Truly going beyond the binary in marriage?

There is an interesting sense in which standard polygamy (i.e., polygyny or polyandry) presupposes the binarity of marriage. In standard polygamy, there is one individual, A, who stands in a marriage relationship to each of a plurality of other individuals, the Bs. But the marriage relationships themselves are binary: A is married to each of the Bs, and the Bs are not married to each other (they have a different kind of relationship).

The same would be true with more complex graph theoretic structures than the simple star-shaped structure of polygyny and polyandry (with A at the center and the Bs at the periphery). If Alice is married to Bob and Carl, and Bob and Carl are each married to Davita, the quadrilateral graph-theoretic structure of this relationship is still constituted by a four binary marriage relationships.

Thus, in these kinds of cases, what we would have are not a plural marriage, but a plurality of binary marriages with overlap. This, I think, makes for more precise terminology. The moral and political questions normally considered under the head of “plural marriages” are about the possibility or morality of overlap between binary marriages.

To truly go beyond the binary would require a relationship that irreducibly contains more than two people, a relationship not constituted by pairwise relationships. I think a pretty good case can be made that even if one accepts overlapping binary marriages, as in standard polygamy, as genuine marriages (I am not sure one should), irreducibly non-binary relationships would still not be marriages (just as unary relationships wouldn't be). The structure of the relationship is just radically different.

Marriage and the state

There is a presumption against the state imposing or enforcing restrictions on people's behavior. That's why, for instance, the state does not enforce private promises where money doesn't change hands. Now, marriage has two primary normative effects:

1. Make sexual union permissible;
2. Impose a rich tapestry of duties that the spouses owe to one another.

Most Western jurisdictions do not have a legal prohibition of fornication, however, which makes the first of the two primary normative effects moot with respect to the state (though of course marriage still is needed for sexual union to be morally permissible, as I argue in One Body). In those jurisdictions that do not legally prohibit fornication, the primary legal effect of marriage is entirely restrictive. Hence, in those jurisdictions, there is a presumption against the state's recognition of any marriages at all. (One might argue that the state needs to license marriages in order to render sex morally permissible; but marriage in the moral sense does not require state involvement.)

In those jurisdictions where fornication is not a crime, I think it is helpful to start debate about things like same-sex marriage or polygamy with a presumption against state involvement in any marriages whatsoever, and then ask in what cases, if any, that default negative judgment can be overcome.

(For the record, I do think the presumption can be overcome in opposite-sex cases, because of the connection with procreation. But I am not arguing for this here.)

If casual sex is permissible, so is polygamy

If casual sex is permissible, so is premarital sex. Now, on a view on which premarital sex is permissible, marriage is a complex normative institution that removes the right to have sex with others and confers on the spouses various duties—such as of loving, cherishing, honoring and caring for—to the other, as well as makes for at least a ceteris paribus commitment that the couple will strive to have a sexual relationship. (If premarital sex is impermissible, then marriage has one more normative component: it confers a permission for sex.)

But there need not be anything morally wrong with x's promising y that she will not have sex with anyone other than y and z. Promises of loving, cherishing, honoring and caring for another are a great thing when taken really seriously, and are simply a higher and deeper form of the commitment that we all have anyway to our friends, and there seems nothing wrong with making such promises to multiple people, as long as there are implicit or explicit rules on how apparent conflicts of love and care are to be resolved (a problem that is already anyway present in the case of a monogamous marriage, since it can come up with respect to duties to spouse and to children, since these can be in tension). The only component possibly problematic in the normative complex is the ceteris paribus commitment to a sexual relationship with multiple people. But it is hard to see what is wrong with that if casual sex is permissible. If it would be permissible for Jane to have sex with Sid and Roman on alternate days, why would it not be permissible for her to make a ceteris paribus promise to do so? This is particularly unproblematic if one thinks of marriage as permissibly dissoluble, as most people who think casual sex is permissible do.

So it seems that if casual sex is permissible, then the normative complex of commitments that constitutes marriage can be permissibly modified to a plural form. One may ask whether the modified version would still count as a marriage. If not, then polygamy is misnamed: it's not a plural marriage (poly-gamy) but a plural marriage-like relationship. But either way, we get the conclusion: If casual sex is permissible, so is polygamy.

An interesting question is whether we can prove the stronger claim that if premarital sex is permissible, so is polygamy. Probably not, since someone could think that premarital sex is permissible only in the context of a relationship with an exclusive commitment to one person. But if one thinks that something weaker than an exclusive commitment is sufficient for permissibility, maybe love, or maybe mutual respect (Martha Nussbaum), then one may still get the conclusion that polygamy is permissible.

Of course, the right conclusion to draw is that casual sex is impermissible.

Polygamy

I was thinking about structural differences between a marriage between two parties and an arrangement with more than two parties. Here are two structural differences.

1. Once you have three persons, you have politics, and not just a relationship. You can have alliances.

2. If you are married to one person, a conflict solely about the apportionment of goods between you and the other person can be resolved by your sacrificing your own good. But if there are three or more persons in the marriage, your self-sacrifice won't solve all such problems, because some goods-apportionment conflicts between the people in the marriage will concern goods to parties other than yourself, rather than between your goods and that of another.

Multiple simultaneous sexual relationships

A reader wanted to know if I knew of any secular arguments against multiple simultaneous sexual relationships. I don't have anything fully worked out. But I think my strategy would be first to argue that sexual relationships ought to be love relationships, with the sexual aspect being unitive.

I would then express the following worry about multiple simultaneous sexual relationships. Suppose Sally has ongoing sexual relationships with Sam and Matt. If these are not both love relationships, then they are problematic for that reason. So suppose they are both love relationships. Then I would query: What happens to Sally's union with Sam while Sally is engaging sexual relations with Matt? Either that union persists then or it does not.

If the union with Matt persists then, then Sally is not giving herself fully to Sam, and her sexual activity with Sam is not expressive to the comprehensive self-giving nature of sexual congress.

If the union with Matt does not persist, then Sally is being unfaithful to her ongoing sexually-consummated love for Matt. She has become united with Matt, but then has severed that union in favor of a union with Sam.

To make this into a full argument, one would need to argue that one ought to be faithful to love, that sexual relations are supposed to be unitive, and that sexual activity outside the context of a love relationship is morally inappropriate.