Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Marriage as a natural kind

Thesis: Marriage as a natural kind of relationships is a better theory than marriage as an institution defined by socially instituted rights and responsibilities.

Argument 1: On the institution view, we have to say that people in most other cultures aren't married since they don't have the same socially instituted rights and responsibilities. That's bad, since they say they're married when they learn English. The natural kind view holds, instead, that people in different cultures are referring to the same kind of relationship, but may get wrong what is and is not a part of the relationship.

We do not automatically accept educational credentials from other cultures. Thus, being medically educated in France does not automatically make one count as medically educated in the U.S. And being medically educated in 5th century France would make one not one whit medically educated in 21st century France (imagine a 5th century doctor who travels in time). In other words, being medically educated is always indexed to a set of standards. But we don't think of marriage in this way, with a few notable exceptions, such as polygamy or same-sex marriage. Getting married in India is sufficient for being married in France. Why? If one thinks of getting married as assenting to a set of rights and responsibilities, then getting married in India shouldn't be sufficient for being married in France, or vice versa.

Argument 2: The natural kind view explains how we can individually and as a society discover new rights and responsibilities involved in marriage. The institution view leads either to constant abolishment of the old institution and replacement with a new one, or to a stale conservatism. We learn about the rights and responsibilities of marriage experientially and not just a priori or by poring over legal tomes. That is how it is with a natural kind like water.

Argument 3: Suppose we see someone from a patriarchal culture who is failing to care for his sick wife (or at least someone he calls a wife). We might well say: "It's your duty as a husband to take care of her." On the institution view, he can respond: "No, it isn't. It would be my duty to take care of her if I were her husband-per-American-rules, but I am her husband-per-Patriland-rules, and in Patriland wives take care of their husbands and husbands do not need to take care of their wives." But on the natural kind view, we can say: "You tried to marry her, and marriage does require taking care of a sick spouse, regardless of who is of what sex. So either you succeeded at marrying, in which case you have this responsibility, or you failed at marrying, in which case you don't have the rights you thought you gained." On the institution view all we can say is: "You're in a corrupt and sexist institution, and you should divorce to stop supporting it. By the way, you're right that you have no role duty to take care of her."

Argument 4a (for conservatives): If you take the institution view, you play into Wedgwood's argument for same-sex "marriage".

Argument 4b (for liberals): If you take the institution view, you cannot advocate same-sex marriage, but only same-sex "marriage". You have to adopt the very revisionery position that marriage should be abolished, albeit replaced with something very much like it, namely marriage*, since marriage is defined by the social understanding, and that has included opposition of sexes. Moreover, such a view leads to unhappy consequences. Once we have replaced marriage with marriage*, we can't say that our grandparents are married*, only that they are married, and since marriage* is the only relationship available after the revision, you can't do what your grandparents did. Moreover, even allowing our grandparents to stay married is problematic if marriage is an unjust institution. So probably the state needs to dissolve their marriage, leaving it up to them whether to marry*. This is a politically untenable and unhappy view. A much better view is that marriage is a natural kind, and we were simply wrong in thinking marriage is only for people of the opposite sex. This (and Argument 3, too) is a species of the general point that relativistic theses run the danger of leading to stale conservatism.

13 comments:

Craig said...

I wonder if you would also want to say that friendships or enemy relationships are natural kinds.

Craig said...

Consider the relationship of "fellow co-worker on a small fishing boat." It seems plausible to me that fishermen from Costa Rica to Thailand can refer to the same kind of relationship, that we can individually and collectively discover new rights and responsibilities of such relationships, and that the mistreatment of a co-worker in Thailand can be straightforwardly identified as such by the Costa Rican.

As I see it, these facts simply suggest that the relationship of fellow co-worker on a small fishing boat fixes a certain set of shared circumstances and that these circumstances then explain the particular set of norms that are more or less universally associated with the relationship. So the work is done by the universality of moral norms and the shared descriptive circumstances fixed by the relationship in question.

Alexander R Pruss said...

I am inclined to think there is a natural relationship of fellow co-worker, which can be further specified to fellow co-worker on a small fishing boat.

I think friendship is a natural kind. I don't think enemy relationship is.

Dagmara Lizlovs said...

"Argument 1: On the institution view, we have to say that people in most other cultures aren't married since they don't have the same socially instituted rights and responsibilities. That's bad, since they say they're married when they learn English. The natural kind view holds, instead, that people in different cultures are referring to the same kind of relationship, but may get wrong what is and is not a part of the relationship.We do not automatically accept educational credentials from other cultures." I recall that there was an issue of formally recognizing Hindu, Muslim and Parsi marriages for Indians living in South Africa prior to the First World War when Jan Smuts was the premier and Mahatma Gandhi was a barrister battling discrimination in South Africa. Can anyone provide more details?

Dan Lower said...

Do you think a friendly rivalry (say, a non-vitriolic rivalry between different high-school football coaches) is a natural kind? Or would you classify that as a type of friendship or co-workership?

Heath White said...

I wonder if this kind of argument couldn’t be gotten around by the use of descriptions. Compare: the moral relativist says that it is right to do whatever your culture thinks it is right to do. Problem: then there is no universal definition of “right to do”; it is always changing within a culture; when you do right it’s not what your grandparents did right, etc. But really, the moral relativist has offered a universal criterion for rightness; it’s just a criterion that depends on what your culture thinks.

I think most people endorse something similar for “responsible citizen.” You are a responsible citizen if (roughly) you follow the laws of your society, whatever they happen to be. That changes all the time; it will be different across different cultures; we can morally critique laws but not say that one has a legal duty to be a good person; there might be puzzles about whether responsible Soviet citizens have the right attitudes to be responsible American citizens; and so on.

Similar points could be made about etiquette. Every time and culture has a standard of ‘polite’ and ‘rude’, but the contents of the standards vary considerably.

Now could the marriage social-institutionalist say something analogous. Two people are married iff they accept and uphold the rights and responsibilities of marriage as their society defines it. The content of these rights and responsibilities will vary across times and cultures, but there is an overarching unity just in the fact that it is a social institution, like (moral relativists’ idea of) morality or citizenship.

Alexander R Pruss said...

Heath:

So this is pretty much an indexical theory, I guess.

That will help get around Argument 4b.

But I think it leaves the societal part of Argument 2 partly intact (maybe one can say that society can discover some of the consequences of the obligations that are already a part of the institution, but they can't discover obligations that aren't such consequences).

It takes care of the first half of the Argument 1, but not quite the second half, in that it does not explain why it is that when married people move from one country to another they are married in the latter country without making a new marriage compact. (We could suppose that they implicitly agree to the marriage norms of the new country, but I think that's not so plausible.)

Finally, I think it leaves Argument 3 intact.

Alexander R Pruss said...

Dan:

I don't know. I find games very mysterious philosophically.

Heath White said...

Alex,

Right, “indexical” is the word I needed. Without endorsing any of these arguments, here are what I take to be the most plausible replies:

On argument 1, I wonder is it true that marriages from other countries are automatically honored. If a Qatari man moves to the US with four wives, what do we do? Frankly, I don’t know, but I do know polygamy is illegal. Who gets to be the real wife? If we don’t honor these marriages, the fact could cut two ways: one could say that marriage is a constructed institution, OR one could say that the man isn’t really married four times in his home country, whatever they like to say over there.

On argument 2, I think the institutionalist/indexicalist would argue that we do not “discover” new rights and responsibilities of marriage, but decide on them. I think this response has the merits and pitfalls of the parallel argument about morality more generally.

On argument 3, I think the indexical theory has to bite the bullet. A pretty good example would be husbands having affairs or visiting prostitutes in cultures where fidelity is expected of the wife but not the husband. The indexical theory has to say that while this may be immoral, it is not a violation of a role-duty.

Alexander R Pruss said...

My understanding is that the practice is to let the polygamous family choose which marriage he wants recognized in the U.S. So in that case, at least, there may be thought to be an agreement to enter under U.S. norms.

Polygyny is a complicated case. I don't know if it's contrary to the natural law.

I agree that that's what the indexicalist will say about argument 2.

I am not sure the indexicalist will say that the affairs you mention in connection with argument 3 are immoral. If she thinks that marriage is needed to make sex permissible, then she will say that the affairs are immoral. But it would be odd for an indexicalist to think marriage is needed to make sex permissible, I think.

That said, I am not sure that there really is a marriage in cases where there is no mutual expectation of fidelity. I think that if how one thinks about what falls under "X" is too far off from what the natural kind (or individual) X is like, one isn't referring to X with "X". Thus, someone who thinks that "water" refers to a poisonous black goop may not be referring to water.

The indexicalist can say a similar thing here, though. And maybe about my Patriland case, too.

But if there is no marriage, then at least I can criticize the Patrilander or the non-faithful quasi-husband for fornicating with his quasi-wife, i.e. for accepting the normative benefits of marriage without taking on the responsibilities of marriage, while the indexicalist is unlikely to have that resource.

Heath White said...

Quick note: in my experience, a lot of people have the intuition/belief that extra-marital sex is immoral, without believing that pre-marital sex is immoral. That is, they believe that marriage makes certain kinds of sex impermissible, rather than making any sex permissible.

Alexander R Pruss said...

I think people do have that intuition. Philosophers who have the intuition will probably say that the prohibition on extramarital sex derives from the agreement to exclusivity.

But you may be right that people would have the intuition in the absence of an agreement to exclusivity. I think the natural kind view actually fits well with this: the prohibition on extramarital sex is a part of the natural bundle of norms that in fact constitutes marriage.

I wonder if your case of cultures where male infidelity is widely tolerated can't be handled a bit differently from how I did. There is a difference between being very tolerant of a violation of a rule and taking the rule not to exist.

ds said...

"Marriage as a natural kind of relationships is a better theory than marriage as an institution defined by socially instituted rights and responsibilities."

I wonder if this is a false choice. Consider Robert Adam's view that moral obligations are social requirements imposed on us by God with whom we have a social relationship. One could then see marriage as an institution with socially defined rights and yet avoid the arguments you suggest.

Also a further worry I have with the view you criticise is that it suggests that my ability to refrain from extra marital sex depends on my society in questionable ways. If the state refused to recognise my marriage in law for example or ceased to recognise it tomorrow I would not be married, and my vows would not be valid, but surely this is problematic.