Still, somebody on Less Wrong once told me that they thought I wouldn’t be “free” to be monogamous in the US because if I stopped being so in the future the police wouldn’t punish me. Of course the exact same thing applies to vegetarianism, but that person said I am free to be on a diet (and tapped out).
I think I understand the idea Eugene is getting at in the sibling thread. Let me see if I can explain it a little differently.
As Sister Y explained in this excellent article, people no longer have a way of committing themselves to marriage. This is a problem for two reasons, neither of which applies to vegetarianism.
In a sense, marriage IS commitment, and talking about a “marriage” without commitment is like talking about a “prisoner” who can leave his cell any time he wants, or a “warranty” which can be ignored at the company’s discretion. Now, you could argue that this is a matter of semantics, and to some extent you would be right, but there is a deeper issue here; that marriage with commitment and “marriage” without commitment are so far apart in relationship-space that we should treat them as completely different things, and that we might be justified in not wanting to call these clusters of relationships by the same name at all (some people like to call the modern relationship cluster Marriage 2.0 for just this reason).
If you can’t credibly commit to doing something, you are going to have trouble finding people who are willing to expose themselves to risk should you fail to do so. Thus, by removing your freedom to pre-commit yourself to fulfilling a marriage contract, your freedom to enter into these contracts has been reduced (indeed, the collapse of the marriage rate appears to be an empirical confirmation of this model). Thomas Schelling covered this in his The Strategy of Conflict.
Among the legal privileges of corporations, two that are mentioned in textbooks are the right to sue and the “right” to be sued. Who wants to be sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise: to borrow money, to enter a contract, to do business with someone who might be damaged. If suit does arise, the “right” seems a liability in retrospect; beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business.
Now, the term under discussion is “monogamy”, not “marriage”, but back to problem 1; the modern serial “monogamy” is a completely different cluster of relationships from the old monogamy, which implied marriage. Dalrock, for example, argues that serial “monogamy” is a promiscuous and immoral relationship model, which are things he doesn’t believe about the traditional religious monogamy model. Whether you agree with him or not, the point is, again, that modern serial “monogamy” is pretty different from old monogamy which meant things like not marrying two wives at once, and maybe some people want to avoid overloading an existing term to incorporate such a different new concept.
marriage with commitment and “marriage” without commitment are so far apart in relationship-space that we should treat them as completely different things
For my own part, I would say that two people who are continuing to live together despite both of them preferring to stop doing so, solely because they committed to doing so at some time in the past, is at least as far away from what the word “marriage” properly refers to as two people who are living together today because they feel like it but would happily walk away from each other tomorrow if they found themselves feeling differently.
But I accept that this position is not universally accepted, and in particular that other people might use “marriage” to refer to the first kind of relationship, even among people who can’t stand the sight of each other, aren’t speaking to each other, don’t share goals or values, etc., as long as they are barred from (for example) marrying anyone else and as long as the legal, financial and organizational obligations that go along with marriage can be imposed on them successfully.
And I can see how, for someone whose concept of marriage works this way, the analysis you perform here makes sense: I can’t meaningfully precommit to not hating the very sight of you in twenty years, but if marriage is unrelated to whether I hate the sight of you, then I can meaningfully precommit to remaining married to you… and the way I do that is by subjecting myself to a legal system that continues imposing those obligations on me for the rest of my life, no matter what happens.
And, sure, I can see how such a person would similarly want words like “monogamy” to refer to such a lifetime commitment, and words like “divorce” to refer to an empty set, etc.
the modern serial “monogamy” is a completely different cluster of relationships from the old monogamy
Well, in the comment I was talking about in the grandparent (which I’d link to if this thing was faster) I said “relationship with my girlfriend” rather than “marriage with my wife”, which I’d think makes clear the former is what I was talking about. Maybe “monogamy” it’s a bad label for it, but ‘$word is a bad label for $thing’ hardly implies ‘I’m not free to do $thing’. (And while it’s unlike traditional lifelong monogamy, it’s also unlike Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory, and given that around here more people practice the latter than the former it seems more useful to me to have a word to distinguish it from the latter than from the former.)
(I’m not sure what exactly Christopher Ryan meant by “monogamy”, but he was opposing it to EEA-style sexual omnivory, which from his description sounds more like Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory than First-World-small-town-mainstream-style serial monogamy to me.)
the modern serial “monogamy” is a completely different cluster of relationships from the old monogamy, which implied marriage.
In the comment I was talking about in the grandparent (which I’d link to if this thing wasn’t being so slow today on my netbook), I was talking about the former (it said “relationship with my girlfriend”, not “marriage with my wife”). If you want to say “monogamy” is a bad label for that, fine, but “you are not free to do $thing” is a different claim altogether from “$word is not a good label for $thing”.
(And while modern monogamy is different from traditional monogamy, it’s also different from Bay-area-technophile-style polyamory, and given that the latter is probably much more common around here, I think it’s still useful to have a word to distinguish one from another.)
You commit to the marriage when you say “I do”. The idea that you cannot commit unless you have the right to sue your ex-spouse in a court of law for money seem preposterous to me on its face.
You commit to the marriage when you say “I do”. The idea that you cannot commit unless you have the right to sue your ex-spouse in a court of law for money seem preposterous to me on its face.
Not the right to sue; the right to be sued, which makes you less likely to become an ex-spouse, and more likely to become spouse to begin with.
There is no right to be sued, there is obligation to be subject to lawsuits, that’s not a right.
In any case, that doesn’t make much difference. So you cannot commit unless there is the big stick of a potential lawsuit hanging over your head? Um, I am sorry for you, then.
I have a feeling that there is some dual-level arguing going on. On the visible level there is talk about inability to commit and how the society took away your (personally, your) opportunity to commit yourself to marriage.
But there also seems to be a strong undercurrent of “the slutty proles are fucking around too much and fuck up the social system so, by Jove, we better get them under control”.
So you cannot commit unless there is the big stick of a potential lawsuit hanging over your head? Um, I am sorry for you, then.
Are you discarding the whole idea of contracts? “What do you need a contract for, can’t you people commit without a big stick of a potential lawsuit hanging over your head? I am sorry for you then.”
Even if a person is fully capable and willing to commit using his sense of duty, in the absence of perfect telepaths they may not able to efficiently signal said capacity and willingness.
Even if a person is fully capable and willing to commit using his sense of duty
Duty? We are talking about marriage, not about commercial contracts specifying supplies of cabbage.
Marriage is a bit different from signing a contract whereby the woman undertakes to cook, wash the floors, and be available in bed, and the man undertakes to earn some money, fix the plumbing, and screw the woman on a regular basis.
If you don’t trust the person you’re marrying to the extent that you want a legal threat hanging over him/her, that marriage is probably a bad idea.
And if you really really want to commit, go tattoo the name of your spouse on your forehead.
Duty? We are talking about marriage, not about commercial contracts about supplies of cabbage.
I’d expect the duty I have to my family to be of bigger importance than a commercial contract. For starters it tends to be a lifelong duty.
Marriage is a bit different from signing a contract whereby the woman undertakes to cook, wash the floors, and be available in bed, and the man undertakes to earn some money, fix the plumbing, and screw the woman on a regular basis.
Yes, it’s a contract to “have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part”.
Btw, I’m through with this discussion. Do you always seek to portray the people you are talking with as horrible monsters? Do you expect to actually convince me by talking to me as if I’m a monster, or is this just a status game to lower me in the eyes of whatever audience you are aiming at?|
Either way, keep your scorn or share it, but I’m out.
And if you really really want to commit, go tattoo the name of your spouse on your forehead
That might work, but facial tattoos are status-lowering in our society.
I’d expect the duty I have to my family to be of bigger importance than a commercial contract.
Does your duty to the family derive from the legal system of your country? Would your duty to your family change if some laws about who can sue whom for what changed?
Do you always seek to portray the people you are talking with as horrible monsters?
I didn’t mean to say anything about you personally. I used “you” in the sense of generic you.
But I am curious, which part did you find implying being a horrible monster?
The difference between monogamy and vegetarianism here is that monogamy requires a binding commitment from another person. Thus, the inability to make a binding contract is a problem for monogamy but not vegetarianism.
How does that distinguish being free to be monogamous and being free to be vegetarian? The number of vegetarians who make binding contracts to be vegetarian is essentially nonexistent.
You didn’t answer the question. You answered the question “why can’t you make a contract for monogamy?” and my question was “why does the inability to make a contract for monogamy matter?” Nobody, for all practical purposes, makes a contract to be vegetarian, so whether or not you can make a contract is irrelevant to comparing the two.
Does at-will employment mean people in the US aren’t free to hire each other?
Long term contracts exist and are enforceable (even if they’re not the default). Monogamy contracts aren’t enforceable in the current legal regime.
Only if you’re dynamically consistent (no akrasia, etc.), otherwise your future self is another party—and some people do write contracts with their future selves; does the fact that the police won’t enforce such contracts mean people aren’t free to make them?
With vegetarianism itself, people do seem to stick to it (but probably there’s some selection bias at work here), but with restrictive diets in general, I’m under the impression that the fraction of people who try to be on a diet but then lapse is within an order of magnitude of the fraction of couples who try to be monogamous but then lapse—probably within a factor of two, too.
And playing chess relies on your opponent also following the rules of chess, so aren’t we free to play chess either? (Or will the police arrest me if I castle while my king is in check?)
Chess can rely on reputation since games are short and someone who refuses to play by the rules will find no one to play against (also the stakes are small). (And in high states games, e.g., tournaments you will at least be escorted out for refusing to play by the rules.) Note, that since monogamy assumes someone will only have one spouse ever, reputation is less useful.
A better example is, are we free to engage in commerce if the police refuse to enforce either non-payment or non-delivery? (Especially if they do enforce anti-violence and anti-theft laws against people attempting to take matters into their own hands in cases of non-payment or non-delivery). Another example, would you say companies are free to provide employee pensions if the law says that companies can cancel pensions anytime (even after retirement) and employees (or former employees) have no recourse if a company does cancel it?
There are many cases where the law doesn’t require specific performance. If you hire someone to work for you, they can refuse to come to work. You can fire them, but you can’t force them to work for you. If you offer to fix someone’s sink in exchange for them fixing your car, one of you could fail to do the work. The other could sue and get paid some money, but the law won’t enforce specific performance and you can’t actually force another person to fix a sink or a car.
By your reasoning we are not “free to hire someone to do work” or “free to exchange sink fixing for car fixing”.
And even in the chess example, you can’t force someone to play chess, and if you exclude them from playing because of their reputation, they still are not playing chess with you. Soi by your reasoning, we are not free to “play chess with person X”, even if you argue that we are free to play chess provided we aren’t picky about partners.
Note, that since monogamy assumes someone will only have one spouse ever, reputation is less useful.
It’s true that someone cannot gain a reputation for being honest in monogamy, but they can get a reputation for cheating. It only requires the “can have a reputation for cheating” half in order for reputation to be useful. It still lets them cheat the first time, but they can always cheat the first time in a chess game as well.
Could whoever modded me down please explain why they modded me down? I must have lost around 20 karma in the past few days because I am getting constantly modded down for almost anything I post.
It’s happened to me again. At one point I lost about 20 karma in a few hours. Now it seems everything I post gets voted down. At an estimated loss of 30 karma per week, I’ll end up being forced off the site by August.
Hmmm. Your past 30 days karma is positive. Either you’re saying it was formerly a lot more positive, or any downvoting isn’t having nearly the effect you suggest.
I tried actually counting them. My past 80 comments (not counting recent ones just now) have all been modded down at least once. There are some that are at 0, but only because another person modded them up as well.
(I tried counting before and found the 54th comment was not modded down but I can’t seem to find that comment again, for some reason.)
This covers well over the whole month. I’m still at positive for the month because I have enough upvotes on my comments that voting each one down by 1 still leaves me at positive.
I occasionally downvote a few (3-5) of your comments in a row, based on merits, not anything else, but I haven’t done it recently, so someone else might be expecting you to post low-quality comments and, after stumbling over one, goes through a bunch. I wouldn’t sweat it, though. I think I dropped 10-12 karma in the last couple hours, probably for similar reasons. Just do your best to make useful and measured comments and the forum readers will appreciate it.
The other could sue and get paid some money, but the law won’t enforce specific performance and you can’t actually force another person to fix a sink or a car.
As Salemicus mentioned in the other thread, the in the analogous case with marriage, the law won’t even do that.
monogamy assumes someone will only have one spouse ever [emphasis added]
That’s not what I meant by monogamy—I wouldn’t call my relationship non-monogamous just because my girlfriend had sex with someone else years before I even met her, any more than I would call someone who used to eat meat but no longer does a non-vegetarian.
I agree that monogamy in your sense of the word would depend on something guaranteeing that enough people stay virgin until old enough to find a lifetime partner.
A better example is, are we free to engage in commerce if the police refuse to enforce either non-payment or non-delivery?
(I’m assuming you’re not talking about contraband, since police will not only refuse to enforce non-payment or non-delivery but also bust your balls if they catch you in a complete transaction.) Reputation can work for commerce too—ever looked at the feedback on eBay sellers or at TripAdvisor reviews of restaurants?
Another example, would you say companies are free to provide employee pensions if the law says that companies can cancel pensions anytime (even after retirement) and employees (or former employees) have no recourse if a company does cancel it?
I don’t know whether I’d call it a pension, but I’d say you’re certainly free to give me a given amount of money every month as long as you feel like it and then stop. (Of course it’d be foolish for me to rely on that money alone for their maintenance, but that’s another issue.)
A better example is, are we free to engage in commerce if the police refuse to enforce either non-payment or non-delivery?
We are indeed. One will just have to handle counterparty risk by other means, such as only dealing with people you know well, private enforcement, meeting for simultaneous performance, etc. This is readily observable in the real world everywhere that the legal system is weak, corrupt, or absent.
BTW, and this is just a nitpick, in Western countries where the legal system is reliable, the police do indeed refuse to enforce contracts, because it isn’t part of their job. Instead, it is up to a wronged party to bring a civil action to the courts. The police have no role in the matter. Contract rights are not property rights.
As another has already pointed out, the enforcement carried out by the courts almost invariably consists of awarding monetary compensation, not specific performance, which happens only in certain exceptional cases. In the UK, these exceptional cases do not include personal services.
Another example, would you say companies are free to provide employee pensions if the law says that companies can cancel pensions anytime (even after retirement) and employees (or former employees) have no recourse if a company does cancel it?
You are trying to put your conclusion into the premise of an absurd hypothetical of Cloud Cuckoo Land. A pension contract that was terminable at will by the pension provider is a pension contract no-one would sign up to. A law saying that all pension arrangements are terminable at will is not going to be passed; if passed, people would find ways to structure their retirement plans that avoid whatever legal definition of “pension contract” was present in such an absurd law. Hey, suppose there was a law that when you buy something online, the supplier has no obligation to supply what you ordered? Well, go ahead and suppose it.
You are presumably trying to draw an analogy with the current state of marriage law. It would be more productive to talk about marriage law directly. Adultery is usually grounds for divorce. That looks like contract enforcement to me—the sort of enforcement that contracts are subject to in the real world, rather than the fantasy S&M version in which the police drag the disobedient partner back in handcuffs. Time was when the guilty party would be sent away from the severed marriage without a penny (at least, if the guilty party was the woman), but that generally does not happen today. If you think the courts should regard adultery more sternly when deciding the division of the common property, go ahead and argue that, rather than claiming that no-one can be monogamous these days because the police won’t “enforce” the marriage contract.
If I make a contract with Amazon, you’re right that I can’t make them deliver the goods. But I can get damages for their failure to do so, that would put me in the same position as if they had in fact delivered the TV (of course I have to mitigate my loss, etc). I am glad to hear that you think that general contractual concepts should apply to marriage contracts, but you are surely aware that they do not, and this is exactly what is being complained of.
You do not (at least in the UK) get damages for breach of a marriage contract. This strikes me as extremely unfair. Adultery is a fundamental breach of the marriage contract, so yes this is grounds for termination of the contract, but the innocent party doesn’t get any proper remedy. No-one is saying that people have to be dragged back in handcuffs. But it is not just or equitable that, to continue your analogy to contract law, a breach of the contract by one party leads to a kind of rescission, rather than damages payable.
Adultery is a fundamental breach of the marriage contract, so yes this is grounds for termination of the contract, but the innocent party doesn’t get any proper remedy.
What would you or Eugine Nier consider a proper remedy? For better or worse, adultery is generally looked on more lightly nowadays than it was in times past. The courts practice accordingly when ruling on a contested divorce. The guilty party is no longer cut off without a penny, still less forced to wear a scarlet letter, horsewhipped or stoned. If that is a problem, it is not a problem with the law, but of those general attitudes. O tempora! O mores!
Those who prefer a different standard are as free as they always have been to find like-minded partners, arrange things between themselves, keep their own agreements, and find their own social support for them, just as those who would engage in trade in the absence of reliable contract law must create their own arrangements.
What would you or Eugine Nier consider a proper remedy?
I can’t speak for Eugine, but I already told you the remedy I think appropriate—ordinary contractual damages. And this would be true not only for adultery, but for any fundamental breach. Of course, parties should be able to specify their own terms as needed in these cases (e.g. liquidated damages). And this needn’t even be the default; but the key thing is that at present, if parties want their marriage contract to be meaningful, they are unable to make it so, as the courts will simply disregard any such terms as contrary to public policy. Fortunately the wind is blowing in the right direction (prenuptial agreements) but much too slowly.
Those who prefer a different standard are as free as they always have been to find like-minded partners, arrange things between themselves, keep their own agreements, and find their own social support for them, just as those who would engage in trade in the absence of reliable contract law must create their own arrangements.
You are right that people are able to trade in the absence of government. But government sometimes helps! Despite this, people like yourself have reduced marriage to a kind of Somalia, where people are unable to form enforceable contracts. People who prefer a different standard as you so strangely put it, should be free to form their own contracts.
However,
The guilty party is no longer cut off without a penny, still less forced to wear a scarlet letter, horsewhipped or stoned. If that is a problem, it is not a problem with the law, but of those general attitudes. O tempora! O mores!
I am disinclined to continue a conversation with someone as lacking in basic manners as you.
Fortunately the wind is blowing in the right direction (prenuptial agreements)
Prenups as currently practiced are mostly concerned with how to arrange matters if and when the marriage breaks down, not how the marriage itself shall be conducted. This is hardly a support for the institution of marriage.
Despite this, people like yourself
I don’t know what you mean by that. I didn’t draw up any of these laws, neither have I agitated for them. But nor have I agitated against them—are you counting all who do not actively evangelise for your views as your enemy?
You do not (at least in the UK) get damages for breach of a marriage contract. This strikes me as extremely unfair. Adultery is a fundamental breach of the marriage contract, so yes this is grounds for termination of the contract, but the innocent party doesn’t get any proper remedy.
Huh? It’s up to you (and your future spouse) to define a marriage contract—they are commonly called pre-nups.
If you want to enter a marriage under conditions that adultery leads to remedies like money paid, sure, just write up such a contract and get it signed. However I see no reasons to impose such a contract on everyone.
Traditionally, of course, a marriage is not a contract at all.
As solipsist notes, pre-nuptial agreements are not binding in the UK, although the courts can take them into account. I referred to this in my post above. However, their scope is much less than what you suggest. A pre-nuptial agreement that specified damages to be paid in the event of fundamental breach would be void as contrary to public policy, at least in the UK. I believe the same is true in most US states, but obviously, marriage laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
To be clear:
I do not want to impose a uniform contract on everyone.
I want people who wish to bind themselves in a marriage contract to be able to do so.
This is generally not currently possible.
This is extremely unfair, and leads to widespread suffering.
I want people who wish to bind themselves in a marriage contract to be able to do so.
Not exactly. You want people to be able to irrevocably bind their future selves. That is rarely a good idea.
I am also curious whether your fundamental view of marriage is one of a contract between two parties. If so, well, that leads to interesting consequences. If not so, why do you want to treat marriage as a contract?
This is generally not currently possible.
This is generally currently possible subject to the normal limits on contracts that the society imposes. There are a lot of those (e.g. you can’t contract to be a slave) and I don’t see what makes marriage special.
This is extremely unfair, and leads to widespread suffering.
I would like to see some supporting evidence for that claim.
Not exactly. You want people to be able to irrevocably bind their future selves.
Not so, and this is an outrageous reading of what I have said. People will still be able to get divorces, just they will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault. I didn’t irrevocably bind my future self when I rented my house, but if I break the lease I’ll have to pay compensation to the landlord.
Your comments above suggest that perhaps you don’t understand the state of law, at least in the UK.
This is generally currently possible subject to the normal limits on contracts that the society imposes… (e.g. you can’t contract to be a slave)...
No it isn’t, at least in the UK. All I want is for marriage to be subject to normal limits on contracts, not the special limits on contracts that apply only in the case of marriage. I say “damages in the case of breach” and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It’s so strange.
I would like to see some supporting evidence for that claim.
Note the sharp discontinuity after 1969. What happened then? Oh yes, the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, meaning you no longer had to prove fault to get a divorce (and divorce settlements were also not based on fault).
There is no sharp discontinuity around 1969. If you smooth out the weird peak around ww2 (which we expect was caused by ww2), the plot of divorces follows a fairly smooth exponential trend (which we expect due to population growth), until the late 70s (the tapering in the 80s is due to both declining marriage rates and a stabilizing divorce rate).
Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
Marriage rates really don’t start collapsing until the early 80s (they don’t drop below 1930s levels until 1981).
I would think for the story you want to tell, you’d want to compare divorce rates to the marriage rate, but it doesn’t hold up. Divorce rates were stable all through the 90s, but the marriage rate continued to plummet.
There is no sharp discontinuity around 1969. If you smooth out the weird peak around ww2 (which we expect was caused by ww2), the plot of divorces follows a fairly smooth exponential trend (which we expect due to population growth
Except population growth has been trivial over this period compared to the rise in divorces.
I would think for the story you want to tell, you’d want to compare divorce rates to the marriage rate, but it doesn’t hold up. Divorce rates were stable all through the 90s, but the marriage rate continued to plummet.
No. In my grandparents time, people were inculcated with the morality that divorce was awful and shameful. Hence when they started to liberalise divorce, few took advantage of it; social pressure was enough. But over time that social pressure weakened because informal mechanisms are weak compared to formal ones. Hence that social pressure gets harder and harder to maintain, and divorce looks more and more acceptable to the new generations. I think we have now bottomed out of that vicious cycle, but unfortunately it has meant a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire.
Except population growth has been trivial over this period compared to the rise in divorces.
The post WW2 baby boom lead to a boom in marriage-aged people in the 60s and 70s. You can see it on the second of the plots on the post you linked to- look how the total number of marriages is increasing between 60 and 72.
And my point isn’t that the rate of divorce wasn’t increasing, it was (though not as much as a plot of total divorces would have you believe, much better to plot the rates).
My point is that 1969 wasn’t a special year in the data. There is no discontinuity on the plots you linked to, and no discontinuity in the data.
Hence that social pressure gets harder and harder to maintain, and divorce looks more and more acceptable to the new generations.
This whole paragraph feels largely unresponsive to what I said. My point was that divorce rates stabilized in the late 80s, but marriage rates continued to fall. You can tell whatever story you want, but we have to agree on what the data is doing.
If whoever voted me down for this post, and the post previous in the thread would explain why I’d appreciate it.
In objective discussions about graphs, I feel like we ‘aspiring rationalists’ ought to be able to come to an agreement about the data in the graph (if perhaps not the causal story behind it), and downvotes for discussing the actual graphs linked to seem to me to be counterproductive.
If I’ve broken some social norm, I’d appreciate being explicitly told.
That is because the Church of England (or RCC, or pretty much any other major Christian denomination) told them so.
More precisely, what the RCC says is that there’s no such thing as divorce, and even if a judge purports to have cancelled your marriage, as far as God is concerned you’re still married.
a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire
I personally call this phenomenon “the Regressive Cost of Virtue” (virtue in the descriptive, not the normative sense). Too lazy to write a good comment on it, I’ll just quote myself from IRC.
People will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault.
Everyone? Or do you just want enforcement of pre-nups?
I am still interested in your view on the basic nature of marriage. Is it, in its essence, a contract between two parties? To point to an obvious divergent view, Catholics view marriage rather differently.
but if I break the lease I’ll have to pay compensation to the landlord.
You voluntarily signed a contract to that effect. If there is no such contract (or no such clause in the contract), would you still owe compensation to the landlord?
I say “damages in the case of breach” and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It’s so strange.
Well then, let’s avoid fuzzy generalities and get down to brass tacks.
Alice and Bob are thinking of getting married. However Alice believes that men are philandering bastards who tend to screw everything that moves so she would like to protect herself against the possibility of Bob turning out to be precisely such a bastard.
In the world which you would consider just and fair, what would Alice and Bob do and what would the legal system have to accept?
It seems that you have in mind an enforceable contract whereby Alice and Bob agree that if any of them gets caught in the wrong bed, he or she will pay the other party ONE! MILLION! DOLLARS! or some other sufficiently painful sum.
I don’t see anything horrible about such a contract, but I’m curious what you think the contract-less default should be (Eve and Dick just got married without any specific contracts, Eve got drunk at a party and slept with her boss, what’s next?). I am also interested in the motivations of Alice in insisting upon such a contract—is it incentive or punishment?
Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
Sure, but I don’t see why that is “extremely unfair” and “leads to widespread suffering”. I see nothing wrong with low marriage rates.
Everyone? Or do you just want enforcement of pre-nups?
If you like, call it a pre-nup. In your terms, I want:
enforcement of pre-nups
Pre-nups to be valid over a much wider variety of terms.
I am still interested in your view on the basic nature of marriage. Is it, in its essence, a contract between two parties?
And I still don’t find this level of analysis helpful. Marriage means different things to different people, and has developed over millenia. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about its basic nature.
I don’t see anything horrible about such a contract, but I’m curious what you think the contract-less default should be (Eve and Dick just got married without any specific contracts, Eve got drunk at a party and slept with her boss, what’s next?).
I would propose that, for now, the contract-less default should be the status quo, because I feel like otherwise you would be upsetting fixed expectations by the back door. But of course existing married couples should be free to alter their marriage terms. After a while I think almost everyone will want a contract that makes the party at fault pay compensation; once that happens, it would make sense to switch the default, but not until then.
I am also interested in the motivations of Alice in insisting upon such a contract—is it incentive or punishment?
It is very hard for the rest of us to speculate as to the motivations of a fictional character you have created. But even if you disapprove of Alice’s motivations, it seems to me that you should respect her right to form a contract.
Sure, but I don’t see why that is “extremely unfair” and “leads to widespread suffering”. I see nothing wrong with low marriage rates.
The marriage rate collapsing isn’t “unfair.” Denying people the ability to form voluntary contracts is the unfair part. The marriage rate collapsing leads to widespread suffering because people want to get married, but feel they can’t because the institution is too unstable due to lack of precommitment. And hence you get soaring illegitimacy. The whole thing is a disaster.
What gives the game away is that I am talking about giving people more freedom, and I get this vitriolic pushback, and find myself constantly being strawmanned. I note that certain people viscerally hate the idea of discipline, stability, order, hard work and bourgeois values generally, and view long-lasting marriages as awful patriarchy. This is what’s lurking beneath it all.
I would propose that, for now, the contract-less default should be the status quo, because I feel like otherwise you would be upsetting fixed expectations by the back door. But of course existing married couples should be free to alter their marriage terms. After a while I think almost everyone will want a contract that makes the party at fault pay compensation; once that happens, it would make sense to switch the default, but not until then.
Adultery was harshly punished in the past. Even in the recent past, before the 70s, adultery was one of the few admissible reasons to obtain divorce, and lead to unfavourable settlement for the adulterous party. In the 70s, no-fault divorce laws were passed in most Western countries, and adultery was demoted to having little or no role in divorce settlements. Keep in mind that no-fault divorce laws weren’t imposed by dictators trying to destroy the fabric of society or something (*), they were passed with popular support by democratically elected governments, and there is no noticeable political pressure today to revise them, or even to make the type of pre-nup agreements you are referring to enforceable.
Your position largely used to be the default one in the past, and public opinion has been moving consistently away from it for the last decades. Holding an unpopular political position is legitimate, but what makes you think that public opinion would move back to it?
Uhm, are you sure you are not succumbing to the false-consensus effect?
Quite sure. To quote from another post I made in this thread:
I think that, right now, most people have no strong view on the subject. But I think that people are good at learning, and so, over time, they will imitate those marriages which prove the most successful, and which best signal future commitment. I could be wrong.
Basically, I think people radically and consistently underestimate the effects of institutional constraints and incentives, and assume that aggregate societal results are somehow “chosen.” So people tend to think that:
Our high rate of divorce is very bad
Changing the incentives to get a divorce has little or no effect on this.
Something just “magically” happened in the 1960s/1970s (“Kids today...”/”liberation!”).
If you enabled people to make binding commitments in marriage, I don’t think most people would leap out and take advantage immediately. Most people would just keep on with whatever they’re doing. But a small number of people would, and their marriages would be more successful and happier and long-lasting, and over time (decades) their behaviour would be imitated, and so on.
Keep in mind that no-fault divorce laws weren’t imposed by dictators trying to destroy the fabric of society or something, they were passed with popular support by democratically elected governments
Disagree about the popular support thing. In Britain, certainly, the Divorce Reform Act was passed with neither popular support nor opposition, just a public who didn’t particularly care. The people pushing for it were a small number of activists, who were also in favour of these social “liberalisations” like abolition of the death penalty, etc. Many of these “lilberalisations” were in fact quite unpopular. I think you greatly underestimate the institutional leeway available to politicians/regulators.
Holding an unpopular political position is legitimate, but what makes you think that public opinion would move back to it?
I don’t think my position is so much unpopular as it is low-demand. I think the UK government, at least, could easily pass the kind of law I favour, and no-one much would care. In fact I don’t think my position is ever likely to be in high demand, because most people don’t think incentives are particularly important.
Disagree about the popular support thing. In Britain, certainly, the Divorce Reform Act was passed with neither popular support nor opposition, just a public who didn’t particularly care. The people pushing for it were a small number of activists, who were also in favour of these social “liberalisations” like abolition of the death penalty, etc. Many of these “lilberalisations” were in fact quite unpopular. I think you greatly underestimate the institutional leeway available to politicians/regulators.
It seems to me that you are arguing that some small groups of activists somehow managed to manipulate the democratic governments of multiple countries in a short span of time, without the general public taking notice, despite the fact that this alleged manipulation affected in substantial (and significantly negative, in your opinion) ways the family life of many people. Sorry, but I don’t think this is a rationally tenable position.
It seems to me that you are arguing that some small groups of activists somehow managed to manipulate the democratic governments of multiple countries in a short span of time,
Yes. This is indeed the whole point of activism.
without the general public taking notice,
I never said anything of the sort. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment that people are determined to put words into my mouth, as it indicates they feel unable to argue with my actual position. In fact, of course, the public did take notice, but didn’t much care.
despite the fact that this alleged manipulation affected in substantial (and significantly negative, in your opinion) ways the family life of many people.
Yes, because the effect was attenuated, and was not seen as causally linked to the activity.
I’m afraid your model of political activity in democratic governments is rather faulty.
Perhaps I should take it as a compliment that people are determined to put words into my mouth, as it indicates they feel unable to argue with my actual position.
Or maybe it indicates that you are not being clear in arguing your position.
Yes, because the effect was attenuated, and was not seen as causally linked to the activity.
In another comment you claimed that divorce rates skyrocketed the very same year that no-fault divorce legislation was passed, now you are arguing that there was no immediate large effect. I’m starting to think that you actually don’t have a coherent position, and you just want to argue that “good old” conservative values are obviously desirable and therefore you have to handwave away the fact that public opinion is largely against them by pushing a quasi-conspiracist narrative.
Denying people the ability to form voluntary contracts is the unfair part.
Unless you want to argue for some extreme form of anarcho-libertarianism, you would concede that there are some types of voluntary contracts that it is in the public interest for the state to consider unenforceable. Selling yourself into slavery is the textbook example, but there are clearly many others.
I’m not saying that the type of pre-nup agreements that impose monetary compensation on adultery are necessarily in the same class of slavery or other forms of undesirable contracts, in fact, I have no strong intuitions either way.
What do you infer from the silence of people who hear what you’re saying, find it uncompelling but not particularly viscerally hateful, shrug, and go on about our business?
“care about” is a broad term. I certainly have opinions about it, but if you mean that I don’t have strong emotional responses to it, your inference is correct as far as it goes.
Pre-nups to be valid over a much wider variety of terms.
I don’t mean purely division-of-property contracts. Pre-nups are general agreements, they can be about anything the parties want to agree to.
And I still don’t find this level of analysis helpful.
Ah. I find your consistent refusal… illuminating :-)
After a while I think almost everyone will want a contract that makes the party at fault pay compensation
Do you, now? I don’t want such a contract, quite explicitly, too. Why do you believe that most people think like you and not like me?
But even if you disapprove of Alice’s motivations
I don’t approve or disapprove. I am interested in them.
Denying people the ability to form voluntary contracts is the unfair part.
Well, that’s the basic libertarian position. Given that you proclaim it, should I understand that you are in favor of gay marriage, a large variety of poly marriages, marriages between close relatives, etc? And that’s even before we get to a variety of more interesting contracts that don’t deal with marriage...
How do you feel, for example, about temporary marriages: Alice and Bob form a voluntary contract that they will be married for one year after which the marriage automatically dissolves and they are free to go their own ways..?
people want to get married, but feel they can’t because the institution is too unstable due to lack of precommitment.
Really? That looks like, um, let’s be polite and say “motivated cognition”. Can you provide evidence that supports this claim?
I am talking about giving people more freedom
That’s the thing, you see, it certainly doesn’t look like that to me.
Ah. I find your consistent refusal… illuminating :-)
What’s the basic nature of drinking alcohol? Is it really about changing your mental state? Or is it really about lowering your inhibitions? Or is it really about drowning your sorrows? Or something else? It’s a ridiculous question. It doesn’t have a single purpose, it has lots, and some people drink for one reason but strongly disapprove of another reason, or vice-versa.
Do you, now? I don’t want such a contract, quite explicitly, too. Why do you believe that most people think like you and not like me?
I think that, right now, most people have no strong view on the subject. But I think that people are good at learning, and so, over time, they will imitate those marriages which prove the most successful, and which best signal future commitment. I could be wrong.
But even if you disapprove of Alice’s motivations
I don’t approve or disapprove. I am interested in them.
She’s your fictional character. You tell me.
Given that you proclaim it, should I understand that you are in favor of gay marriage, a large variety of poly marriages, marriages between close relatives, etc?… [temporary marriage also]
Except for marriages between close relatives, I “favour” all of these things in the sense that I think they should be legal.
That’s the thing, you see, it certainly doesn’t look like that to me.
And I am much too polite to tell you what your position looks like to me.
What’s the basic nature of drinking alcohol? Is it really about changing your mental state?
Why, yes, it is, given that lowering your inhibitions and drowning your sorrows are exactly that. I don’t think it is a ridiculous question.
they will imitate those marriages which prove the most successful
I am guessing that you define a “successful marriage” as a “long-lasting marriage”. I would not agree with such a definition.
Let me also point out that people will imitate the lives which look the most successful to them. Such lives may or may not involve long-lasting marriages.
I “favour” all of these things in the sense that I think they should be legal.
Interesting. So you think both that temporary marriages should be legal and that marriages should be made to be longer and more painful to get out of.
And I am much too polite to tell you what your position looks like to me.
/me waves a magic wand… Poof! I invoke the magical name of Crocker and release you from the politeness spell! :-)
What’s the basic nature of drinking alcohol? Is it really about changing your mental state?
Why, yes, it is, given that lowering your inhibitions and drowning your sorrows are exactly that. I don’t think it is a ridiculous question.
So someone who drinks alchohol just because they like the taste is “wrong”? To me that’s just absurd. Marriage can mean a holy sacrament to a Catholic, a lifelong commitment to me, an excuse for a good party for my cousin, and many more things besides. There’s no true “nature” beside the meanings we give it.
Let me also point out that people will imitate the lives which look the most successful to them. Such lives may or may not involve long-lasting marriages.
This is true! Different people have different wishes and desires. That’s why people should have the choice. I think most people want a long-lasting marriage, and would take steps to achieve that. I could be wrong though, and if people want to stay with the status quo they would be free to do so. You on the other hand, refuse to discover whether you are right, and refuse to give people the choice.
So you think both that temporary marriages should be legal and that marriages should be made to be longer and more painful to get out of.
No, I do not think that marriages should be made more painful to get out of. If people want to, they should be allowed to make their marriages shorter and even easier to get out of. But of course you already know that, and are deliberately misreading me.
I … release you from the politeness spell! :-)
You appear to be labouring under the misapprehension that I show politeness out of respect for you. I assure you that is not the case. I am polite out of respect for me.
So someone who drinks alchohol just because they like the taste is “wrong”?
I don’t know of a single person who drinks alcohol because they like the taste. I know people who drink Bordeaux wines, or particular beers, or specific ports because they like the taste.
There’s no true “nature” beside the meanings we give it.
Oh, I did not ask about the eternal true Platonic nature. I asked what do you believe the true nature of marriage to be.
You on the other hand, refuse to discover whether you are right, and refuse to give people the choice.
Do I, really? You seem to lapsing into the agitprop vocabulary.
I am polite out of respect for me.
Allow me to have my doubts. People like that don’t drop hints how they would really destroy the opponent’s positions if only the limits of politeness did not hold them back...
Allow me to have my doubts. People like that don’t drop hints how they would really destroy the opponent’s positions if only the limits of politeness did not hold them back...
Once again you miss the point. I don’t think my arguments would gain any extra force if I was personally rude about you, or resorted to the type of deliberate misreadings you engage in. Everyone can see what your position is like, and we can all draw our own conclusions.
The way we all conduct ourselves leads others to conclude things, not merely about the weight of our arguments, but the content of our characters. That’s all.
Well, the discussion seems to have drifted into the more heat and less light direction. I don’t find your position convincing and no doubt you feel the same way about mine. Perhaps we should just accept that we disagree.
Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Marriage rates were declining in the 1970s and 1980s even in countries where divorce wasn’t introduced until later, such as Ireland or Malta.
(And intuitively, I’d be less reluctant to do something if it was easier to undo it, though YMMV.)
Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion? Because it has always been among my biggest gripes with the conservative account of why divorce is so bad. It just doesn’t seem plausible, especially given how over-optimistic most people are about the prospects of their marriage! And frankly, I’d be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty. It might be rational in the abstract, but signals many troubling things about the individual, such as low trust and an instinctively transactional view of relationships. (Marriages for economic reasons probably need a whole different set of norms, such as a historically seen unspoken tolerance for adultery.)
I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women’s education and economic independence. Now, reasonable people who think those are great things can disagree whether the decline of traditional marriage is a cost or a neutral consequence, but I’ve never had time for people who seek to pin the blame on deliberate and direct political subversion.
Sure, I don’t like how some liberals attempt to be contrarian and claim that all the changes in this sphere have actually been unreservedly wonderful and a worthwhile goal from the start.… but that’s a general problem of people wanting policies to have no downsides, and the other side’s logical leap from calling out the downside to denying the problem is always baffling. Liberals cheering for something as a triumph for the Wonderful Nice Liberal Agenda might be less evidence that it’s a triumph for the Degenerate Corrupt Liberal Agenda and more evidence that liberals like cheering. This should not inform one’s analysis of the material/economic factors.
Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion?
So, it seems to me that there is a terrible disconnect between property-splitting during a divorce and the existence of no-fault divorce, making marriage a tremendously costly move for the wealthier of the two parties (especially if they’re male). If in order for Bob to marry Alice, he has to give her the unilateral option to take half of his things and leave, then marriage seems unwise.
In the era of fault divorce, Bob is safer- he needs to either break the contract, or can end the contract if Alice breaks it without having to transfer to her the same share of his possessions.
(I think that the collapse in marriage rates is seen at too coarse a level. If you look at marriage rates by class, you notice that the upper class is still living in the 50s and the lower class has collapsed. An explanation, that I buy, is that we no longer try to promote good citizenship and good living, and so unsurprisingly people answer the call of the short term, to their long term detriment.)
And frankly, I’d be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty.
This reads like a status assertion to me, along the lines of “follow your dreams” being code for “I’m awesome enough that I can get ahead by following my dreams” or “I’m awesome enough that I get to set my job parameters.” Not caring about loyalty is code for “I’m going to be awesome forever, so it’ll always be in their interests to stay with me,” but far better to have insurance in case of worse, poorer, or sickness.
I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women’s education and economic independence.
If so, then why are the educated women marrying more than uneducated women? [src]
The explanation, that I buy, is that we no longer try to promote good citizenship and good living, and so unsurprisingly people answer the call of the short term, to their long term detriment.
This makes sense if we assume marriage is causal for class. i.e. the people who don’t heed the call of the short term and do marry have better outcomes and end up higher class. Choosing marriages naturally sorts people into class, by this model.
Liberals would tell a story where things are reversed and class is causal of the pathology- they would say the economic changes that have occurred for the last few decades have increased ‘economic uncertainty’ for the lower class (for some measure of uncertainty.) which has lead to marital stress and divorce. Its also worth pointing out that in the lower classes divorce is usually less costly for the man (the wife is more likely to be working at a similar paying job, the man has less stuff to lose)
Personally, I found the book Red Families/Blue Families pushed me away from the first explanation and toward the second (full disclosure, this is part of a larger trend of me growing increasing liberal over the last decade and a half or so.)
I’ve edited the grandparent to say “an explanation,” because I don’t want to make the claim that this is a complete explanation. I very much agree that the prospects for marriage are significantly worse for the lower classes, for reasons both having to do with the shifting economic value of skills and the shifting costs of sex.
Liberals would tell a story where things are reversed and class is causal of the pathology- they would say the economic changes that have occurred for the last few decades have increased ‘economic uncertainty’ for the lower class (for some measure of uncertainty.) which has lead to marital stress and divorce.
There were many historical periods with much much greater economic uncertainty, they also had higher marriage rates.
Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
And frankly, I’d be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty. It might be rational in the abstract, but signals many troubling things about the individual, such as low trust and an instinctively transactional view of relationships. (Marriages for economic reasons probably need a whole different set of norms, such as a historically seen unspoken tolerance for adultery.)
Well, perhaps I should start by saying that I don’t like distinction you draw between “affection and companionship” and “economic reasons.” The two are implicitly entwined. I will attempt to flesh out my position.
You don’t need marriage for “affection and companionship,” at least in the short term. You can just hang out. But most people want more than that. They want to build a life together. That involves making costly investments that will only bear fruit over time (e.g. buying a house, raising children, pension plans, etc). That involves making irreversible compromises—e.g. a shared circle of friends means you will have to be friends with people you wouldn’t otherwise be friends with, and not friends with people you would otherwise like to be; same goes with shared hobbies, etc. That involves specialization—perhaps one spouse will give up paid employment, or only work part-time. And so on.
But the problem with all these decisions is that they can lead to time-incompatible incentives. If Alice gives up work for a while to raise children while Bob focuses on his career, then ten years later Alice will be less pretty, less employable, and more dependent on Bob. Bob, meanwhile, can much more easily walk out on the marriage and start again. What’s to stop Bob reaping the benefits of Alice’s sacrifices, then checking out of the marriage?
And realistic people know that they won’t necessarily be thrilled with each other for every moment of their marriage. They will have rows, they will have disagreements, there will be times when the grass seems greener elsewhere. So you may find my attitude creepy, but I find your attitude evil—I think it’s quite wrong to go into a marriage without thinking about how to make sure it lasts. It’s partly about Alice making sure that Bob stays loyal to her, otherwise she’s wasting her time building a life with him. But it’s also about Bob(wedding) making sure that Bob(10 years later) stays loyal to Alice, otherwise he’s wasting his time. And vice versa.
So when you put the two sides of the problem together, you see it’s quite tricky. But at the same time, it’s super-rewarding if you can pull it off. Some people try to work around it to make the incentives less time-incompatible (e.g. women having children later) but this itself has its costs. The best solution is if Alice and Bob can bind their future selves to the marriage like Odysseus binding himself to the mast; that way they can both truly commit to the marriage, secure in the knowledge that the other party will too. And that will, paradoxically, mean that they create the best shared life together, and so will have least reason to leave the marriage.
But if, instead, Alice and Bob can’t bind their future self, then they can’t trust each other. Maybe Alice can trust Bob(wedding), but Bob(10 years later) is a different person—yes, people change during marriage, but not necessarily in ways their partner can control or predict. So because they can’t commit to the marriage securely, they won’t make the same kind of costly investments in their shared life. Which means their marriage will be worse, which means they will be more tempted to divorce, and so on in a vicious circle.
You don’t need marriage for “affection and companionship,” at least in the short term. You can just hang out.
Except that in pre-1970s cultures, er..., ‘affection and companionship’ outside marriage were, er..., frowned upon, to the point that when people were caught doing ‘affection and companionship’ they were sometimes made to get married at gunpoint by each other’s parents. (Hell, there even are anecdotes about 20freakin′14 I could tell for that matter, though not as bad as that.)
I’d be much less against unbreakable marriage if it was something the bride and groom spontaneously chose to do, clearly demonstrating tht they know what they’re doing, without any social stigma for not doing so.
That involves making costly investments that will only bear fruit over time (e.g. buying a house, raising children, pension plans, etc).
That’s also an argument against at-will employment: it is much harder to make plans for the future if my employer could fire me at any time for any reason or no reason. And yet people who oppose at-will employment tend to support divorce and vice versa. This suggests that their opposition is more due to Green vs Blue politics than on anything directly rational.
(My own view is that employment contracts which cannot be unilaterally terminated without just cause should be allowed but not required, and ditto with marriages; of course employees who want such a contract would probably end up paid less than those who are OK with at-will employment, for obvious demand-and-supply reasons.)
If Alice gives up work for a while to raise children while Bob focuses on his career, then ten years later Alice will be less pretty, less employable, and more dependent on Bob.
That sounds like a very bad idea to me: for example, what if Bob dies? or turns out to be a violent psychopath, even if he managed to hide it until the wedding? My inner libertarian says that so long as Alice freely chose to marry Bob that’s her own problem and she shouldn’t be protected from herself, but my inner paternalist isn’t that sure.
Bob, meanwhile, can much more easily walk out on the marriage and start again. What’s to stop Bob reaping the benefits of Alice’s sacrifices, then checking out of the marriage?
So, in terms of David Friedman’s classification of “love”, “trade” and “force” in The Machinery of Freedom, you say that “love” can’t be reliable in the long term, and I agree, but why is force better than trade? I think it may be better if Alice gave something to Bob so that he won’t want to check out of the marriage.
And realistic people know that they won’t necessarily be thrilled with each other for every moment of their marriage. They will have rows, they will have disagreements, there will be times when the grass seems greener elsewhere.
Yes. And yet some couple stay together for years, even decades, without getting married. Why can’t we trust present Alice and present Bob’s determination about whether the current crisis is temporary, rather than relying on past Alice and past Bob’s (probably unrealistic, especially given their age) assessment that all future crises would be?
Some people try to work around it to make the incentives less time-incompatible (e.g. women having children later) but this itself has its costs.
And yet places where women have children later don’t look that much worse to me. ISTM socioeconomical effects would largely swamp biological effects due to maternal age. (Search this for “maternal age”.)
Bob(10 years later) is a different person
Yeah, that’s not exactly an argument for making him accountable for Bob(10 years earlier)’s mistakes.
(Of course, I do not endorse the present-day US system where I hear someone who unilaterally walks out of a marriage can be entitled to a sizeable fraction of the other spouse’s property and future income.)
I don’t know who you’re arguing against, but it certainly isn’t me.
As I’ve stated Oh, at least a dozen times in this thread, I don’t want all marriages to be unbreakable. I just want people to be able to set the terms of their marriages as they see fit. No-one should be forced to remain in a marriage they don’t want to, but people who break marriage contracts should have to pay damages according to the terms of that contract, just as I can’t be made to live somewhere I don’t want to, but I will have to pay damages if I break the lease.
It isn’t force over trade. Contracts are trade. People must be held to the terms of their contract(or damages) or there is no trade.
So, you choose not to address the grandparent’s point about social stigma, and you want to add other ‘optional’ binding agreements which may themselves have social pressure pushing people to adopt them.
If you want people to find the process of divorce unpleasant, you can rest assured that most of them probably do.
So, you choose not to address the grandparent’s point about social stigma, and you want to add other ‘optional’ binding agreements which may themselves have social pressure pushing people to adopt them.
I didn’t think the grandparent made any point about ‘social stigma’ worth addressing. But, to be clear:
You don’t have any right to your neighbours’ good opinion.
If doing X would upset (or please) your neighbours, your choice (not) to do X is still voluntary. It just means you’re facing a trade-off. Welcome to adulthood.
More generally, I don’t think that social approval/stigma are bad things. They are the glue that binds civil society together. I can’t help notice that people when people speak negatively of social pressure, they never apply that critique generally. Should there be less social stigma against racism? Less social stigma against harassment? Suddenly, they’re not so sure.
If you want people to find the process of divorce unpleasant, you can rest assured that most of them probably do.
Actually, my focus is on making marriage more pleasant.
More generally, I don’t think that social approval/stigma are bad things. They are the glue that binds civil society together. I can’t help notice that people when people speak negatively of social pressure, they never apply that critique generally. Should there be less social stigma against racism? Less social stigma against harassment? Suddenly, they’re not so sure.
I’m a lot happier with social stigma when it attaches to acts and fades in proportion to time distance from the act, at some rate inversely proportional to severity, rather than attaching to immutable properties (whether or not they derive from some act). If I hypothetically get plastered and vomit strawberry Jello shots and half-digested guacamole all over my friend’s expensive Persian rug, chances are my friends are going to give me a lot of shit about it, and to be a little more cautious about inviting me to parties for a while… but I do not thereby become Gest the Puker, then and forevermore. Divorce has traditionally not had this property.
I might make an exception for crimes on the level of murder or rape, on the grounds that those are so severe that the stigma shouldn’t vanish in a normal lifetime. (Though on reflection, I doubt I’d think much less of him if my grandfather revealed that he’d killed a man in his youth.) But if we’re going to be treating marriage as a civil contract like any other, then breaking it is a civil matter, not something on that level.
If doing X would upset (or please) your neighbours, your choice (not) to do X is still voluntary. It just means you’re facing a trade-off. Welcome to adulthood.
For some value of “voluntary”, sure. Likewise, for some value of “voluntary” if I point a gun at you and ask you to do something, your choice whether to do what I ask or be shot is voluntary.
For better or worse, marriages as presently constituted in the West are not commercial contracts, but legal, social, and (optionally) religious arrangements conferring certain statuses on the partners in the eyes of the law, society, the relevant religious bodies, and each other. If you want a marriage contract such as you describe, there’s no point in complaining that marriage contracts as they exist are not that. It would take a legal historian to say authoritatively, but I am not sure they ever have been. There are various similarities and differences, but they are different entities.
What you would have to do instead, is design a contract such as you would wish a marriage contract to be, and consult with lawyers to see if it can be done in a manner that would be recognised by current law and practice as a valid contract incurring damages for its breach. If you find that it cannot be done, then you would have to agitate for such changes to the law as would be necessary to recognise it.
If that’s too big a job for one person, you could combine with others, register a domain—realmarriage.org is available—and begin a movement.
What you would have to do instead, is design a contract such as you would wish a marriage contract to be, and consult with lawyers to see if it can be done in a manner that would be recognised by current law and practice as a valid contract incurring damages for its breach.
Isn’t that what pre-nups are?
I don’t know to which extent the courts will be willing to enforce the “damages” portions, but pre-nups are valid contracts and fulfill much of the needs you’re pointing to.
Possibly, but pre-nups aren’t valid in some jurisdictions (the UK, for example).
Some other issues have occurred to me regarding the redesign of marriage contracts. If a marriage contract is to be simply an ordinary contract in the framework of contract law, then several issues arise, which Salemicus and others of like mind might not want. What, if anything is to distinguish a “marriage” contract from any other, if it can be drawn up between any two (or more) people of legal age to enter into contracts? If the contract says whatever the parties wish it to say, is there any longer such a thing as “marriage”? How shall “marriage” be defined for such purposes as widows’ pensions, the line of succession in intestacy, etc.?
Any contract can be varied or voided instantly by common agreement of the parties, because no third party has any legal standing to object. Thus marriage “contracts” of this sort would make divorce by mutual agreement instant. (If there is no other ground than decision to separate, it takes 2 years in the UK.)
The only alternative is to reform the law of marriage itself. This is not to say that it cannot be done, but it would be a long row to hoe.
The entire concept of marriage is that the relationship between the individuals is a contract, even if not all conceptions of marriage have this contract as a literal legal contract enforced by the state. There’s good reason to believe that marriages throughout history have more often been about economics and/or politics than not, and that the norm that marriage is primarily about the sexual/emotional relationship but nonetheless falls under this contractual paradigm is a rather new one. I agree with your impression that this transactional model of relationships is a little creepy, and see this as an argument against maintaining this social norm.
I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women’s education and economic independence.
BTW, the total marriage rate by year is a metric that can be easily confounded by tempo effects: if in a country all people born until 1950 married at 20 and all people born since 1951 married at 30, the marriage rate between 1971 to 1980 would be exactly 0 but (neglecting the mortality of twentysomething) no cohort would be any less likely to ever get married than another.
I see that as evidence that marriage, as currently implemented, is not a particularly appealing contract to as many people as it once was. Whether this is because of no-fault divorce is irrelevant to whether this constitutes “widespread suffering.”
I reject the a priori assumptions that are often made in these discussions and that you seem to be making, namely, that more marriage is good, more divorce is bad, and therefore that policy should strive to upregulate marriage and downregulate divorce. If this is simply a disparity of utility functions (if yours includes a specific term for number of marriages and mine doesn’t, or similar) then this is perhaps an impasse, but if you’re arguing that there’s some correlation, presumably negative, between number of marriages and some other, less marriage-specific form of disutility (i.e. “widespread suffering”), I’d like to know what your evidence or reasoning for that is.
Look at the following graph of divorce over time. [...] Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
I’m not sure what point are you trying to make with these graphs. If people were allowed to make binding pre-nup agreements that penalized adultery would there be more marriages? Less divorces? More happiness? None of these things seem obvious to me.
I say “damages in the case of breach” and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It’s so strange.
Pattern-matching is often rational in politics just because it’s so cheap, as long as the pattern makes sense in the first place. I’m sorry, but the pattern of reactionary rhetoric about marriage has these very deliberate connotations. People who discuss this tend to discuss punishing sinners (vicariously so), not holding rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts.
Credibly dissociate yourself from people you don’t want to be pattern-matched to, and show that you understand the reasoning by which your audience opposes them (in this case, for example, Salemicus should at least acknowledge that at-fault divorce can—to put it mildly! - increase underlying gender inequality without any explicitly gendered provisions), and that you’re not going to defend them in that particular battle. Leftists do it all the time, to the extent that they have the opposite problem of not being able to unite while agreeing with each other on 95% of everything.
But there’s no-one who advocates dragging people off in chains, slavery, etc. This isn’t pattern-matching me to some well-known group (in which case I agree, I should distinguish myself). Instead, this is just deliberately straw-manning.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “punishing sinners”—but I assume you mean treating adultery as not just a breach of contract, but a tort. Well, damages for a tort are also financial.
As for “underlying gender inequality”—you’ll notice that no-one else has brought that up in this thread. Perhaps that is the “reasoning by which [my] audience opposes” me”, but if so I’d prefer that people actually advanced that reasoning, rather than that being their double super-secret baseline position, and their public one being a lot of straw-manning and nonsense. Alternatively, it may be that the “underlying gender inequality” argument is yours and yours alone, and you are projecting.
Again, this reasoning would equally suggest that I am not free to hire you to work for me, since you can stop working (stop being monogamous) and I have no recourse other than to fire you (terminate the marriage).
You aren’t permitted to bind yourself to work for someone in the future either.
At least under English law, you are allowed to bind yourself to work for someone in the future. The employer will not get specific performance awarded, but you can be forced to pay damages, observe a restrictive covenant, etc.
Most employment in the US is at will, and you can fire someone any time and they can walk out any time. So even if binding yourself is legal (I have no idea) and you count that, that reasoning has the same problem as the one about vegetarianism: It really doesn’t matter whether you can make a contract for such things because pretty much nobody ever does so. In practice there’s no difference—you’re not going to be making a contract for either one, and the penalty for breaking an actual job agreement will just be reputation, like breaking an actual marriage agreement..
Furthermore, this argument requires that you believe that in states where such an agreement is illegal (and I suspect, considering the restrictions on non-compete clauses, that there are such states) you’re not free to hire someone for a job.
As I understand it, in states where employment is “at will”, you can form a written agreement with your employer, but most arrangements are at will by the mutual choice of the parties. It might work out like that in marriage too, if you gave people the choice—maybe people would stick with the current system because that’s what they like! Of course, the fact that you’re unwilling to give people the choice suggests that you’re not too confident of that result.
Furthermore, this argument requires that you believe that in states where such an agreement is illegal (and I suspect, considering the restrictions on non-compete clauses, that there are such states) you’re not free to hire someone for a job.
It is certainly true that there are a large number of unconscionable restrictions in the labour market, from rent-seeking credentialism to bogus cartelization and onwards. It is perhaps hyperbole to say that you’re not free to hire someone for a job, because at least some terms will be enforceable, but I would certainly understand where someone was coming from if they said that.
Prenuptial agreements have historically not been considered legally valid in the United Kingdom. This is still generally the case, although a 2010 Supreme court test case between the German heiress Katrin Radmacher and Nicolas Granatino,[6] indicated that such agreements can “in the right case” have decisive weight in a divorce settlement.[7]
On the other hand, pre-nups are enforceable in the US and most of continental Europe.
And if you’re afraid the court won’t enforce your pre-nup you can put assets in escrow, for example :-)
In any case, I’m not sure what the underlying argument is. I tend to see it as expressing the wish that the society enforce a very particular notion of marriage on everyone regardless of what they think about it.
In any case, I’m not sure what the underlying argument is. I tend to see it as expressing the wish that the society enforce a very particular notion of marriage on everyone regardless of what they think about it.
The underlying argument is exactly the opposite of what you see it as.
Society is currently enforcing a very particular notion of marriage on everyone regardless of what they think about it. Specifically, removing any notion of fault from the termination.
I would like people to be able to credibly commit as to their future behaviour if they so wish. I would like to give people that choice, which the likes of Kennaway would deny them. If you want to stick with the current arrangements, you should be able to.
I do wonder about so wilful a misreading of the discussion here.
Specifically, removing any notion of fault from the termination.
I feel there is a bunch of anchoring going on here.
Why do you think the termination of the relationship naturally has an actionable fault of one party that is being removed?
By the way, do you feel that this fault has to be sexual? Can this actionable fault be ill temper, or snoring, or flatulence, or lack of humor, or insufficient performance in bed, or earning not enough money?
I would like people to be able to credibly commit as to their future behaviour if they so wish.
I don’t think so. Putting on a wedding ring looks like a credible commitment to me. What you want is to punish people for breaking their commitments and so far I haven’t seen a good reason to do so in the context of marriages.
I am glad to hear that you think that general contractual concepts should apply to marriage contracts, but you are surely aware that they do not, and this is exactly what is being complained of.
Informally, a marriage contract can be seen as a type of contract (hence the name), but legally it generally has a rather different nature, with some similarities and some differences to ordinary contracts. For example, the state decrees what does and what does not constitute a marriage in the eyes of the law. In contrast, Amazon declares its own terms and conditions. When a marriage is recognised, that has various implications for taxation of the partners, rights in a deceased partner’s estate, etc. that would not be present in ordinary contracts. It is called a marriage contract, but that does not imply that all of ordinary contract law does, can, or should apply.
Considered as a contract, what are its terms? It is not drawn up by the parties to it, but lies scattered across the books of the law. As those laws change, so the contract changes.
Is the complaint that the courts are no longer enforcing its terms, or is the reality that the terms themselves have changed? Time was when conjugal rights were a thing, a legal thing. The time has changed, and now, rape within marriage is a thing, a criminal thing, however objectionable the likes of James A. Donald may find that, and however much he may pontificate that when rape within marriage is a thing, marriage is no longer a thing.
If you were drawing up an actual contract of marriage, a uniform contract to define what marriage shall be throughout a state, what would it say?
Monogamy just means that you do not seek more than one sexual or romantic partner. You can be monogamous while your party isn’t. Whether this would suit you is a matter of personal preferences.
Or, two partners can be monogamous even if they have no legal mean to bind themselves to.
Monogamy just means that you do not seek more than one sexual or romantic partner.
I also mean that by “monogamy”, but other people in this conversation have made clearer they mean something narrower by that word, so this discussion sounds like “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” when Alice has already made clear she means an auditory sensation and Bob has already made clear he means an acoustic wave.
Still, somebody on Less Wrong once told me that they thought I wouldn’t be “free” to be monogamous in the US because if I stopped being so in the future the police wouldn’t punish me. Of course the exact same thing applies to vegetarianism, but that person said I am free to be on a diet (and tapped out).
I think I understand the idea Eugene is getting at in the sibling thread. Let me see if I can explain it a little differently.
As Sister Y explained in this excellent article, people no longer have a way of committing themselves to marriage. This is a problem for two reasons, neither of which applies to vegetarianism.
In a sense, marriage IS commitment, and talking about a “marriage” without commitment is like talking about a “prisoner” who can leave his cell any time he wants, or a “warranty” which can be ignored at the company’s discretion. Now, you could argue that this is a matter of semantics, and to some extent you would be right, but there is a deeper issue here; that marriage with commitment and “marriage” without commitment are so far apart in relationship-space that we should treat them as completely different things, and that we might be justified in not wanting to call these clusters of relationships by the same name at all (some people like to call the modern relationship cluster Marriage 2.0 for just this reason).
If you can’t credibly commit to doing something, you are going to have trouble finding people who are willing to expose themselves to risk should you fail to do so. Thus, by removing your freedom to pre-commit yourself to fulfilling a marriage contract, your freedom to enter into these contracts has been reduced (indeed, the collapse of the marriage rate appears to be an empirical confirmation of this model). Thomas Schelling covered this in his The Strategy of Conflict.
Now, the term under discussion is “monogamy”, not “marriage”, but back to problem 1; the modern serial “monogamy” is a completely different cluster of relationships from the old monogamy, which implied marriage. Dalrock, for example, argues that serial “monogamy” is a promiscuous and immoral relationship model, which are things he doesn’t believe about the traditional religious monogamy model. Whether you agree with him or not, the point is, again, that modern serial “monogamy” is pretty different from old monogamy which meant things like not marrying two wives at once, and maybe some people want to avoid overloading an existing term to incorporate such a different new concept.
For my own part, I would say that two people who are continuing to live together despite both of them preferring to stop doing so, solely because they committed to doing so at some time in the past, is at least as far away from what the word “marriage” properly refers to as two people who are living together today because they feel like it but would happily walk away from each other tomorrow if they found themselves feeling differently.
But I accept that this position is not universally accepted, and in particular that other people might use “marriage” to refer to the first kind of relationship, even among people who can’t stand the sight of each other, aren’t speaking to each other, don’t share goals or values, etc., as long as they are barred from (for example) marrying anyone else and as long as the legal, financial and organizational obligations that go along with marriage can be imposed on them successfully.
And I can see how, for someone whose concept of marriage works this way, the analysis you perform here makes sense: I can’t meaningfully precommit to not hating the very sight of you in twenty years, but if marriage is unrelated to whether I hate the sight of you, then I can meaningfully precommit to remaining married to you… and the way I do that is by subjecting myself to a legal system that continues imposing those obligations on me for the rest of my life, no matter what happens.
And, sure, I can see how such a person would similarly want words like “monogamy” to refer to such a lifetime commitment, and words like “divorce” to refer to an empty set, etc.
Well, in the comment I was talking about in the grandparent (which I’d link to if this thing was faster) I said “relationship with my girlfriend” rather than “marriage with my wife”, which I’d think makes clear the former is what I was talking about. Maybe “monogamy” it’s a bad label for it, but ‘$word is a bad label for $thing’ hardly implies ‘I’m not free to do $thing’. (And while it’s unlike traditional lifelong monogamy, it’s also unlike Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory, and given that around here more people practice the latter than the former it seems more useful to me to have a word to distinguish it from the latter than from the former.)
(I’m not sure what exactly Christopher Ryan meant by “monogamy”, but he was opposing it to EEA-style sexual omnivory, which from his description sounds more like Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory than First-World-small-town-mainstream-style serial monogamy to me.)
In the comment I was talking about in the grandparent (which I’d link to if this thing wasn’t being so slow today on my netbook), I was talking about the former (it said “relationship with my girlfriend”, not “marriage with my wife”). If you want to say “monogamy” is a bad label for that, fine, but “you are not free to do $thing” is a different claim altogether from “$word is not a good label for $thing”.
(And while modern monogamy is different from traditional monogamy, it’s also different from Bay-area-technophile-style polyamory, and given that the latter is probably much more common around here, I think it’s still useful to have a word to distinguish one from another.)
Frankly, I don’t understand this mindset at all.
You commit to the marriage when you say “I do”. The idea that you cannot commit unless you have the right to sue your ex-spouse in a court of law for money seem preposterous to me on its face.
Not the right to sue; the right to be sued, which makes you less likely to become an ex-spouse, and more likely to become spouse to begin with.
There is no right to be sued, there is obligation to be subject to lawsuits, that’s not a right.
In any case, that doesn’t make much difference. So you cannot commit unless there is the big stick of a potential lawsuit hanging over your head? Um, I am sorry for you, then.
I have a feeling that there is some dual-level arguing going on. On the visible level there is talk about inability to commit and how the society took away your (personally, your) opportunity to commit yourself to marriage.
But there also seems to be a strong undercurrent of “the slutty proles are fucking around too much and fuck up the social system so, by Jove, we better get them under control”.
Are you discarding the whole idea of contracts? “What do you need a contract for, can’t you people commit without a big stick of a potential lawsuit hanging over your head? I am sorry for you then.”
Even if a person is fully capable and willing to commit using his sense of duty, in the absence of perfect telepaths they may not able to efficiently signal said capacity and willingness.
Duty? We are talking about marriage, not about commercial contracts specifying supplies of cabbage.
Marriage is a bit different from signing a contract whereby the woman undertakes to cook, wash the floors, and be available in bed, and the man undertakes to earn some money, fix the plumbing, and screw the woman on a regular basis.
If you don’t trust the person you’re marrying to the extent that you want a legal threat hanging over him/her, that marriage is probably a bad idea.
And if you really really want to commit, go tattoo the name of your spouse on your forehead.
I’d expect the duty I have to my family to be of bigger importance than a commercial contract. For starters it tends to be a lifelong duty.
Yes, it’s a contract to “have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part”.
Btw, I’m through with this discussion. Do you always seek to portray the people you are talking with as horrible monsters? Do you expect to actually convince me by talking to me as if I’m a monster, or is this just a status game to lower me in the eyes of whatever audience you are aiming at?|
Either way, keep your scorn or share it, but I’m out.
That might work, but facial tattoos are status-lowering in our society.
Does your duty to the family derive from the legal system of your country? Would your duty to your family change if some laws about who can sue whom for what changed?
I didn’t mean to say anything about you personally. I used “you” in the sense of generic you.
But I am curious, which part did you find implying being a horrible monster?
Just to confirm, this is in fact a decent summary of my position.
The difference between monogamy and vegetarianism here is that monogamy requires a binding commitment from another person. Thus, the inability to make a binding contract is a problem for monogamy but not vegetarianism.
How does that distinguish being free to be monogamous and being free to be vegetarian? The number of vegetarians who make binding contracts to be vegetarian is essentially nonexistent.
Monogamy involves another party, vegetarianism doesn’t.
You didn’t answer the question. You answered the question “why can’t you make a contract for monogamy?” and my question was “why does the inability to make a contract for monogamy matter?” Nobody, for all practical purposes, makes a contract to be vegetarian, so whether or not you can make a contract is irrelevant to comparing the two.
Like I said in the parent, vegetarianism doesn’t require a contract, monogamy does.
But why does that matter?
So does employment. Does at-will employment mean people in the US aren’t free to hire each other?
Only if you’re dynamically consistent (no akrasia, etc.), otherwise your future self is another party—and some people do write contracts with their future selves; does the fact that the police won’t enforce such contracts mean people aren’t free to make them?
Long term contracts exist and are enforceable (even if they’re not the default). Monogamy contracts aren’t enforceable in the current legal regime.
There is a huge difference in degree here.
With vegetarianism itself, people do seem to stick to it (but probably there’s some selection bias at work here), but with restrictive diets in general, I’m under the impression that the fraction of people who try to be on a diet but then lapse is within an order of magnitude of the fraction of couples who try to be monogamous but then lapse—probably within a factor of two, too.
I was talking about the difference in degree between cooperating with your future self and cooperating with others.
The former’s harder for me; YMMV.
Why?
Because monogamy relies on your spouse also being monogamous.
And playing chess relies on your opponent also following the rules of chess, so aren’t we free to play chess either? (Or will the police arrest me if I castle while my king is in check?)
Chess can rely on reputation since games are short and someone who refuses to play by the rules will find no one to play against (also the stakes are small). (And in high states games, e.g., tournaments you will at least be escorted out for refusing to play by the rules.) Note, that since monogamy assumes someone will only have one spouse ever, reputation is less useful.
A better example is, are we free to engage in commerce if the police refuse to enforce either non-payment or non-delivery? (Especially if they do enforce anti-violence and anti-theft laws against people attempting to take matters into their own hands in cases of non-payment or non-delivery). Another example, would you say companies are free to provide employee pensions if the law says that companies can cancel pensions anytime (even after retirement) and employees (or former employees) have no recourse if a company does cancel it?
There are many cases where the law doesn’t require specific performance. If you hire someone to work for you, they can refuse to come to work. You can fire them, but you can’t force them to work for you. If you offer to fix someone’s sink in exchange for them fixing your car, one of you could fail to do the work. The other could sue and get paid some money, but the law won’t enforce specific performance and you can’t actually force another person to fix a sink or a car.
By your reasoning we are not “free to hire someone to do work” or “free to exchange sink fixing for car fixing”.
And even in the chess example, you can’t force someone to play chess, and if you exclude them from playing because of their reputation, they still are not playing chess with you. Soi by your reasoning, we are not free to “play chess with person X”, even if you argue that we are free to play chess provided we aren’t picky about partners.
It’s true that someone cannot gain a reputation for being honest in monogamy, but they can get a reputation for cheating. It only requires the “can have a reputation for cheating” half in order for reputation to be useful. It still lets them cheat the first time, but they can always cheat the first time in a chess game as well.
Could whoever modded me down please explain why they modded me down? I must have lost around 20 karma in the past few days because I am getting constantly modded down for almost anything I post.
Abuse of the karma system is a well-known problem on LessWrong,
which the admins appear to have decided not to do anything about.Update: actually, it appears Eliezer has looked into this and not been able to find any evidence of mass-downvoting.
It’s happened to me again. At one point I lost about 20 karma in a few hours. Now it seems everything I post gets voted down. At an estimated loss of 30 karma per week, I’ll end up being forced off the site by August.
Hmmm. Your past 30 days karma is positive. Either you’re saying it was formerly a lot more positive, or any downvoting isn’t having nearly the effect you suggest.
I tried actually counting them. My past 80 comments (not counting recent ones just now) have all been modded down at least once. There are some that are at 0, but only because another person modded them up as well.
(I tried counting before and found the 54th comment was not modded down but I can’t seem to find that comment again, for some reason.)
This covers well over the whole month. I’m still at positive for the month because I have enough upvotes on my comments that voting each one down by 1 still leaves me at positive.
My karma was over 600 and it’s now down to 571.
And this only seems to have happened recently, so the first weeks of the month were enough to make the total positive anyway.
If a post older than thirty days is downvoted, it doesn’t appear in the past 30 days karma.
I occasionally downvote a few (3-5) of your comments in a row, based on merits, not anything else, but I haven’t done it recently, so someone else might be expecting you to post low-quality comments and, after stumbling over one, goes through a bunch. I wouldn’t sweat it, though. I think I dropped 10-12 karma in the last couple hours, probably for similar reasons. Just do your best to make useful and measured comments and the forum readers will appreciate it.
As Salemicus mentioned in the other thread, the in the analogous case with marriage, the law won’t even do that.
That’s not what I meant by monogamy—I wouldn’t call my relationship non-monogamous just because my girlfriend had sex with someone else years before I even met her, any more than I would call someone who used to eat meat but no longer does a non-vegetarian.
I agree that monogamy in your sense of the word would depend on something guaranteeing that enough people stay virgin until old enough to find a lifetime partner.
(I’m assuming you’re not talking about contraband, since police will not only refuse to enforce non-payment or non-delivery but also bust your balls if they catch you in a complete transaction.) Reputation can work for commerce too—ever looked at the feedback on eBay sellers or at TripAdvisor reviews of restaurants?
I don’t know whether I’d call it a pension, but I’d say you’re certainly free to give me a given amount of money every month as long as you feel like it and then stop. (Of course it’d be foolish for me to rely on that money alone for their maintenance, but that’s another issue.)
That’s my point.
This, however, makes it harder for me to promise you a pension as part of employment negotiations.
We are indeed. One will just have to handle counterparty risk by other means, such as only dealing with people you know well, private enforcement, meeting for simultaneous performance, etc. This is readily observable in the real world everywhere that the legal system is weak, corrupt, or absent.
BTW, and this is just a nitpick, in Western countries where the legal system is reliable, the police do indeed refuse to enforce contracts, because it isn’t part of their job. Instead, it is up to a wronged party to bring a civil action to the courts. The police have no role in the matter. Contract rights are not property rights.
As another has already pointed out, the enforcement carried out by the courts almost invariably consists of awarding monetary compensation, not specific performance, which happens only in certain exceptional cases. In the UK, these exceptional cases do not include personal services.
You are trying to put your conclusion into the premise of an absurd hypothetical of Cloud Cuckoo Land. A pension contract that was terminable at will by the pension provider is a pension contract no-one would sign up to. A law saying that all pension arrangements are terminable at will is not going to be passed; if passed, people would find ways to structure their retirement plans that avoid whatever legal definition of “pension contract” was present in such an absurd law. Hey, suppose there was a law that when you buy something online, the supplier has no obligation to supply what you ordered? Well, go ahead and suppose it.
You are presumably trying to draw an analogy with the current state of marriage law. It would be more productive to talk about marriage law directly. Adultery is usually grounds for divorce. That looks like contract enforcement to me—the sort of enforcement that contracts are subject to in the real world, rather than the fantasy S&M version in which the police drag the disobedient partner back in handcuffs. Time was when the guilty party would be sent away from the severed marriage without a penny (at least, if the guilty party was the woman), but that generally does not happen today. If you think the courts should regard adultery more sternly when deciding the division of the common property, go ahead and argue that, rather than claiming that no-one can be monogamous these days because the police won’t “enforce” the marriage contract.
If I make a contract with Amazon, you’re right that I can’t make them deliver the goods. But I can get damages for their failure to do so, that would put me in the same position as if they had in fact delivered the TV (of course I have to mitigate my loss, etc). I am glad to hear that you think that general contractual concepts should apply to marriage contracts, but you are surely aware that they do not, and this is exactly what is being complained of.
You do not (at least in the UK) get damages for breach of a marriage contract. This strikes me as extremely unfair. Adultery is a fundamental breach of the marriage contract, so yes this is grounds for termination of the contract, but the innocent party doesn’t get any proper remedy. No-one is saying that people have to be dragged back in handcuffs. But it is not just or equitable that, to continue your analogy to contract law, a breach of the contract by one party leads to a kind of rescission, rather than damages payable.
What would you or Eugine Nier consider a proper remedy? For better or worse, adultery is generally looked on more lightly nowadays than it was in times past. The courts practice accordingly when ruling on a contested divorce. The guilty party is no longer cut off without a penny, still less forced to wear a scarlet letter, horsewhipped or stoned. If that is a problem, it is not a problem with the law, but of those general attitudes. O tempora! O mores!
Those who prefer a different standard are as free as they always have been to find like-minded partners, arrange things between themselves, keep their own agreements, and find their own social support for them, just as those who would engage in trade in the absence of reliable contract law must create their own arrangements.
I can’t speak for Eugine, but I already told you the remedy I think appropriate—ordinary contractual damages. And this would be true not only for adultery, but for any fundamental breach. Of course, parties should be able to specify their own terms as needed in these cases (e.g. liquidated damages). And this needn’t even be the default; but the key thing is that at present, if parties want their marriage contract to be meaningful, they are unable to make it so, as the courts will simply disregard any such terms as contrary to public policy. Fortunately the wind is blowing in the right direction (prenuptial agreements) but much too slowly.
You are right that people are able to trade in the absence of government. But government sometimes helps! Despite this, people like yourself have reduced marriage to a kind of Somalia, where people are unable to form enforceable contracts. People who prefer a different standard as you so strangely put it, should be free to form their own contracts.
However,
I am disinclined to continue a conversation with someone as lacking in basic manners as you.
Prenups as currently practiced are mostly concerned with how to arrange matters if and when the marriage breaks down, not how the marriage itself shall be conducted. This is hardly a support for the institution of marriage.
I don’t know what you mean by that. I didn’t draw up any of these laws, neither have I agitated for them. But nor have I agitated against them—are you counting all who do not actively evangelise for your views as your enemy?
Huh? It’s up to you (and your future spouse) to define a marriage contract—they are commonly called pre-nups.
If you want to enter a marriage under conditions that adultery leads to remedies like money paid, sure, just write up such a contract and get it signed. However I see no reasons to impose such a contract on everyone.
Traditionally, of course, a marriage is not a contract at all.
As solipsist notes, pre-nuptial agreements are not binding in the UK, although the courts can take them into account. I referred to this in my post above. However, their scope is much less than what you suggest. A pre-nuptial agreement that specified damages to be paid in the event of fundamental breach would be void as contrary to public policy, at least in the UK. I believe the same is true in most US states, but obviously, marriage laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
To be clear:
I do not want to impose a uniform contract on everyone.
I want people who wish to bind themselves in a marriage contract to be able to do so.
This is generally not currently possible.
This is extremely unfair, and leads to widespread suffering.
Not exactly. You want people to be able to irrevocably bind their future selves. That is rarely a good idea.
I am also curious whether your fundamental view of marriage is one of a contract between two parties. If so, well, that leads to interesting consequences. If not so, why do you want to treat marriage as a contract?
This is generally currently possible subject to the normal limits on contracts that the society imposes. There are a lot of those (e.g. you can’t contract to be a slave) and I don’t see what makes marriage special.
I would like to see some supporting evidence for that claim.
Not so, and this is an outrageous reading of what I have said. People will still be able to get divorces, just they will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault. I didn’t irrevocably bind my future self when I rented my house, but if I break the lease I’ll have to pay compensation to the landlord.
Your comments above suggest that perhaps you don’t understand the state of law, at least in the UK.
No it isn’t, at least in the UK. All I want is for marriage to be subject to normal limits on contracts, not the special limits on contracts that apply only in the case of marriage. I say “damages in the case of breach” and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It’s so strange.
Look at the following graph of divorce over time.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons
Note the sharp discontinuity after 1969. What happened then? Oh yes, the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, meaning you no longer had to prove fault to get a divorce (and divorce settlements were also not based on fault).
Now look at the marriage rate:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/resources/gmr_tcm77-258471.png
Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
There is no sharp discontinuity around 1969. If you smooth out the weird peak around ww2 (which we expect was caused by ww2), the plot of divorces follows a fairly smooth exponential trend (which we expect due to population growth), until the late 70s (the tapering in the 80s is due to both declining marriage rates and a stabilizing divorce rate).
Marriage rates really don’t start collapsing until the early 80s (they don’t drop below 1930s levels until 1981).
I would think for the story you want to tell, you’d want to compare divorce rates to the marriage rate, but it doesn’t hold up. Divorce rates were stable all through the 90s, but the marriage rate continued to plummet.
Except population growth has been trivial over this period compared to the rise in divorces.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44549000/gif/_44549854_uk_pop_226.gif
No. In my grandparents time, people were inculcated with the morality that divorce was awful and shameful. Hence when they started to liberalise divorce, few took advantage of it; social pressure was enough. But over time that social pressure weakened because informal mechanisms are weak compared to formal ones. Hence that social pressure gets harder and harder to maintain, and divorce looks more and more acceptable to the new generations. I think we have now bottomed out of that vicious cycle, but unfortunately it has meant a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire.
The post WW2 baby boom lead to a boom in marriage-aged people in the 60s and 70s. You can see it on the second of the plots on the post you linked to- look how the total number of marriages is increasing between 60 and 72.
And my point isn’t that the rate of divorce wasn’t increasing, it was (though not as much as a plot of total divorces would have you believe, much better to plot the rates).
My point is that 1969 wasn’t a special year in the data. There is no discontinuity on the plots you linked to, and no discontinuity in the data.
This whole paragraph feels largely unresponsive to what I said. My point was that divorce rates stabilized in the late 80s, but marriage rates continued to fall. You can tell whatever story you want, but we have to agree on what the data is doing.
If whoever voted me down for this post, and the post previous in the thread would explain why I’d appreciate it.
In objective discussions about graphs, I feel like we ‘aspiring rationalists’ ought to be able to come to an agreement about the data in the graph (if perhaps not the causal story behind it), and downvotes for discussing the actual graphs linked to seem to me to be counterproductive.
If I’ve broken some social norm, I’d appreciate being explicitly told.
That is because the Church of England (or RCC, or pretty much any other major Christian denomination) told them so.
And you don’t think that the King’s example was enough?
So, do tell. What’s wrong with divorce?
More precisely, what the RCC says is that there’s no such thing as divorce, and even if a judge purports to have cancelled your marriage, as far as God is concerned you’re still married.
David Brooks Says
I personally call this phenomenon “the Regressive Cost of Virtue” (virtue in the descriptive, not the normative sense). Too lazy to write a good comment on it, I’ll just quote myself from IRC.
Everyone? Or do you just want enforcement of pre-nups?
I am still interested in your view on the basic nature of marriage. Is it, in its essence, a contract between two parties? To point to an obvious divergent view, Catholics view marriage rather differently.
You voluntarily signed a contract to that effect. If there is no such contract (or no such clause in the contract), would you still owe compensation to the landlord?
Well then, let’s avoid fuzzy generalities and get down to brass tacks.
Alice and Bob are thinking of getting married. However Alice believes that men are philandering bastards who tend to screw everything that moves so she would like to protect herself against the possibility of Bob turning out to be precisely such a bastard.
In the world which you would consider just and fair, what would Alice and Bob do and what would the legal system have to accept?
It seems that you have in mind an enforceable contract whereby Alice and Bob agree that if any of them gets caught in the wrong bed, he or she will pay the other party ONE! MILLION! DOLLARS! or some other sufficiently painful sum.
I don’t see anything horrible about such a contract, but I’m curious what you think the contract-less default should be (Eve and Dick just got married without any specific contracts, Eve got drunk at a party and slept with her boss, what’s next?). I am also interested in the motivations of Alice in insisting upon such a contract—is it incentive or punishment?
Sure, but I don’t see why that is “extremely unfair” and “leads to widespread suffering”. I see nothing wrong with low marriage rates.
If you like, call it a pre-nup. In your terms, I want:
enforcement of pre-nups
Pre-nups to be valid over a much wider variety of terms.
And I still don’t find this level of analysis helpful. Marriage means different things to different people, and has developed over millenia. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about its basic nature.
I would propose that, for now, the contract-less default should be the status quo, because I feel like otherwise you would be upsetting fixed expectations by the back door. But of course existing married couples should be free to alter their marriage terms. After a while I think almost everyone will want a contract that makes the party at fault pay compensation; once that happens, it would make sense to switch the default, but not until then.
It is very hard for the rest of us to speculate as to the motivations of a fictional character you have created. But even if you disapprove of Alice’s motivations, it seems to me that you should respect her right to form a contract.
The marriage rate collapsing isn’t “unfair.” Denying people the ability to form voluntary contracts is the unfair part. The marriage rate collapsing leads to widespread suffering because people want to get married, but feel they can’t because the institution is too unstable due to lack of precommitment. And hence you get soaring illegitimacy. The whole thing is a disaster.
What gives the game away is that I am talking about giving people more freedom, and I get this vitriolic pushback, and find myself constantly being strawmanned. I note that certain people viscerally hate the idea of discipline, stability, order, hard work and bourgeois values generally, and view long-lasting marriages as awful patriarchy. This is what’s lurking beneath it all.
Uhm, are you sure you are not succumbing to the false-consensus effect?
Adultery was harshly punished in the past. Even in the recent past, before the 70s, adultery was one of the few admissible reasons to obtain divorce, and lead to unfavourable settlement for the adulterous party. In the 70s, no-fault divorce laws were passed in most Western countries, and adultery was demoted to having little or no role in divorce settlements.
Keep in mind that no-fault divorce laws weren’t imposed by dictators trying to destroy the fabric of society or something (*), they were passed with popular support by democratically elected governments, and there is no noticeable political pressure today to revise them, or even to make the type of pre-nup agreements you are referring to enforceable.
Your position largely used to be the default one in the past, and public opinion has been moving consistently away from it for the last decades.
Holding an unpopular political position is legitimate, but what makes you think that public opinion would move back to it?
(* Well, the Soviet divorce law of 1918 arguably was.)
Quite sure. To quote from another post I made in this thread:
Basically, I think people radically and consistently underestimate the effects of institutional constraints and incentives, and assume that aggregate societal results are somehow “chosen.” So people tend to think that:
Our high rate of divorce is very bad
Changing the incentives to get a divorce has little or no effect on this.
Something just “magically” happened in the 1960s/1970s (“Kids today...”/”liberation!”).
If you enabled people to make binding commitments in marriage, I don’t think most people would leap out and take advantage immediately. Most people would just keep on with whatever they’re doing. But a small number of people would, and their marriages would be more successful and happier and long-lasting, and over time (decades) their behaviour would be imitated, and so on.
Disagree about the popular support thing. In Britain, certainly, the Divorce Reform Act was passed with neither popular support nor opposition, just a public who didn’t particularly care. The people pushing for it were a small number of activists, who were also in favour of these social “liberalisations” like abolition of the death penalty, etc. Many of these “lilberalisations” were in fact quite unpopular. I think you greatly underestimate the institutional leeway available to politicians/regulators.
I don’t think my position is so much unpopular as it is low-demand. I think the UK government, at least, could easily pass the kind of law I favour, and no-one much would care. In fact I don’t think my position is ever likely to be in high demand, because most people don’t think incentives are particularly important.
It seems to me that you are arguing that some small groups of activists somehow managed to manipulate the democratic governments of multiple countries in a short span of time, without the general public taking notice, despite the fact that this alleged manipulation affected in substantial (and significantly negative, in your opinion) ways the family life of many people.
Sorry, but I don’t think this is a rationally tenable position.
Yes. This is indeed the whole point of activism.
I never said anything of the sort. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment that people are determined to put words into my mouth, as it indicates they feel unable to argue with my actual position. In fact, of course, the public did take notice, but didn’t much care.
Yes, because the effect was attenuated, and was not seen as causally linked to the activity.
I’m afraid your model of political activity in democratic governments is rather faulty.
Or maybe it indicates that you are not being clear in arguing your position.
In another comment you claimed that divorce rates skyrocketed the very same year that no-fault divorce legislation was passed, now you are arguing that there was no immediate large effect.
I’m starting to think that you actually don’t have a coherent position, and you just want to argue that “good old” conservative values are obviously desirable and therefore you have to handwave away the fact that public opinion is largely against them by pushing a quasi-conspiracist narrative.
Unless you want to argue for some extreme form of anarcho-libertarianism, you would concede that there are some types of voluntary contracts that it is in the public interest for the state to consider unenforceable.
Selling yourself into slavery is the textbook example, but there are clearly many others.
I’m not saying that the type of pre-nup agreements that impose monetary compensation on adultery are necessarily in the same class of slavery or other forms of undesirable contracts, in fact, I have no strong intuitions either way.
What do you infer from the silence of people who hear what you’re saying, find it uncompelling but not particularly viscerally hateful, shrug, and go on about our business?
I infer that you don’t particularly care one way or the other about the discussion. Should I infer something different?
“care about” is a broad term. I certainly have opinions about it, but if you mean that I don’t have strong emotional responses to it, your inference is correct as far as it goes.
I don’t mean purely division-of-property contracts. Pre-nups are general agreements, they can be about anything the parties want to agree to.
Ah. I find your consistent refusal… illuminating :-)
Do you, now? I don’t want such a contract, quite explicitly, too. Why do you believe that most people think like you and not like me?
I don’t approve or disapprove. I am interested in them.
Well, that’s the basic libertarian position. Given that you proclaim it, should I understand that you are in favor of gay marriage, a large variety of poly marriages, marriages between close relatives, etc? And that’s even before we get to a variety of more interesting contracts that don’t deal with marriage...
How do you feel, for example, about temporary marriages: Alice and Bob form a voluntary contract that they will be married for one year after which the marriage automatically dissolves and they are free to go their own ways..?
Really? That looks like, um, let’s be polite and say “motivated cognition”. Can you provide evidence that supports this claim?
That’s the thing, you see, it certainly doesn’t look like that to me.
What’s the basic nature of drinking alcohol? Is it really about changing your mental state? Or is it really about lowering your inhibitions? Or is it really about drowning your sorrows? Or something else? It’s a ridiculous question. It doesn’t have a single purpose, it has lots, and some people drink for one reason but strongly disapprove of another reason, or vice-versa.
I think that, right now, most people have no strong view on the subject. But I think that people are good at learning, and so, over time, they will imitate those marriages which prove the most successful, and which best signal future commitment. I could be wrong.
She’s your fictional character. You tell me.
Except for marriages between close relatives, I “favour” all of these things in the sense that I think they should be legal.
And I am much too polite to tell you what your position looks like to me.
Why, yes, it is, given that lowering your inhibitions and drowning your sorrows are exactly that. I don’t think it is a ridiculous question.
I am guessing that you define a “successful marriage” as a “long-lasting marriage”. I would not agree with such a definition.
Let me also point out that people will imitate the lives which look the most successful to them. Such lives may or may not involve long-lasting marriages.
Interesting. So you think both that temporary marriages should be legal and that marriages should be made to be longer and more painful to get out of.
/me waves a magic wand… Poof! I invoke the magical name of Crocker and release you from the politeness spell! :-)
So someone who drinks alchohol just because they like the taste is “wrong”? To me that’s just absurd. Marriage can mean a holy sacrament to a Catholic, a lifelong commitment to me, an excuse for a good party for my cousin, and many more things besides. There’s no true “nature” beside the meanings we give it.
This is true! Different people have different wishes and desires. That’s why people should have the choice. I think most people want a long-lasting marriage, and would take steps to achieve that. I could be wrong though, and if people want to stay with the status quo they would be free to do so. You on the other hand, refuse to discover whether you are right, and refuse to give people the choice.
No, I do not think that marriages should be made more painful to get out of. If people want to, they should be allowed to make their marriages shorter and even easier to get out of. But of course you already know that, and are deliberately misreading me.
You appear to be labouring under the misapprehension that I show politeness out of respect for you. I assure you that is not the case. I am polite out of respect for me.
I don’t know of a single person who drinks alcohol because they like the taste. I know people who drink Bordeaux wines, or particular beers, or specific ports because they like the taste.
Oh, I did not ask about the eternal true Platonic nature. I asked what do you believe the true nature of marriage to be.
Do I, really? You seem to lapsing into the agitprop vocabulary.
Allow me to have my doubts. People like that don’t drop hints how they would really destroy the opponent’s positions if only the limits of politeness did not hold them back...
Once again you miss the point. I don’t think my arguments would gain any extra force if I was personally rude about you, or resorted to the type of deliberate misreadings you engage in. Everyone can see what your position is like, and we can all draw our own conclusions.
The way we all conduct ourselves leads others to conclude things, not merely about the weight of our arguments, but the content of our characters. That’s all.
Well, the discussion seems to have drifted into the more heat and less light direction. I don’t find your position convincing and no doubt you feel the same way about mine. Perhaps we should just accept that we disagree.
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Marriage rates were declining in the 1970s and 1980s even in countries where divorce wasn’t introduced until later, such as Ireland or Malta.
(And intuitively, I’d be less reluctant to do something if it was easier to undo it, though YMMV.)
Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion? Because it has always been among my biggest gripes with the conservative account of why divorce is so bad. It just doesn’t seem plausible, especially given how over-optimistic most people are about the prospects of their marriage! And frankly, I’d be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty. It might be rational in the abstract, but signals many troubling things about the individual, such as low trust and an instinctively transactional view of relationships. (Marriages for economic reasons probably need a whole different set of norms, such as a historically seen unspoken tolerance for adultery.)
I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women’s education and economic independence. Now, reasonable people who think those are great things can disagree whether the decline of traditional marriage is a cost or a neutral consequence, but I’ve never had time for people who seek to pin the blame on deliberate and direct political subversion.
Sure, I don’t like how some liberals attempt to be contrarian and claim that all the changes in this sphere have actually been unreservedly wonderful and a worthwhile goal from the start.… but that’s a general problem of people wanting policies to have no downsides, and the other side’s logical leap from calling out the downside to denying the problem is always baffling. Liberals cheering for something as a triumph for the Wonderful Nice Liberal Agenda might be less evidence that it’s a triumph for the Degenerate Corrupt Liberal Agenda and more evidence that liberals like cheering. This should not inform one’s analysis of the material/economic factors.
So, it seems to me that there is a terrible disconnect between property-splitting during a divorce and the existence of no-fault divorce, making marriage a tremendously costly move for the wealthier of the two parties (especially if they’re male). If in order for Bob to marry Alice, he has to give her the unilateral option to take half of his things and leave, then marriage seems unwise.
In the era of fault divorce, Bob is safer- he needs to either break the contract, or can end the contract if Alice breaks it without having to transfer to her the same share of his possessions.
(I think that the collapse in marriage rates is seen at too coarse a level. If you look at marriage rates by class, you notice that the upper class is still living in the 50s and the lower class has collapsed. An explanation, that I buy, is that we no longer try to promote good citizenship and good living, and so unsurprisingly people answer the call of the short term, to their long term detriment.)
This reads like a status assertion to me, along the lines of “follow your dreams” being code for “I’m awesome enough that I can get ahead by following my dreams” or “I’m awesome enough that I get to set my job parameters.” Not caring about loyalty is code for “I’m going to be awesome forever, so it’ll always be in their interests to stay with me,” but far better to have insurance in case of worse, poorer, or sickness.
If so, then why are the educated women marrying more than uneducated women? [src]
This makes sense if we assume marriage is causal for class. i.e. the people who don’t heed the call of the short term and do marry have better outcomes and end up higher class. Choosing marriages naturally sorts people into class, by this model.
Liberals would tell a story where things are reversed and class is causal of the pathology- they would say the economic changes that have occurred for the last few decades have increased ‘economic uncertainty’ for the lower class (for some measure of uncertainty.) which has lead to marital stress and divorce. Its also worth pointing out that in the lower classes divorce is usually less costly for the man (the wife is more likely to be working at a similar paying job, the man has less stuff to lose)
Personally, I found the book Red Families/Blue Families pushed me away from the first explanation and toward the second (full disclosure, this is part of a larger trend of me growing increasing liberal over the last decade and a half or so.)
I’ve edited the grandparent to say “an explanation,” because I don’t want to make the claim that this is a complete explanation. I very much agree that the prospects for marriage are significantly worse for the lower classes, for reasons both having to do with the shifting economic value of skills and the shifting costs of sex.
There were many historical periods with much much greater economic uncertainty, they also had higher marriage rates.
Well, perhaps I should start by saying that I don’t like distinction you draw between “affection and companionship” and “economic reasons.” The two are implicitly entwined. I will attempt to flesh out my position.
You don’t need marriage for “affection and companionship,” at least in the short term. You can just hang out. But most people want more than that. They want to build a life together. That involves making costly investments that will only bear fruit over time (e.g. buying a house, raising children, pension plans, etc). That involves making irreversible compromises—e.g. a shared circle of friends means you will have to be friends with people you wouldn’t otherwise be friends with, and not friends with people you would otherwise like to be; same goes with shared hobbies, etc. That involves specialization—perhaps one spouse will give up paid employment, or only work part-time. And so on.
But the problem with all these decisions is that they can lead to time-incompatible incentives. If Alice gives up work for a while to raise children while Bob focuses on his career, then ten years later Alice will be less pretty, less employable, and more dependent on Bob. Bob, meanwhile, can much more easily walk out on the marriage and start again. What’s to stop Bob reaping the benefits of Alice’s sacrifices, then checking out of the marriage?
And realistic people know that they won’t necessarily be thrilled with each other for every moment of their marriage. They will have rows, they will have disagreements, there will be times when the grass seems greener elsewhere. So you may find my attitude creepy, but I find your attitude evil—I think it’s quite wrong to go into a marriage without thinking about how to make sure it lasts. It’s partly about Alice making sure that Bob stays loyal to her, otherwise she’s wasting her time building a life with him. But it’s also about Bob(wedding) making sure that Bob(10 years later) stays loyal to Alice, otherwise he’s wasting his time. And vice versa.
So when you put the two sides of the problem together, you see it’s quite tricky. But at the same time, it’s super-rewarding if you can pull it off. Some people try to work around it to make the incentives less time-incompatible (e.g. women having children later) but this itself has its costs. The best solution is if Alice and Bob can bind their future selves to the marriage like Odysseus binding himself to the mast; that way they can both truly commit to the marriage, secure in the knowledge that the other party will too. And that will, paradoxically, mean that they create the best shared life together, and so will have least reason to leave the marriage.
But if, instead, Alice and Bob can’t bind their future self, then they can’t trust each other. Maybe Alice can trust Bob(wedding), but Bob(10 years later) is a different person—yes, people change during marriage, but not necessarily in ways their partner can control or predict. So because they can’t commit to the marriage securely, they won’t make the same kind of costly investments in their shared life. Which means their marriage will be worse, which means they will be more tempted to divorce, and so on in a vicious circle.
Except that in pre-1970s cultures, er..., ‘affection and companionship’ outside marriage were, er..., frowned upon, to the point that when people were caught doing ‘affection and companionship’ they were sometimes made to get married at gunpoint by each other’s parents. (Hell, there even are anecdotes about 20freakin′14 I could tell for that matter, though not as bad as that.)
I’d be much less against unbreakable marriage if it was something the bride and groom spontaneously chose to do, clearly demonstrating tht they know what they’re doing, without any social stigma for not doing so.
That’s also an argument against at-will employment: it is much harder to make plans for the future if my employer could fire me at any time for any reason or no reason. And yet people who oppose at-will employment tend to support divorce and vice versa. This suggests that their opposition is more due to Green vs Blue politics than on anything directly rational.
(My own view is that employment contracts which cannot be unilaterally terminated without just cause should be allowed but not required, and ditto with marriages; of course employees who want such a contract would probably end up paid less than those who are OK with at-will employment, for obvious demand-and-supply reasons.)
That sounds like a very bad idea to me: for example, what if Bob dies? or turns out to be a violent psychopath, even if he managed to hide it until the wedding? My inner libertarian says that so long as Alice freely chose to marry Bob that’s her own problem and she shouldn’t be protected from herself, but my inner paternalist isn’t that sure.
So, in terms of David Friedman’s classification of “love”, “trade” and “force” in The Machinery of Freedom, you say that “love” can’t be reliable in the long term, and I agree, but why is force better than trade? I think it may be better if Alice gave something to Bob so that he won’t want to check out of the marriage.
Yes. And yet some couple stay together for years, even decades, without getting married. Why can’t we trust present Alice and present Bob’s determination about whether the current crisis is temporary, rather than relying on past Alice and past Bob’s (probably unrealistic, especially given their age) assessment that all future crises would be?
And yet places where women have children later don’t look that much worse to me. ISTM socioeconomical effects would largely swamp biological effects due to maternal age. (Search this for “maternal age”.)
Yeah, that’s not exactly an argument for making him accountable for Bob(10 years earlier)’s mistakes.
(Of course, I do not endorse the present-day US system where I hear someone who unilaterally walks out of a marriage can be entitled to a sizeable fraction of the other spouse’s property and future income.)
I don’t know who you’re arguing against, but it certainly isn’t me.
As I’ve stated Oh, at least a dozen times in this thread, I don’t want all marriages to be unbreakable. I just want people to be able to set the terms of their marriages as they see fit. No-one should be forced to remain in a marriage they don’t want to, but people who break marriage contracts should have to pay damages according to the terms of that contract, just as I can’t be made to live somewhere I don’t want to, but I will have to pay damages if I break the lease.
It isn’t force over trade. Contracts are trade. People must be held to the terms of their contract(or damages) or there is no trade.
So, you choose not to address the grandparent’s point about social stigma, and you want to add other ‘optional’ binding agreements which may themselves have social pressure pushing people to adopt them.
If you want people to find the process of divorce unpleasant, you can rest assured that most of them probably do.
I didn’t think the grandparent made any point about ‘social stigma’ worth addressing. But, to be clear:
You don’t have any right to your neighbours’ good opinion.
If doing X would upset (or please) your neighbours, your choice (not) to do X is still voluntary. It just means you’re facing a trade-off. Welcome to adulthood.
More generally, I don’t think that social approval/stigma are bad things. They are the glue that binds civil society together. I can’t help notice that people when people speak negatively of social pressure, they never apply that critique generally. Should there be less social stigma against racism? Less social stigma against harassment? Suddenly, they’re not so sure.
Actually, my focus is on making marriage more pleasant.
I’m a lot happier with social stigma when it attaches to acts and fades in proportion to time distance from the act, at some rate inversely proportional to severity, rather than attaching to immutable properties (whether or not they derive from some act). If I hypothetically get plastered and vomit strawberry Jello shots and half-digested guacamole all over my friend’s expensive Persian rug, chances are my friends are going to give me a lot of shit about it, and to be a little more cautious about inviting me to parties for a while… but I do not thereby become Gest the Puker, then and forevermore. Divorce has traditionally not had this property.
I might make an exception for crimes on the level of murder or rape, on the grounds that those are so severe that the stigma shouldn’t vanish in a normal lifetime. (Though on reflection, I doubt I’d think much less of him if my grandfather revealed that he’d killed a man in his youth.) But if we’re going to be treating marriage as a civil contract like any other, then breaking it is a civil matter, not something on that level.
For some value of “voluntary”, sure. Likewise, for some value of “voluntary” if I point a gun at you and ask you to do something, your choice whether to do what I ask or be shot is voluntary.
For better or worse, marriages as presently constituted in the West are not commercial contracts, but legal, social, and (optionally) religious arrangements conferring certain statuses on the partners in the eyes of the law, society, the relevant religious bodies, and each other. If you want a marriage contract such as you describe, there’s no point in complaining that marriage contracts as they exist are not that. It would take a legal historian to say authoritatively, but I am not sure they ever have been. There are various similarities and differences, but they are different entities.
What you would have to do instead, is design a contract such as you would wish a marriage contract to be, and consult with lawyers to see if it can be done in a manner that would be recognised by current law and practice as a valid contract incurring damages for its breach. If you find that it cannot be done, then you would have to agitate for such changes to the law as would be necessary to recognise it.
If that’s too big a job for one person, you could combine with others, register a domain—realmarriage.org is available—and begin a movement.
Isn’t that what pre-nups are?
I don’t know to which extent the courts will be willing to enforce the “damages” portions, but pre-nups are valid contracts and fulfill much of the needs you’re pointing to.
Possibly, but pre-nups aren’t valid in some jurisdictions (the UK, for example).
Some other issues have occurred to me regarding the redesign of marriage contracts. If a marriage contract is to be simply an ordinary contract in the framework of contract law, then several issues arise, which Salemicus and others of like mind might not want. What, if anything is to distinguish a “marriage” contract from any other, if it can be drawn up between any two (or more) people of legal age to enter into contracts? If the contract says whatever the parties wish it to say, is there any longer such a thing as “marriage”? How shall “marriage” be defined for such purposes as widows’ pensions, the line of succession in intestacy, etc.?
Any contract can be varied or voided instantly by common agreement of the parties, because no third party has any legal standing to object. Thus marriage “contracts” of this sort would make divorce by mutual agreement instant. (If there is no other ground than decision to separate, it takes 2 years in the UK.)
The only alternative is to reform the law of marriage itself. This is not to say that it cannot be done, but it would be a long row to hoe.
The entire concept of marriage is that the relationship between the individuals is a contract, even if not all conceptions of marriage have this contract as a literal legal contract enforced by the state. There’s good reason to believe that marriages throughout history have more often been about economics and/or politics than not, and that the norm that marriage is primarily about the sexual/emotional relationship but nonetheless falls under this contractual paradigm is a rather new one. I agree with your impression that this transactional model of relationships is a little creepy, and see this as an argument against maintaining this social norm.
BTW, the total marriage rate by year is a metric that can be easily confounded by tempo effects: if in a country all people born until 1950 married at 20 and all people born since 1951 married at 30, the marriage rate between 1971 to 1980 would be exactly 0 but (neglecting the mortality of twentysomething) no cohort would be any less likely to ever get married than another.
I see that as evidence that marriage, as currently implemented, is not a particularly appealing contract to as many people as it once was. Whether this is because of no-fault divorce is irrelevant to whether this constitutes “widespread suffering.”
I reject the a priori assumptions that are often made in these discussions and that you seem to be making, namely, that more marriage is good, more divorce is bad, and therefore that policy should strive to upregulate marriage and downregulate divorce. If this is simply a disparity of utility functions (if yours includes a specific term for number of marriages and mine doesn’t, or similar) then this is perhaps an impasse, but if you’re arguing that there’s some correlation, presumably negative, between number of marriages and some other, less marriage-specific form of disutility (i.e. “widespread suffering”), I’d like to know what your evidence or reasoning for that is.
I’m not sure what point are you trying to make with these graphs.
If people were allowed to make binding pre-nup agreements that penalized adultery would there be more marriages? Less divorces? More happiness?
None of these things seem obvious to me.
Pattern-matching is often rational in politics just because it’s so cheap, as long as the pattern makes sense in the first place. I’m sorry, but the pattern of reactionary rhetoric about marriage has these very deliberate connotations. People who discuss this tend to discuss punishing sinners (vicariously so), not holding rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts.
So what are you supposed to say if you want to hold rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts?
Credibly dissociate yourself from people you don’t want to be pattern-matched to, and show that you understand the reasoning by which your audience opposes them (in this case, for example, Salemicus should at least acknowledge that at-fault divorce can—to put it mildly! - increase underlying gender inequality without any explicitly gendered provisions), and that you’re not going to defend them in that particular battle. Leftists do it all the time, to the extent that they have the opposite problem of not being able to unite while agreeing with each other on 95% of everything.
But there’s no-one who advocates dragging people off in chains, slavery, etc. This isn’t pattern-matching me to some well-known group (in which case I agree, I should distinguish myself). Instead, this is just deliberately straw-manning.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “punishing sinners”—but I assume you mean treating adultery as not just a breach of contract, but a tort. Well, damages for a tort are also financial.
As for “underlying gender inequality”—you’ll notice that no-one else has brought that up in this thread. Perhaps that is the “reasoning by which [my] audience opposes” me”, but if so I’d prefer that people actually advanced that reasoning, rather than that being their double super-secret baseline position, and their public one being a lot of straw-manning and nonsense. Alternatively, it may be that the “underlying gender inequality” argument is yours and yours alone, and you are projecting.
Again, this reasoning would equally suggest that I am not free to hire you to work for me, since you can stop working (stop being monogamous) and I have no recourse other than to fire you (terminate the marriage).
You aren’t permitted to bind yourself to work for someone in the future either.
At least under English law, you are allowed to bind yourself to work for someone in the future. The employer will not get specific performance awarded, but you can be forced to pay damages, observe a restrictive covenant, etc.
Most employment in the US is at will, and you can fire someone any time and they can walk out any time. So even if binding yourself is legal (I have no idea) and you count that, that reasoning has the same problem as the one about vegetarianism: It really doesn’t matter whether you can make a contract for such things because pretty much nobody ever does so. In practice there’s no difference—you’re not going to be making a contract for either one, and the penalty for breaking an actual job agreement will just be reputation, like breaking an actual marriage agreement..
Furthermore, this argument requires that you believe that in states where such an agreement is illegal (and I suspect, considering the restrictions on non-compete clauses, that there are such states) you’re not free to hire someone for a job.
As I understand it, in states where employment is “at will”, you can form a written agreement with your employer, but most arrangements are at will by the mutual choice of the parties. It might work out like that in marriage too, if you gave people the choice—maybe people would stick with the current system because that’s what they like! Of course, the fact that you’re unwilling to give people the choice suggests that you’re not too confident of that result.
It is certainly true that there are a large number of unconscionable restrictions in the labour market, from rent-seeking credentialism to bogus cartelization and onwards. It is perhaps hyperbole to say that you’re not free to hire someone for a job, because at least some terms will be enforceable, but I would certainly understand where someone was coming from if they said that.
Wikipedia article on prenups:
On the other hand, pre-nups are enforceable in the US and most of continental Europe.
And if you’re afraid the court won’t enforce your pre-nup you can put assets in escrow, for example :-)
In any case, I’m not sure what the underlying argument is. I tend to see it as expressing the wish that the society enforce a very particular notion of marriage on everyone regardless of what they think about it.
The underlying argument is exactly the opposite of what you see it as.
Society is currently enforcing a very particular notion of marriage on everyone regardless of what they think about it. Specifically, removing any notion of fault from the termination.
I would like people to be able to credibly commit as to their future behaviour if they so wish. I would like to give people that choice, which the likes of Kennaway would deny them. If you want to stick with the current arrangements, you should be able to.
I do wonder about so wilful a misreading of the discussion here.
I feel there is a bunch of anchoring going on here.
Why do you think the termination of the relationship naturally has an actionable fault of one party that is being removed?
By the way, do you feel that this fault has to be sexual? Can this actionable fault be ill temper, or snoring, or flatulence, or lack of humor, or insufficient performance in bed, or earning not enough money?
I don’t think so. Putting on a wedding ring looks like a credible commitment to me. What you want is to punish people for breaking their commitments and so far I haven’t seen a good reason to do so in the context of marriages.
Informally, a marriage contract can be seen as a type of contract (hence the name), but legally it generally has a rather different nature, with some similarities and some differences to ordinary contracts. For example, the state decrees what does and what does not constitute a marriage in the eyes of the law. In contrast, Amazon declares its own terms and conditions. When a marriage is recognised, that has various implications for taxation of the partners, rights in a deceased partner’s estate, etc. that would not be present in ordinary contracts. It is called a marriage contract, but that does not imply that all of ordinary contract law does, can, or should apply.
Considered as a contract, what are its terms? It is not drawn up by the parties to it, but lies scattered across the books of the law. As those laws change, so the contract changes.
Is the complaint that the courts are no longer enforcing its terms, or is the reality that the terms themselves have changed? Time was when conjugal rights were a thing, a legal thing. The time has changed, and now, rape within marriage is a thing, a criminal thing, however objectionable the likes of James A. Donald may find that, and however much he may pontificate that when rape within marriage is a thing, marriage is no longer a thing.
If you were drawing up an actual contract of marriage, a uniform contract to define what marriage shall be throughout a state, what would it say?
So what?
Monogamy just means that you do not seek more than one sexual or romantic partner.
You can be monogamous while your party isn’t. Whether this would suit you is a matter of personal preferences.
Or, two partners can be monogamous even if they have no legal mean to bind themselves to.
I also mean that by “monogamy”, but other people in this conversation have made clearer they mean something narrower by that word, so this discussion sounds like “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” when Alice has already made clear she means an auditory sensation and Bob has already made clear he means an acoustic wave.
Tapping out.