one another, it would take a very strong external interest for the expected utility of de-monogamizing to become positive for either partner.
I'm not sure whom you believe I'm strawmanning; my post was responding to Wollen, and his example had nothing to do with jealousy. The responses I'd offer to this point are otherwise the same as I offered above re: prudence and jealousy.
> This [the point about the painting example] seems wrong to me! Most people would probably think an original Picasso to be more valuable than any copies, even an expertly-done counterfeit. I think this preference is related directly to aesthetics (and any extra benefits like signaling wealth are downstream of that), and that the value is derived directly from scarcity (read: specialness).
Eh, I don't know about that. It seems to me that if we had two original Picassos depicting the same scene, and only a single (expertly done) counterfeit depicting that same scene, either of the two original Picassos would remain more valuable than the counterfeit, even though there are two of the originals and only one counterfeit. I take this to suggest that what's doing the work re: specialness here is not so much scarcity, but something involving having a direct causal relation to a great artist.
Anyway, this comment has gotten quite long, so I should probably pause here. But feel free to follow up on any of these points if you'd like. In any case, thanks again for the enjoyable comment/discussion.
This is in the ballpark of Benjamin Hause's question, but I'll ask it on a separate thread.
It seems to me that the question of whether we should approve or disapprove of monogamy norms should be much more engaged with sociology, history, and evolutionary psychology than this discussion suggests. The classic defenses of property rights that I find plausible--e.g., in Hume--treat them as a kind of social technology for enabling long-term, costly investment. E.g., you want land to be cultivated. That won't happen if, after you've reaped and sowed, anyone can come along and take your harvest. But if people have exclusive rights to the fruits of their land, which will be defended by courts, then society will be much richer, as land will be cultivated, and there will be more food to go around. So if we're thinking about the morality of theft, we should really think about the institution of property, and what value it does or doesn't serve, rather than just directly consulting our intuitions about acts of theft.
Similarly, it seems to me that we should see monogamy norms as a kind of social technology for producing various goods, especially in light of the fact that the historical alternative to monogamy has tended to be polygyny, and there's reason to think that's a kind of default equilibrium in the absence of norms to the contrary. If in the past that involved harems, even today, online dating markets often look de facto polygynous; a few men get lots of dates and don't commit to anyone they date, and most men getting few or no dates, and most women dating some of the highly in demand men. Two of the main advantages of monogamy relative to alternatives:
1. Reducing competition among males: when a few men have lots of partners, and most men have none, you tend to see a lot of conflict and competition, often violent, among men. Polygynous societies historically tend to see a lot of internal conflict and war, perhaps sometimes as a mechanism to remove surplus men. Relatedly, polgynous societies tend to be pretty patriarchal.
2. Investment in children: when children are raised in monogamous pairings, fathers are much more likely to invest in their upbringing. Historically, children in polygynous societies see a lot less paternal investment. Certainly of time, if not resources. What might things look like under contemporary ethical polyamory? Who knows, but my guess is that there will probably be a lot less paternal investment in children than under monogamy.
Obviously there's lots to say here, and I'm just gesturing at complex and contested considerations, but it seems to me that if we're thinking about what our attitude towards the institution of monogamy norms should be, these are the sorts of questions we have to address. We shouldn't treat the question by thinking about couples in isolation, and consulting our intuitions about whether they'd be treating each other fairly by imposing monogamy requirements on each other. Maybe your approach to ethics is deeply intuitionist/deontological?
Hi Daniel, thanks for this well-thought-out comment. I think that the considerations you've gestured at certainly do raise some important challenges to my view. As you've acknowledged, these are complex and contested matters, and, like you, I'll only be able to speak about them briefly here. I'll try, though, to gesture in some directions that are at least somewhat helpful.
> We shouldn't treat the question by thinking about couples in isolation, and consulting our intuitions about whether they'd be treating each other fairly by imposing monogamy requirements on each other.
In a way, I agree: I certainly don't want to suggest that consulting our intuitions about couples in isolation is enough to *complete* the ethical critique of monogamy. Such consultation of intuitions is simply the starting point--the point at which, if I'm correct, we should see that monogamy is pro tanto wrong. Since pro tanto wrongness can be outweighed, the question then becomes whether monogamy has good-making features (e.g., practicality, specialness, jealousy prevention, etc.) that are sufficient to justify monogamy in the end. Confronting monogamy's allegedly good-making features is, in fact, where I think the most interesting and challenging part of the debate is, and is where I spend most of the text in my papers on the subject. As I see it, the points you've brought up (about social stability and investment in children) fit well into this way of looking at the debate, as they are proposed good-making features of monogamy. (The reason why I didn't discuss these or other proposed good-making features of monogamy in my post is simply that my post was responding to Wollen, who argues that monogamy isn't even pro tanto wrong, and that we thus don't need to posit any good-making features of monogamy to rescue it from my anti-monogamy argument in the first place.)
That said, to address something you brought up near the end of your comment, I think it's fair to call my ethics broadly intuitionistic. Perhaps one way this comes up is that, even if non-monogamy does have the kinds of negative externalities (e.g., exacerbating unequal mating patterns) described in your post, I'm doubtful of how much that should move any given couple who's deciding whether to be monogamous. To me, that non-monogamy seems more consonant with love for my partner intuitively carries a good deal more moral weight than does the fact (if it is one) that our being non-monogamous would make a teensy contribution to the negative externalities to which you've referred.
While the above is a somewhat concessive response, I think that there's room to supplement it with a less concessive response, namely one which challenges whether an increase in non-monogamy would in fact exacerbate the relevant social harms. However much non-monogamy might have taken the form of polygyny in our species' past, there's reason to doubt that that would be true to the same extent in current developed countries. With the much greater economic and social power of women compared to before, there's less of a sense of "I must find a rich, high-status husband and become part of his harem to ensure my survival and the survival of my children." Likewise plausibly making a difference here would be increased egalitarianism in gender norms (e.g., less slut-shaming for women, such that women need not have as much fear of reduced social status from having multiple male partners). And I'd add that, when it comes to children raised in contemporary polyamorous families, Elisabeth Sheff's work (see her book *The Polyamorists Next Door*) suggests that such children actually do quite well.
Your point about de facto polygyny in online dating is an interesting one, though it's not clear to me whether that's in part because the interface of much online dating encourages a quick, looks-based evaluation, and is also largely geared toward casual relationships and hookups. It'd be interesting to see whether the same patterns hold when examining serious, long-term relationships. (This is an area that I admit I need to look into more myself.)
To the extent that non-monogamy still does contribute to polygyny and its associated social harms (e.g., violence from sexless young men), there could be ways of addressing such harms apart from monogamy. For instance, when it comes to the risk of incel violence, having increasingly technologically sophisticated and immersive video games and pornography plausibly helps. Legalizing prostitution would also be an imporant help here.
A final point one might raise is that, if our species seems to have a certain difficulty with doing non-monogamy well, the same seems to hold true for monogamy, particularly when we examine rates of cheating and divorce. When we consider the tensions that monogamy introduces or exacerbates for many people, it's not obvious to me that those alleged to be introduced or exacerbated by non-monogamy would be any worse on balance.
Anyway, those are, again, just a few broad directions a response might go; I hope to explore these issues more fully in future writing. In the meantime, thanks again for your comment, and please feel free to follow up on any of these points if you'd like.
Interesting discourse! How does your argument interface with the empirical evidence? It sounds like ultimately you're saying monogamy is wrong insofar as it deprives people of various welfare goods. But that almost sounds like an empirical claim. Does this mean that if there were evidence that people were happier in monogamous relationships, it would undermine your view? (In that case, non-monogamy would deprive people of well-being, on average.)
Hi Ben, thanks for the question. While I certainly wouldn't say that empirical considerations fail to bear on the argument at all (e.g., the argument relies on the observation that sexual and romantic relationships at least tend to enrich people's lives), I think that there's also an important sense in which the argument isn't as readily subject to purely empirical objections as one might think. For instance, when it comes to your tentative framing of the argument--"monogamy is wrong insofar as it deprives people of various welfare goods"--I actually wouldn't put it this way. I think that monogamy would be wrong even if (just to give a concrete example) a particular couple were the last people on earth. In such a case, being monogamous would, ex hypothesi, not deprive them of any welfare goods (in the form of or stemming from additional relationships) that they might have experienced if they were non-monogamous. Yet being monogamous would still be wrong for them, in my view, because it would involve dispositions that go against love for one another; that is, each partner would still be such that *if* the other encountered someone that she was interested in starting a relationship with, he (the existing partner) would not support it (which seems to me to be inconsonant with love).
(Of course, one might wonder why a couple would even bother with committing themselves to monogamy if they were the last people on earth. But maybe we can bracket this out by imagining that they don't know that they're the last people on earth.)
> Does this mean that if there were evidence that people were happier in monogamous relationships, it would undermine your view?
I think that evidence to that effect *could* undermine my view (e.g., the appeals to jealousy and practicality are, in a crucial way, arguments that for at least some people, a monogamous relationship will be a happier one). However, there are a few factors that I think would heavily bear on how probative such evidence would be. For instance, if it turned out that people were generally happier in monogamous relationships, but that this was simply because people *mistakenly* thought that monogamous relationships were valuable in a certain way (e.g., carrying a sense of "specialness" that [let's say] doesn't stand up to philosophical scrutiny), then the greater happiness wouldn't seem robust enough, or to be sufficiently a matter of anything intrinsic to monogamy, to be all that much a point in monogamy's favor. Likewise if people in general have (at least up to now) turned out to be happier in monogamous relationships simply because, say, it fits with what their friends are doing and they like conforming, or because non-monogamy is still in certain ways stigmatized, or because non-monogamy hasn't yet had time to build up the same level of shared scripts, cultural permeation, etc. that monogamy has. To the extent that greater happiness in monogamy were a matter of relatively shallow or contingent features like these, I'd see that as greatly reducing its moral import. But to the extent that people are generally happier in monogamy because of features that monogamy's defenders would argue are more deeply a part of monogamy, like practicality and preventing jealousy, that would be much more a point in monogamy's favor (which is why those are the kinds of objections I tend to put the most effort into engaging with).
Not everything is philosophical. Some things just Are.
Humans trend towards monogamy because human reproduction is incredibly resource-intensive. We see this across the animal kingdom. The more resources it takes to make offspring, the more likely a species is to trend towards monogamy.
It’s amoral. It’s just one element of our evolutionary development. For thousands of years, the children of monogamous parents had a measurable advantage at surviving to then reproduce.
Now, deviating from that biological norm is *also* amoral. It’s not some ethical edict, just “what we’re prone to, because inherited instincts passed it on”. But we aren’t machines. We have higher reasoning, we get to make choices.
So honey, I know I agreed with you on having new friends, but these people really smell! They sure resemble street people. The kids are terrified and even the dog- you know, the gross one always lucking his balls- makes himself scarce.
I also wasn't too fond of that guy who was always leering at our 15 yr old girl and making lurid suggestions to her. Sure, I know, he's your friend, settle down...
Ok, just one more thing to bring up. You know the cash I usually keep in my top drawer? Yeah, that cash. It's gone, not spent, just gone. I'm wondering if that couple you befriended- yeah, the strung-out looking ones- I wondered if they took it. Along with my welder, motorcycle and pistol. No No No, I'm just wondering, not accusing.
Now just settle down. I'm sorry, I take it all back. Bring your friends by anytime. I just read a substack referencing the sanctity of friendship and how it can never be questioned. I think I have that right- it's not easy to tell, as the author and many of the comment section twisted themselves in knots trying to explain it all.
Anyhow, I've asked a couple of old girl friends to come by for a nooner. Do you think you could grab the kids and make yourselves scarce for a few hours? That is, unless you want to watch......
> if not, then monogamy ends up being like the restriction on having additional friends, a restriction that many or most would find immoral
I don't have a moral intuition that this would be immoral. If anything I have a weak moral intuition that assuming _no_ restrictions on making additional friends is immoral.
> 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.
I'll have to side with Amos on this one. As I keep saying when things like these come up, life is weird and varied, and a life well lived most likely includes a certain amount of experimentation and brushing against the edges of acceptability or morality. Much of life is an interplay between the demands of wider groups vs your individual (or smaller group) desires and interests, and mature cultures worldwide usually have some understanding and toleration of this kind of exploration.
Then, people are are also varied at the individual level, and there's a long tail of people with uncommon tastes. By default I'd say it's a good thing that they can find each other and do their thing together. The clubbers with the clubbers, the meditators with the meditators, the thespians with the thespians... what do I know, some people even go for corporate jobs.
So if two people can get together in Amos' ideal case and decide to explore being each other's only friend, weird and insane as it may sound, I'll refrain from judging them. As long as no coercion is involved, for all I care they can well decide to spend every available moment gazing into the other's eyes — who knows, maybe some amazing writing or art could come out of the experience!
And I don't think that essentialist arguments of "sin against love", or careful appeals to the precautionary principle, can properly counter that.
To go wider: if I understand correctly your general argument goes:
1. Friendships and romantic relationships are sufficiently alike that intuitions on one should transfer to the other
2. Restricting one partner's friendships seems wrong
3. Therefore restricting one partner's romantic prospects also seems wrong.
While I agree with Amos' basic skepticism on #2, I also find claim #1 very interesting to explore, and I don't see many comments going into that one. IMO to go for the core of #1, it's not so much a question of individual rights and wrongs, but a question of human ethology.
We're a social species with strong pair bonding, these are two core aspects of our nature, long before culture and personal choice sets in. So the question of whether friendship deprivation functions similarly to romantic deprivation is a relatively contingent, empirical one. If our evolutionary lineage on the way to technological domination of the planet had been slightly different, our answer could be quite different too.
We can get a decent idea of the boundaries of these two types of deprivations by looking at circumstances where they actually are applied. We see that romantic restrictions are ubiquitous and often entered willingly; our prototypical mating pattern is medium-term exclusive pair bonding, and our evolutionary line gave us the tendency to fall in love, which makes us (typically) enjoy that. Not so surpisingly, this is expressed in most cultures, and when Western liberal culture decides to free up people from traditional constraints, serial imperfect monogamy is still the biggest model that emerges. We also find other, unrelated contexts where people accept sexual/romantic deprivation: from historically important and stable institutions like monasticism, to the fact that many cultures (try to) impose sexual abstinence on young adults ("bachelors").
OTOH, depriving people of socialization and friendship is extremely rare. Even in traditional, patriarchal cultures that don't allow cross-sex friendships, and put lots of restrictions on women, they usually still have ways to have other women as friends. And when they don't, it's seen as inhuman. In the modern world, as far as I can tell, you only find restrictions on socialization in such extreme situations as solitary confinement (a punishment seen as so terrible that it's mostly given to protect others from the individual), and emergency situations like temporary restrictions on hospital visits at the height of the COVID pandemic.
So without going further, at a glance it doesn't seem to me like intuitions about friendship limitations should transfer as-is to romantic limitations, because those are two quite distinct elements of our repertoire, and they seem to function quite differently too.
Hi Skaladom, thanks for the well-thought-out comment. You've brought up a fairly novel way of putting pressure on the argument, which is something I always appreciate. Here are a few thoughts in response:
> By default I'd say it's a good thing that they can find each other and do their thing together. The clubbers with the clubbers, the meditators with the meditators, the thespians with the thespians... what do I know, some people even go for corporate jobs.
I agree that it's a good thing that such people "can find each other and do their thing together." But that's because none of those examples seem to me to involve restrictions that go against love for one's partner(s). The challenge for your view, as I see it, is to find a case of restrictions that go against love, but intuitively don't seem immoral (a case apart from monogamous restrictions, since that's the issue we're differing on). If you can find such a case, then I agree that that would indeed do a good deal to undermine my argument.
Here's a case to help illustrate what I mean. Suppose that two partners regularly insult each other, saying things that are outright gratuitously nasty (and where this isn't simply playful banter, but expressing real hostility). Unless there's some sufficiently important compensating benefit they derive from this practice (which we can, without any need for great imagination, stipulate that there's not), their practice of nastily insulting one another strikes me as immoral. And a plausible explanation of why it's immoral is that such a practice goes against love for one another--this despite the fact that both partners, in continuing to be in a relationship where they know they'll go on receiving such treatment, arguably (at least tacitly) consent to it.
> As long as no coercion is involved, for all I care they can well decide to spend every available moment gazing into the other's eyes — who knows, maybe some amazing writing or art could come out of the experience!
To me, this very framing (particularly the last clause) suggests that you're thinking of all this in terms of good-making features that might justify such a restriction. If that's the thought, then I agree that even a restriction that might seem to go against love at first glance can, if it turns out to have sufficiently important good-making features, be justified in the end. In the case of monogamy, then, I'm happy to concede that if monogamy were to have sufficiently important good-making features, monogamous restrictions would be justified. I simply don't think that monogamy does have sufficiently important good-making features to justify its restrictions.
When it comes to formulating my argument (re: your second comment), I'd frame it a little differently. In particular, I'd go with something like the following:
1. Restricting one's partner's friendships seems wrong.
2. The *reason* why restricting one's partner's friendships seems wrong--i.e., that given the goodness of friendship, restricting one's partner from additional friendships, unless there are sufficiently important good-making features at stake, goes against love--applies in a parallel way to monogamous restrictions (i.e., given the goodness of sexual and romantic relationships, restricting one's partner from having more of them, unless there are sufficiently important good-making features at stake, goes against love).
3. Therefore, monogamous restrictions, unless they have sufficiently important good-making features, are wrong.
I acknowledge, of course, that friendships and romantic relationships need not be the same in all ways. However, the two seem to me to be similar enough in the *relevant* ways for the argument to go through.
That said, I agree with what I take to be the spirit of much of your second comment, namely that friendship restrictions are more extreme and are morally worse than monogamous restrictions. But I think that my argument still suggests that, unless sufficiently important good-making features are provided, monogamous restrictions are still wrong (just not *as* wrong as friendship restrictions).
A few final points: First, even if I conceded the point that monogamous restrictions are not outright morally wrong, it would still seem to me that non-monogamous relationships, in virtue of being more consonant with love, are morally *better* than monogamous ones. That going against love for one's partner has *some* moral disvalue, even if it's not sufficient for wrongness, seems to me hard to deny; if you indeed deny this, then I'd say that we have a more or less bedrock clash of intuitions.
Lastly, surely almost all people in relationships in fact want to conduct them in a manner that's consonant with love for their partner. And so, even if I conceded all your points when it comes to morality, I think that we'd still have the result that holding one's partner to monogamous restrictions is practically irrational for almost all people (given its inconsonance with love). This seems to me like a conclusion that defenders of monogamy probably wouldn't be comfortable with.
Anyway, those are some of my main thoughts at the moment, but please feel free to respond if there are any points you want to follow up on. And, in any case, thanks again for the thought-provoking comment.
> The challenge for your view, as I see it, is to find a case of restrictions that go against love, but intuitively don't seem immoral
Challenge accepted! We haven't really discussed exactly what you mean by "going against love", but from the way you're using the phrase, it seems to me that any assertion of boundaries that impinges on your partner's will, freedom or identity would count. If that's what you mean, then there are many examples: "I love this guy/girl, but I can't live with a smoker / an atheist / a vegan / a hunter / a gamer / a squanderer / etc."
If not, then please clarify the contours of your idea of love, to see what it means to go against it.
In my other comment I tried to hint towards the biological origins of love, as a first step towards understanding what it calls for, but that would probably be a long discussion to bring to full fruition. At the very least we'd have to go from the ethology up to the psychology of human love, and probably into some game theory too, to be able to properly look at its normative aspects.
EDIT: To clarify, my approach here is that "all abstractions are leaky", so I don't think it makes much sense to talk about the demands of love in some abstract or ideal way, without going into the nitty gritty of how it actually works for us humans.
> Challenge accepted! We haven't really discussed exactly what you mean by "going against love", but from the way you're using the phrase, it seems to me that any assertion of boundaries that impinges on your partner's will, freedom or identity would count. If that's what you mean, then there are many examples: "I love this guy/girl, but I can't live with a smoker / an atheist / a vegan / a hunter / a gamer / a squanderer / etc." If not, then please clarify the contours of your idea of love, to see what it means to go against it.
Sure, I'd be happy to clarify here. As an initial point, I'd reject the claim that "any assertion of boundaries that impinges on your partner's will, freedom or identity would count [as going against love]." If that were the claim I was relying on, then I agree the claim would be way too strong, and there'd be legions of counterexamples to my argument (such as some of the ones you've gestured at).
What I *would* claim is that, the more a given boundary impinges on your partner's freedom, and the more the restricted behavior seems as if it would (or at least plausibly could) further your partner's well-being, the more justification that boundary is going to require; to the extent that it lacks such justification, the boundary is going to be inconsonant with love for your partner, and will in that way be immoral.
I make this claim because it seems to me that love involves having a favorable disposition toward your loved one's freedom and well-being. That is, love calls for not restricting your loved one's activities--especially when they're activities that would plausibly further your loved one's well-being--unless there's a good reason for so restricting them. If there is a sufficient reason for restricting them in a given case, then it seems to me that the restriction does not ultimately go against love for one's partner.
Thus, in the case of monogamous restrictions, the whole moral issue seems to me to turn on whether monogamous restrictions have a sufficiently weighty justification. If (as I think) they lack such a justification, then they are to that extent inconsonant with love for one's partner, and thereby immoral.
Thanks for the reply! I was getting ready to sketch arguments showing that at least some kinds of mutual restrictions or boundaries are acceptable and probably inevitable in a relationship, but you don't deny that, so we're on the same page globally. And *some* difference has to be drawn somewhere, if we want to distinguish abusive restrictions from sane ones. I don't share the intuition that monogamy falls on the bad side of the line, but I'm happy to leave the discussion here.
Pardon me for inserting myself in this discussion out of the blue, but I wanted to share a few thoughts on the matter. It occurred to me that there have been other instances where certain practices and dynamics have been regarded, prima facie, as opposite to a proper disposition to love, and a noteworthy response to this is that what is consistent with love can be mediated or complicated by the perceptions of the loved party.
Let's bring in the practices, rituals and dynamics englobed within BDSM (Bondage, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and Masochism):
It has been contended that practices like using physical force against a partner contradict the love precept of caring for the well-being of a person. After all, impact play not only implies eliciting physical pain but often leads to noticeable (even if mild) physical damage (like bruising). Conversely, it could be said that asking a partner to inflict physical force upon us is concerning too, since we would be asking our partner to act in a manner contrary to love.
Something similar can be argued for humiliation plays and control dynamics, where we deliberately say harmful or insulting things to our partner, put them in humiliating situations and order them around. Why would be partake in this?
Well, the response would be that not only the other party is consenting to this, but that they find those practices and dynamics desirable themselves because of the “paradoxical” positive feelings they produce or highlight. And insofar as this is true, then those practices seem more consonant with love.
There is evidence that pain can elicit the release of endorphins (the “pleasure hormone”) and accentuate subsequent subjective sensations of pleasure. For humiliation and control games or scenes, it’s mentioned that such situations put you in a deeply vulnerable position, and vulnerability can be exhilarating or appealing because of how intense it can feel. Pushing your limits can feel good. And conversely, it feels good to be “in charge” or have someone willingly assume a vulnerable position at your hand.
Now, why don't simply experience pleasure without the pain or look for other less extreme experiences of vulnerability? It could be that for both parties, the pleasure without the pain and the less extreme vulnerability wouldn't be exactly the same. Then, it seems that these practices and dynamics suggest something interesting: that negative affects and experiences (which include things like being restricted) can uniquely elicit or intensify positive ones.
Now, more relevant to this discussion: what changes for BDSM dynamics and scenes is not necessarily the acts in themselves but how the partner responds to them. Abusive partners historically have claimed that they hit their partner “out of love,” and in many cases, the victims could agree due to abuse internalization. We will quickly contest that regardless of whether they think that they are acting in “accordance to love,” inflicting pain and damage is wrong, especially to a loved one. Yet, from a BDSM-informed ethical framework, it strikes me that what is wrong with the abusive condition isn't inflicting or eliciting something negative on the other person per se (even when consented), but that the other person didn't find that pain or damage in any way desirable and pleasurable on its own.
Another important point is that not all people merely indulge in these acts occasionally or by happenstance. Some kinksters deliberately seek partnerships that contain these practices and dynamics and sometimes organize their relationship and sexuality around them such that they would avoid or terminate a relationship that doesn't involve these practices or dynamics (anymore). This is especially the case with 24/7 or Total Power Exchange dynamics where the BDSM element structure is a critical part of the relationship.
Now, by ending my exposition here I will admit that it surely would look half-baked, and probably it wouldn't be as obvious how all this relates to monogamy, but it would be impolite to leave even a lengthier comment unprompted—since for that matter, I would probably need to compose an entire article.
Hi Bataille's Idol, thanks for sharing your thoughts. The BDSM comparison is an interesting one. I can see how there's a need for my view to be careful here, as it might seem that the principle about acting in a manner consonant with love for one's partner risks condemning all BDSM (on the grounds that BDSM, in involving the infliction of pain, etc., isn't consonant with love for one's partner). And, while your comment doesn't put it quite this way, what I take to be the spirit of at least part of your comment is that such an implication would be unduly conservative and implausible. If that's indeed the thought, then I agree with that assessment. The anti-monogamy view, then, needs to have something to say about why BDSM is okay while monogamy isn't.
I think that the crucial feature here is something your comment nicely goes into, namely that for those who practice it, BDSM has sufficiently important good-making features, good-making features that couldn't feasibly be had in other ways (e.g., a certain kind or intensity of pleasure resulting from vulnerability). And so, as long as such practices remain consensual, there appears to be no inconsonance with love there in the end.
With monogamy, by contrast, it seems to me that there are no sufficiently important good-making features to justify the restrictions at issue. (If I'm mistaken about this, then monogamy is consonant with love after all, and is morally justified--or, at least, if there is something wrong with monogamy, it'd have to lie elsewhere than in the argument I've given.)
Anyway, if I understand your view correctly, it seems to me that the above take on BDSM is more or less in agreement with what you've suggested (particularly the part where you helpfully note, "[F]rom a BDSM-informed ethical framework, it strikes me that what is wrong with the abusive condition isn't inflicting or eliciting something negative on the other person per se (even when consented), but that the other person didn't find that pain or damage in any way desirable and pleasurable on its own"). But let me know if I've misunderstood some aspect of your view.
I agree with most of this post. But this is an interesting line:
> 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.
Part of what a right is, in my view, is that it's always morally permissible to exercise it. This line, along with your comments about how prudential factors affect morality, make me think that you're working with a slightly different conception of "morally permissible".
Here, the phrase "right thing to do" seems to have a more positive conception to it: "do this, and everyone will be better off". It's the right thing to do in the sense that selecting Pareto-optimal choices is the right thing to do. It doesn't seem to have a negative conception to it, the same way it does when we say "the right thong to do is not to to steal or kill or abuse people". In that case, we seem to be actively branding people who fail to follow through with a kind of resolute unacceptability, a mark of sin that degrades their moral character and renders them blameworthy and open to criticism.
That is, the way I see it, you seem to be arguing that monogamy is not the right thing to do the same way I'd tell a student that playing video games every day instead of studying is not the right thing to do. It shows a neglect for their well-being, reflects poorly on their moral character (in the same way that the predisposition to extreme jealousy Ari Shtein brings up might reflect poorly on someone), and is overall a Bad Idea. But it doesn't make them a Bad Person or indicate that eg. we have a duty to intervene and stop the behavior whenever we see it, the way we would if we saw someone stealing or killing. (There are extreme utilitarians who insist that everyone who doesn't pick the most prudent option is a Bad Person, but I assume you aren't one of them.)
Have I gotten your position right?
Hi Jessie, thanks for the question. Of the two senses of "right thing to do" that you've described in your final paragraph, I'd say that the sense I have in mind is indeed closer to the first. That is, while I think that being monogamous isn't the right thing to do, I don't think that being monogamous is enough to make someone a bad person (as that kind of label would need to be based on a more comprehensive evaluation of a person's actions and qualities). I also don't think that "we have a duty to intervene and stop the behavior whenever we see it, the way we would if we saw someone stealing or killing" (whatever such a duty would mean in practice, when it came to monogamy). At the same time, I see the sense in which monogamy is not the "right thing to do" as perhaps a bit more serious than the one involved in your example of the student who plays video games every day instead of studying. In that example, the badness seems primarily prudential (though I suppose this could depend on how we fill out the details of the case), but with monogamy, the badness, as I see it, is primarily a matter of how one is relating to someone else, namely one's partner (someone to whom one might think that there are special duties to relate to in a manner consonant with love); this plausibly lends a greater seriousness to the moral issues involved in monogamy.
In the end, then, I'm not sure whether the sense of "right thing to do" that I have in mind fits neatly within either of the senses you've described. But I can say a bit about one area where our approaches differ, namely when it comes to what it is to have a right to do something. You write, "Part of what a right is, in my view, is that it's always morally permissible to exercise it." On the way I prefer to use the term "right," a right is something that one ought not to be coercively prevented from doing. On this conception, a person could have the right to do something even if doing that thing is morally impermissible. For example, I could say something needlessly rude to someone else; while doing so would be immoral, arguably I shouldn't be coercively prevented from doing so, as the (moral) right to freedom of speech includes the right to say (at least certain) things that are bad.
Anyway, I'm not sure to what extent all that helps answer your question, but I hope it does at least somewhat. If there are any points you'd like to follow up on, please of course feel free.
This is very helpful, thank you!
One question: you say that people have a special duty to love their partners. By this I presume you mean moral duty. Is this true? If I fall out of love with my partner (due to no fault of either of us, just naturally growing apart, or perhaps something like suddenly realizing I'm gay), am I morally in the wrong for not immediately breaking up with them?
Good question! I'm a little wary about saying that people have a special duty to love their partners, though I'm okay with the weaker claim (which is all I think my broader view requires) that there's a duty for one's behaviors and dispositions toward one's partner to be consonant with love (i.e., not to go against love), at least as far as one is able to make them.
In the case you've described (of naturally or inevitably falling out of love), I'd say that one need not be morally in the wrong for not immediately breaking up with one's partner. I think that even one who falls out of love can, in an important sense, go on relating to one's partner in a manner consonant with love. For instance, love calls for being honest with the person one loves, which, in turn, would mean that the person who's fallen out of love with her partner should be upfront with her partner that this has happened. The two can then decide on next steps (whether that be trying to rekindle the relationship or departing on hopefully amicable terms).
When I speak of there being a duty to relate to one's partner in a manner consonant with love, I have in mind not so much a duty to always feel a certain emotion toward one's partner, but a duty to embrace actions and action-dispositions (roughly, things like being honest, compassionate, etc.) that are importantly linked with love.
And, of course, wanting to deny them happiness in the counterfactual world where they would gain it with a new partner is not consonant.
Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed reply. You’ve convinced me, actually!
This is less relevant to the points that have been brought up thus far, and if you’ve addressed this at some other point I apologize, but I think there is an argument that monogamy is permissible:
While polyamorous couples are generally happier than monogamous ones, those in the middle of the two extremes, “monogamish” or open relationships or swingers and the like, generally have lower self-reported relationships satisfaction than either of the other groups.
I would speculate that this is something similar to sexual orientation: one with a disposition towards monogamy cannot trivially switch to polyamory, and an attempt to do so, especially out of moral obligation, would likely struggle greatly with the new relationship standards and invite suffering upon themself (jealousy, resentment, FOMO, etc.) and their partner (as experiencing those things makes being a supportive partner more difficult). While I agree that polyamory is a superior form of relationship in many aspects, that does not oblige people who lack the disposition for it to engage in it.
Hi Roko Maria, thanks for the thought. I think it's an interesting question whether people have "relationship orientations" (in a manner similar to sexual orientation). I'm ultimately skeptical, though, that there are relationship orientations in anything like the manner of sexual orientations. One key difference is that which relationship structure one feels drawn to seems much more cognitively mediated than does sexual orientation. Even the reasons you yourself have gestured at for some people's disinclination to non-monogamy ("jealousy, resentment, FOMO, etc.") seem to me to be largely or predominantly a matter of which thoughts people are having (e.g., "Does the fact that my partner is on a date with someone else mean that I'm not enough for him? Is he doing things with his other partner that he won't do with me? If he ends up liking the other more, does that mean I'm undesirable?" Etc.). With sexual orientation, by contrast, there seems to be very little if any cognitive mediation; one experiences it simply as a brute attraction (or lack of attraction) to certain kinds of bodies. To the extent, then, that people can change their thoughts, that should offer much more hope of being able to switch from monogamy to non-monogamy than there is of being able to switch one's sexual orientation.
One thing I would say about the point on prudential reasons: I agree that prudential reasons are a subset of moral reasons, but I don't think that the prudential reasons against friendship-monogamy apply to regular monogamy. Regular monogamy *doesn't* cut off your support network, and in cases where a monogamous person does try to cut off their partner's support network (e.g., if your SO tried to get you to disassociate from your friends), just about everyone recognizes that as bad. Similarly, most monogamous relationships, unlike most cases of friendship-monogamy, don't lead to abuse, and it's not clear that they're any more likely to lead to abuse than polyamory.
Hi Plasma, thanks for the thought. I'd say there's a fair amount we agree on here. I at least agree, for instance, that that monogamy doesn't *completely* cut off one's support network; a person can be in a monogamous relationship but (unlike with friendship-monogamy) still have a robust network of friends. However, it seems to me that monogamy does cut off *a* source of support, namely whatever support one might have received from additional partners if one were non-monogamous. Thus, I'd agree that the prudential considerations against friendship-monogamy don't apply *to as large an extent* to regular monogamy, though I think that they do still apply to some extent.
I guess that depends on whether the people who would potentially become romantic partners if you were non-monogamous end up becoming regular friends when you're monogamous, or just not becoming close acquaintances at all. Under the former scenario, it doesn't really seem like monogamy cuts off any support, though in the latter it does. I think, though, that even if monogamy cuts off some small amount of support, that wouldn't be enough to make it intrinsically wrong or imprudent. Plenty of decisions that you make might lead to you or someone you know having fewer friends, for example, but we don't automatically consider that immoral for reducing people's support networks.
Fair point--when I said that monogamy cuts off "whatever support one might have received from additional partners if one were non-monogamous," that (particularly the "whatever support") was a bit of an overstatement, since, as you've pointed out, there's still the possibility of being friends with the people who might otherwise have been one's additional partners. Looking back, I suppose a better way of formulating my point would have been to say that monogamy cuts off a *kind* of support one might receive from people aside from one's partner, namely whatever kind of support is distinctive to sexual and romantic relationships as opposed to mere friendships. It's admittedly tricky to draw lines precisely when it comes to how these forms of support differ from one another, though I think that one way of gesturing at the potential stakes involved is to imagine (for one who is already in a relationship) that one's partner(s) was/were instead simply friends. I think that many or most people would feel that this would be a significant downgrade, and would perhaps even feel some distress at the thought of it, which suggests that the stakes involved aren't trivial.
> I think, though, that even if monogamy cuts off some small amount of support, that wouldn't be enough to make it intrinsically wrong or imprudent. Plenty of decisions that you make might lead to you or someone you know having fewer friends, for example, but we don't automatically consider that immoral for reducing people's support networks.
Likewise a fair point, particularly when it comes to the (im)prudence. While I'd see the cutting off of the additional kind of support referred to above as a prudential *reason* against monogamy, that's certainly not enough to suggest that monogamy is imprudent on balance. It could be, for all that's been said in this brief exchange, that other considerations tip the scales in favor of monogamy's being prudent (or at least not imprudent) after all. This is a large part of why I wouldn't want to ground my ethical critique of monogamy on considerations of prudence alone (they're at most an adjunct), but instead on considerations of relating to one's partner in a manner that's consonant with love.
"Plenty of decisions that you make might lead to you or someone you know having fewer friends, for example, but we don't automatically consider that immoral for reducing people's support networks."--Yes, that seems right, though I think a key point here is whether the reducing of support networks is simply a more or less accidental byproduct of one's decisions (as in, e.g., if one decides to go on vacation with a friend, which ends up preventing that friend from meeting a new friend they'd otherwise have met), or whether one is restricting another from receiving a certain kind of support in principle (as in monogamy). The latter strikes me as much more open to ethical critique.