Monogamy Is Mostly Fine
hashtag love continues to be love
1. Why Wouldn’t It Be Fine?
On Valentine’s Day, Very Lovable Substacker
wrote an article defending monogamy:
This seemed odd.
Isn’t it polyamory that needs defending? Everyone already loves monogamy!
Well, apparently, a cabal of ruthless, cold, heartless philosophers, led by
, have levied attack after onslaught after assault on the longstanding institution of one-to-one pairing.Basically, Chalmers heard your douchiest friend say, “I could never be tied down; I’ve got too much love to spread,” and took him very seriously.
He argues that monogamy is “analogous to a morally troubling restriction on having additional friends.” He thinks that stopping your partner from seeking out additional relationships is just as bad as jealously sabotaging all of your BFF’s other budding friendships.
We all agree that totally-exclusive friendships are weird and wrong—so why would totally-exclusive sexual relationships be acceptable? We have the contraceptive and protective technology to virtually eliminate the risk of physical harm from sleeping around—sex is like a handshake, and so forth. If you’d have a problem with your friend telling you, “no, we’re special friends, so we can only shake each other’s hands,” you should also have a problem with your partner telling you not to sleep with anyone else.
Convinced?
2. Lol, No
Yeah, Amos wasn’t either.
But he readily accepted Chalmers’ claim that friendships and sexual relationships were basically analogous before making his objection, whereas I think most people’s intuitions point pretty strongly away from that claim.
So let’s first ask if Chalmers is totally off-base with this idea. Is there something morally special about sex?
Well, natural law theorists say Diet Coke, we’re moving on.
The best version of this case is based in sociology—a good utilitarian would accept some seemingly-immoral limitations on individual freedom if they were necessary to create general social harmony. Does monogamy fit the bill?
sure thinks so!1He writes, at extreme length, that humans everywhere, throughout our history, have tended to love monogamous love. Luckily, he’s got a habit of putting the important bits in huge text, so here we go:
Genetic data on human reproducing chromosomal lineages shows that the rise of polygyny is genetically recent, not ancient or primordial.
Cool! I definitely have fallen for this one at least once or twice before—I sorta live by the 17-to-1 ratio to win arguments. Oops!
The ethnographic record of traditional and foraging societies shows that polygyny is almost never the dominant marriage form even where it is practiced.
This is extra fascinating!
If we really truly preferred polygamy, and it was just The Man holding us back, why wouldn’t we do it when given the option? Something about monogamy clearly appeals to us on a very deep level.
Then again, lots of stupid things appeal to us on a very deep level! Torturing and slaughtering hundreds of billions of animals, for one. Raping our friends and family, for another.
puts it well: “There Is Nothing Natural: And if there is, we shouldn't care.” Monogamy doesn’t win out because we happen to do it a lot—the fact that we do it a lot is some evidence that it’s beneficial to our survival, but the debate can’t possibly end there.Further, the sociological reasoning cuts both ways!
opines on Stone’s post:If you want a stable society, monogamy is best. If you want technological breakthroughs, it would be a good idea to eliminate most men from the breeding pool.
I tend to agree.
And, on a longtermist view, innovation and growth are way more important than satisfying a natural desire to be monogamous!
Imagine a genie offered you the following deal: if you give up eating french fries forever, your IQ will rise by 45 points, you’ll become ridiculously incredibly healthy and good-looking, and you’ll grow a little lizard tail. Even though you really like french fries, and even though you’ll end up with a slightly unnatural and uncomfortable appendage, it seems pretty obvious you should take the deal!
So let’s grant that polygamy might be ok for society, as Amos does in his post. Does Chalmers’ view stand up to scrutiny?
3. Lol, No, Again
Amos argues that you can restrict friendships sometimes.
He imagines an exclusive friendship—one adhering to “friendship-monogamy,” a restriction on having any other friends—that satisfies four criteria:2
For aesthetic reasons, both [partners] find friendship-monogamy appealing — perhaps because it affords a certain flavour of specialness that both partners are drawn towards. …
For some reason (maybe an abuse-prevention fairy follows them wherever they go), there’s no chance of the couple’s relationship ever sliding into emotional, verbal, or physical abuse.
Both partners — neither feeling pressured or by the other — decide that the rules of their relationship are to be such that neither can have any outside friends. This is to ensure maximum specialness. Though there are other types of “specialness” a relationship might have, it’s this flavour of specialness the couple happens to prefer.
The relationship shapes up to be a happy one, and both partners derive great satisfaction from the monogamish feeling of specialness.
Seems legit, no?
No!
See, Amos admits in his post that friendship-monogamy does seem imprudent—that is, each partner is probably denying themself some good (the good of having more friends) in order to maintain the monogamy. He brushes off this concern, though, writing, “I take it that it’s generally not immoral to deny yourself something good.”
Chalmers objects to this view in his response:
To me, the most elegant, non-gerrymandered view of morality is one according to which morality takes everyone’s well-being into account—including one’s own. … Thus, insofar as there’s a prudential reason against friendship-monogamy, that strikes me as ipso facto a moral reason against friendship-monogamy.
It sure ipso facto does!
But Chalmers, setting aside the metaphysical debate, goes further:
I believe that even when it meets all four conditions he lists, friendship-monogamy remains wrong. To capture it most briefly, I find that what’s wrong with friendship-monogamy, even in cases that meet Wollen’s conditions, is that the partners involved are embracing dispositions that go against love for one another.
Well, I’ve had a thought or two about loving dispositions before, and I’m real doubtful they’re at odds with monogamy!
Chalmers asks us to imagine
a world in which one of the partners, despite initially being all in on friendship-monogamy, eventually meets someone new whom she’d like to have as a friend. Suppose also that she brings up this prospect to her partner. Now, if their relationship is to remain friendship-monogamous, her partner must inform her that he’s unwilling to accept her having this new friend; should she go on to make friends with this new person, he (her partner) will end the relationship.
…
[Therefore] anyone who embraces friendship-monogamy will be such that if his partner becomes interested in making an additional friend, he’ll refuse to support the new friendship, instead forcing his partner to choose between making the new friend and preserving their relationship. And that very disposition, I hold—even if it never happens to become activated, never happens to come upon the circumstances that would trigger it—is inconsonant with love for one’s partner.
And if the restricting partner were, instead, to consent to opening their relationship?
Clearly such a response wouldn’t show that their relationship is merely no longer monogamous; it’d show that their relationship wasn’t even monogamous in the first place. Monogamy, whether of the friendship- or regular variety, must be more counterfactually robust than this.
4. Love, Love Is a Verb. Love Is a Doing Word
My favorite way to think about love is as a union. When two lovers love, their love creates a new loving unit of lovability. Two ‘I’s become a ‘we’, their interests and moral considerations merge, and they begin to act on the other’s behalf as much as on their own.
Mazel tov!
I think the union view undercuts Chalmers’ argument in two places:
It strikes against the implicit claim that disposition is relevant even when it doesn’t lead to action.
It demonstrates that a monogamous relationship could become open or poly without admitting that it was never monogamous in the first place.
Let’s take (1) first:
When I described love as union before, I mentioned the “moral considerations” of two lovers merging. If you, like me, think “moral consideration” has more to do with our tangible effects on conscious beings’ welfare than with our attitudes toward them, then this means that love consists largely in the actions we take in our partner’s interest.
There’s certainly reason to find this view unintuitive—when I commented about it on Chalmers’ post, he replied with a compelling reductio:
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.
And yet, I find myself willing to bite this bullet—I think you can keep a red-flag list without undermining our love, even if the list is a bit silly!
The alternative strikes me as more worrying: seemingly, Chalmers would need to accept that totally-unconditional love is more loving than love with understandable limits—that is, if I held a norm like “I will leave you if you murder my mother,” he would consider me to be undermining our love, and you would be justified in admonishing me for not supporting you robustly enough.
I think there’s a clear analogy to Chalmers’ metaethical view that prudence and morality are closely linked: when your interests and mine begin to merge, my interests still matter! I may still hold certain ethical stances that cause me to condition our relationship on certain behaviors of yours. In practice, as our union grows tighter, those views will moderate, and you too will begin to adopt them. Once we’ve formed a more perfect union, no discrepancy should be left!
Alright, now (2)—but hold on, I’m gonna need a fresh section for this…
5. What Even Is Monogamy?
It seems like Chalmers is operating from a pretty strict view—monogamous relationships must be “counterfactually robust.” But how robust? Let’s break it down into a few levels, and see which situations “monogamy” best describes:
If you call yourself monogamous, and then you get a tingle in your dingle for someone else, you absolutely must ignore it.
If you call yourself monogamous, and then you get a tingle in your heart for someone else, you absolutely must ignore it.
If you call yourself monogamous, and then your best friend admits their romantic feelings for you, and you realize you have those feelings too, you absolutely must ignore them.
If you call yourself monogamous, and then any of the above happens, you talk to your partner about it, and they hint that they’d be willing to open up your relationship, you must admonish them for their infidelity and go back to ignoring your feelings.
Given that (1) happens to the average man something like 15 thousand times a day, I think it’s fair to say that monogamy mandates ignorance. (2) is probably untrustworthy and common enough to be worth ignoring too.
But (3) and (4) go a bit far.
See, on the union view, monogamy isn’t a strictly-held rule—it’s simply a mutually-agreeable arrangement. In the most plausible situation, each partner has a bit of a jealous streak and finds a strong monogamy norm to be reassuring.
But, of course, each partner knows somewhere deep down that there is a certain quality of person they would rather be with than their current partner.
Similarly, each knows that there’s a certain quality of person for whom they would be willing to open their relationship—with full knowledge of the emotional harm this could cause their jealous partner, and full knowledge that their partner might go off and start making them jealous too.
I think Chalmers makes a strong case for more people to reflect on this question—on how much it would really take for them to open their relationship, and how much their jealousy might be holding them back—but he’s given us no reason to think that any degree of mutually-agreed monogamy is unacceptable.
If you think your love needs spreading, then spread it. But if, on reflection, you really value one-on-one companionship, I certainly won’t stand in your way.
Photo by Roman Purtov on Unsplash
Lukethoughts
“Ari sucks at cards no one can change my mind.” (Ed. note: I was a bit mean to Lucas today while he was learning—sorry, bud!”)
“Is there a title for a psychological effect that makes the brain more selfless than selfish? The inability to communicate your wants and genuine desires because you care more about sparing the other the trouble of “inconveniencing” them with your desires over theirs. It seems simple but deep seeded especially when it comes to those you care about.” (Ed. note: I believe they call it “love.”)
“Academic dishonesty is stupid if ChatGPT is the extent of it. The inability to accept that AI is apart of our academia is insanity truly.” (Ed. note: Shut it all down, man. Seriously. Please do not get used to using this shit as a replacement for your brain!)
Yeah, Chalmers quotes the same passage in his post, but ain’t nothing new under the sun, so shut up.
Good article. I guess it’s a fundamentally utilitarian case that in some way paints the jealous party as petty- that if they could just will it hard enough, they could get over this immature and useless emotion. I don’t think it’ll happen. Eons of primate evolution have deeply wired most humans in equilateral peer matches for mate guarding. Perhaps if status differentials are high enough or the mating opportunities are plentiful that the jealousy calculus brain region shuts off temporarily. Yet people can feel both, they are not on a unidimensional coordinate where the bad subtracts the good. They exist together. And many people would just prefer not to deal with that on an ongoing basis, and I don’t think there really a good philosophical argument to convince them since the feeling are self validating by definition.
Hi Ari, thanks for the engagement! I'll probably write a fuller response as its own post later, but for now, I just wanted to let you know that I enjoyed reading your post.