We also have to be careful again about whether by ‘mark of virtue’ we mean an indicator of virtue (because polyamory might correlate with virtue without being itself virtuous), or whether by ‘mark of virtue’ we mean an instance of virtue.
In other words, all of this talk is being needlessly roundabout: What we really want to know, I think, is whether polyamory is a good thing. Does it improve most people’s lives? How many non-polyamorous people would benefit from polyamory? How many non-polyamorous people should rationally switch to polyamory, given their present evidence? And do people (or rationalists) tend to accept polyamory for good reasons? Those four questions are logically distinct.
Perhaps the last two questions are the most relevant, since we’re trying to determine not just whether polyamorous people happen to win more or be rationalists more often, but whether their polyamory is itself rationally motivated (and whether their reasons scale to the rest of the community). So I think the question you intend to ask is whether polyamorous people (within the LessWrong community, at a minimum) have good reason to be polyamorous, and whether the non-polyamorous people have good reason to be non-polyamorous.
This question is very analogous to the sort of question we could ask about cryonics. Are the LessWrongers who don’t want to be frozen being irrational—succumbing to self-deception, say? Or are the more cryonics-happy LessWrongers being irrational? Or are they both being rational, and they just happen to have different core preferences?
I agree that “whether polyamory (or cryonics, or whatever) is a good thing” is a thing we want to know. Possibly even the thing we really want to know, as you suggest.
When you unpack the question in terms of improving lives, benefiting people, etc. you’re implicitly adopting a consequentialist stance, where “is polyamory a good thing” equates to “does polyamory have the highest expected value”? I endorse this completely.
In my experience, it has a high positive expected value for some people and a high negative expected value for others, and the highest EV strategy is figure out which sort of person I am and act accordingly.
This is very similar to asking whether a homosexual sex life has the highest expected value, actually, or (equivalently) whether a homosexual sex life is a good thing: it definitely is for some people, and definitely is not for others, and the highest-EV strategy is to pick a sex life that corresponds to the sort of person I am.
All of that said, I do think there’s a difference here between unpacking “is polyamory a good thing?” as “does polyamory has the highest expected value?” (the consequentialist stance) and unpacking it as “is polyamory the a characteristic practice of virtuous people?” (the virtue-ethicist stance).
Perhaps what I mean, when I talk about markers of virtue, is that this community seems to be adopting a virtue-ethics rather than a consequentialist stance on the subject.
We agree on the higher-level points, so as we pivot toward object-level discussion and actually discuss polyamory, I insist that we begin by tabooing ‘polyamory,’ or stipulating exactly what we mean by it. For instance, by ‘Polyamory is better than monamory for most people.’ we might mean:
Most people have a preference for having multiple simultaneous romantic/sexual partners.
Most people have such a preference, and would live more fulfilling lives if they acknowledged it.
Most people would live more fulfilling lives if they attempted to have multiple romantic/sexual partners.
Most people would live more fulfilling lives if they actually had multiple romantic/sexual partners.
Most people are capable of having multiple romantic/sexual partners if they try, and would live more fulfilling lives in that event.
Most people would live more fulfilling lives if they at least experimented once with having multiple romantic/sexual partners.
Most people would live more fulfilling lives if they were sometimes willing to have multiple romantic/sexual partners.
Some conjunction or disjunction of the above statements.
More generally, we can distinguish between ‘preference polyamory’ (which I like to call polyphilia: the preference for, or openness to, having multiple partners, whether or not one actually has multiple partners currently) and ‘behavioral polyamory’ (which I call multamory: the actual act of being in a relationship with multiple people). We can then cut it even finer, since dispositions and behaviors can change over time. Suppose I have a slight preference for monamory, but am happy to be in poly relationships too. And, even more vexingly, maybe I’ve been in poly relationships for most of my life, but I’m currently in a mono relationship (or single). Am I ‘polyamorous’? It’s just an issue of word choice, but it’s a complex one, and it needs to be resolved before we can evaluate any of these semantic candidates utilitarianly.
And even this is too coarse-grained, because it isn’t clear what exactly it takes to qualify as a ‘romantic/sexual’ partner as opposed to an intimate friend. Nor is it clear what it takes to be a ‘partner;’ it doesn’t help that ‘sexual partner’ has an episodic character in English, while ‘romantic partner’ has a continuous character.
As for virtue ethics: In my experience, ideas like ‘deontology,’ ‘consequentialism,’ and ‘virtue ethics’ are hopeless confusions. The specific kinds of arguments characteristic of those three traditions are generally fine, and generally perfectly compatible with one another. There’s nothing utilitarianly unacceptable about seriously debating whether polyamory produces good character traits and dispositions.
I should note that my original question wasn’t (and wasn’t intended to be) about polyamory, but rather about MugaSofer’s categorizations (and indirectly about LW’s). So from my perspective, I have been having an object-level discussion, give or take.
But, OK, if you want to actually discuss polyamory, I’m OK with that too.
Were I to taboo “polyamory”, I would unpack it as the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with more than one person at a time. I would similarly taboo “monamory” (were such a term in common usage) as the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with exactly one person at a time.
(And, sure, as you say, we can further drill down into this by exploring what “romantic” means, and how it differs from intimate friendship. And for that matter what “person” means and what a “practice” is and what it means to “maintain” a “relationship” and so forth, if we want.)
So by “Polyamory is better than monamory for most people.” I would mean that the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with more than one person at a time is better than the practice of maintaining them with one person at a time, for most people.
And I would also say that someone who is currently involved in romantic relationships with no more than one person is not currently engaging in polyamory, though that’s not to say that they haven’t in the past nor that they won’t in the future. And someone currently involved in romantic relationships with no people is not engaging in monamory either.
The difference between the unpackings you propose seem to have nothing to do with different understandings of “polyamory” or “monamory”, but rather with different understandings of “better”.
I would probably unpack “polyamorous” as applied to a person either as preferring romantic relationships with more than one person at a time or as requiring romantic relationships with more than one person at a time. I don’t really care which meaning gets used but it’s important to agree or conversations tend to derail. (Similar issues arise with whether “homosexual” is understood to exclude people attracted to the opposite sex. Both usages are common, but it’s difficult to talk about homosexuality clearly if we don’t know which usage is in play.)
Here’s what I was trying to get at: Polyamory vs. monamory isn’t a fair fight, because monamory is one relationship type. Polyamory isn’t one relationship type; it’s an umbrella term for thousands of different relationship types, including:
three-person relationships only
n-person relationships only, for higher values
multiple romantic partners, but only one sexual partner
multiple sexual partners, but only one romantic or emotionally intimate partner (‘swinging’)
couples where one partner is strictly monamorous and the other is polyamorous
‘open’ two-person relationships (possibly a limiting case of the primary/secondary distinction, below)
fully connected polyamorous networks (transitivity holds for relationships)
‘rings’ or ‘chains’ (i.e., minimally connected polyamorous networks)
networks with ‘clusters’ of relative intimacy or relative exclusivity (e.g., quads)
hierarchical polyamory: ‘primary’ partners vs. ‘secondary’ (vs. ‘tertiary,’ etc.), including mistresses and concubines
treating everyone with equal romantic/sexual intimacy (omnamory)
treating an extremely large group of people (e.g., a large commune or town or cult) with equal romantic/sexual intimacy (‘tribes’)
regular polyamory broken by occasional bouts of monamory
regular monamory broken by occasional bouts of polyamory
homosexual vs. bisexual vs. heterosexual polyamorous networks
long-term polyamorous relationships
short-term polyamorous relationships
‘rotating’ polyamorous arrangements (i.e., one schedules specific blocs of time for different partners, with ‘shifts’ lasting days or even months at a time)
celibate or asexual polyamory
polyamorous relationships with a distinctive significance or theme or interest, e.g.: ‘family’ polyamory; religious polyamory; BDSM polyamory; marriage polyamory....
All of the above are off-the-table for traditional monogamous pairing. What are the odds that a majority of people would just happen to converge on exactly one ideal relationship type? If we expect people to have diverse preferences, we should expect polyamory to dominate monamory.
That said, not all two-person relationships are the same type of relationship either. My relationship with my husband is not very much like my mom’s (former) relationship with hers, despite both relationships being monogamous… indeed, it has more in common with several of my friends’ poly relationships.
That said, though, we can certainly ask whether there are more ways for N people to be in relationship at a time than for 2 people to be in relationship at a time? Yeah, I would expect so, I guess. (The prospect of itemizing them, as you seem to be trying to do here, seems both daunting and not terribly useful, though perhaps entertaining.)
Does the difference actually matter that much, in terms of what leaves people better off? Maybe. I’m not really sure. I’m not even sure how to approach the question.
Certainly, the more willing people are to explore a wide range of relationship-space, and the more able they are to recognize what leaves them better off in a relationship, the more likely they are to find a way of being in relationship that leaves them better off. But this seems no more (though no less) true for being willing to experiment with polyamory as for being willing to experiment with their nonpreferred gender as for willing to experiment with various sexual kinks as for many other things.
homosexual vs. bisexual vs. heterosexual polyamorous networks
long-term polyamorous relationships
short-term polyamorous relationships
If you’re counting those as separate, you should also count homosexual vs heterosexual monamorous relationships, and long-term vs short-term monamorous relationships. :-)
Traditional Euro/American monogamy treats homosexual and short-term relationships as deviations from the ideal, not as legitimate alternative ideals. One does not choose or prefer to be a serial monogamist.
But it’s possible traditional monogamy is an unfair straw-manning of monamory in this discussion. I’m happy to include gay/lesbian couples, and perhaps some intersex/genderqueer ones while we’re at it. But I’m not so sure deliberately short-term, serial relationships should go in the monamorous camp rather than the polyamorous one; it seems to slightly break the spirit of monamory, as usually conceived, to not even aspire to have non-short-term relationships. And how do we draw the borders between relationships in serial monamory, to keep it from bleeding over into polyamory at the boundaries? To avoid haggling over definitions, perhaps we should treat serial monamory as a third category, distinct from both ‘committed’ monamory and ‘simultaneous’ polyamory.
I would certainly agree that as the set of ways to be in relationship we refer to as “monogamy” gets smaller and smaller, the odds that it’s optimal for a given person dwindle.
I’ve utterly lost sight of why that’s interesting, or why we need all these labels.
Can you back up a little and summarize your goal, here?
My two main goals are to draw attention to why we privilege ‘monogamy wins’ or ‘monamory wins’ out of hypothesis-space in the first place, and to evaluate the usefulness of the categories under discussion, as a prolegomena to settling the duly clarified questions empirically.
We can start compiling research, and proposing new research, that settles this question; but we can only do so productively if we’ve clarified the question enough to isolate the plausibly very important variables. Surely some arities of relationships (2-person, 3-person, 4-person...) are better than others; but quality of relationship will also vary based on the structure of the network (degree and kind of connectedness), the temporal dynamics of the network, the level (and kind) of experience and honesty and affection of the participants, the sexual and romantic behavior, and for that matter how the relationship type is treated in the relevant society. (E.g., monamory could be more fun in our culture even if polyamory has more fun-potential in otherwise preferable hypothetical cultures.) Asking questions like these is more interesting, more clear, and more answerable than just ‘is polyamory better than monogamy?’.
If the research is fine-grained enough, it should also address the standard deviation from the ‘ideal relationship type,’ and discover if there are distinct macro-level population clusters with importantly different preferences, or whether it’s bell curves all the way down.
WRT why we privilege monogamy: well, we certainly haven’t always done so, so were I interested in the question I’d probably look at the history of marriage and the decline of polygamy and see what other factors were in play at the time.
WRT researching relationship quality, I would probably start by asking how I can tell a high-quality relationship apart from a low-quality relationship, then by going out in the world and seeing what kinds of relationship structures correlate with relationship quality.
The relationship between that second question and the “how many partners?” question is tenuous at best, but if I focus on the overlap as we’ve been doing (and thereby ignore the majority of relationship-space) my expectation is that I’d find nominally poly relationships correlate better with relationship quality than nominally monogamous ones, based on my observations about how easy it is to stay in a low-quality monogamous relationship vs. a low-quality poly relationship.
My expectation is also that this would be dwarfed by other factors we would see if we weren’t ignoring the rest of relationship-space.
Also, if we found anything remotely resembling a normal distribution of happiness around a single “ideal relationship type” that wasn’t a confounding artifact around some other factor, I would be amazed. To the point that I’d pretty much have to discard all of my current beliefs about relationships. I would probably defy the data instead.
WRT researching relationship quality, I would probably start by asking how I can tell a high-quality relationship apart from a low-quality relationship, then by going out in the world and seeing what kinds of relationship structures correlate with relationship quality.
The trouble here is that different relationship types serve different goals. You’re more likely to come up with a flowchart which takes you from values to recommended relationship type than the claim that relationship type X is better for everyone than all other relationship types.
People eating what is usually called food should be a minority because there are so many other things that fit in your mouth: stones, grass, computer components …
When two people meet, what is called some kind of handshake / traditional greeting should be a minority because there are so many other potential ways of interacting: touching their head, touching their elbow …
Just because one “umbrella term” unpacks into more constituent types does not imply at all that the cumulative probability of a random human belonging to that umbrella term dominates.
Diverse preferences do not mean each atomic category is equiprobable.
What are the odds that a majority of people would just happen to converge on exactly one ideal relationship type?
Almost as if there are some … common characteristics, which preclude some i.i.d. dispersion over every conceivable category?
I’m not saying what is or is not the majority “ideal relationship type”. I’m just saying that I don’t think your argument works.
People eating what is usually called food should be a minority because there are so many other things that fit in your mouth: stones, grass, computer components …
For this to be a relevant analogy, we need to have adequate reason to think that monamory, like food, deserves its privileged position out of possibilityspace. There are specific, overwhelmingly powerful reasons to think that stones, grass, and computer component are inadequate sources of human nutrition; but in the absence of such considerations, it would certainly be unreasonable to simply assume that what we’ve always eaten is the best thing we could possibly eat out of some set of options.
My claim isn’t that no possible evidence could ever show that monamory is better than polyamory. My claim is only that in the absence of strong evidence in either direction, we should expect polamory to win, for the same reason we should expect 99 randomly selected stones to have at least one stone that’s shinier than another 1 randomly selected stone. Some positive argument for monamory is needed; whereas no positive argument is needed to privilege polyamory, so long as it permits orders of magnitudes more varieties of human behavior than does traditional monogamy. It’s because no one specific behavior has yet been shown to have a privileged amount of utility that the broader category gets a head start.
Were I to taboo “polyamory”, I would unpack it as the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with more than one person at a time.
With the caveat that every partner knows about it and consented to the arrangement, and not under duress. Otherwise it would be called cheating and/or coercion, which is far more widespread than polyamory. On a related note, when comparing polyamory to other arrangements, one has to account for the effects of cheating in a monogamous arrangement.
Agreed that consent and transparency are other dimensions along which clarity is useful. I wouldn’t object to unpacking “polyamory” as requiring a high level of consent and transparency. Agreed that various degrees of coercion in relationships (of all sorts) are far more common than perfect consent. Agreed that various degrees of deceit and/or concealment in relationships (of all sorts) are far more common than perfect transparency.
Are people happier, for the most part and all other things being equal, having multiple romantic parters, having single romantic partners, or is there too much variation between individuals to generalize?
Dave seems to be saying that there’s too much individual variation to generalize. I don’t think I can answer the question, because I don’t know how to work out all other things being equal: right now it seems to me that lack of social acceptance makes polyamory a pretty bad choice for most people, even if they are inclined towards it. It very seriously limits the number of people you can have relationships with, for example.
Dave seems to be saying that there’s too much individual variation to generalize.
I don’t quite think I’m saying this.
I am saying that there are people who, for the most part and all other things being equal, are better off (which is similar to happier, I guess) having multiple romantic partners, and there are other people who (ftmpaaotbe) are better off having single romantic partners. (I also think, though I haven’t previously said, that there are people who ftmpaaotbe are better off having no romantic partners.)
But if you insist on asking whether people are ftmpaaotbe better off with single or multiple partners, without reference to which type of person, I do think the question is answerable. I’m not sure what the answer is. I just think it’s the wrong question to ask, and I don’t care very much about the answer.
This is in a similar sense that I can tell you what a person’s chance of getting pregnant after unprotected sex is, independent of their age or gender, but it’s really a far more useful question to ask if I break the results out by age and gender.
And, yes, I agree that ftmpaaotbe conceals a wealth of trickiness. That said, “this is a bad choice because it’s socially unacceptable” is also a very tricky line of argument.
Okay, gotcha...I actually made a new years resolution not to go on this website anymore, for the sake of time management, so this is my last post. But I think I understand your point! A good note to go out on.
I know how a consequentialist (at least, one operating with the intention of maximizing ‘human values’) would unpack these questions, and I know how we could theoretically look at facts and give answers to ze’s questions.
But how, on earth, would “is polyamory the characteristic of virtuous people” get unpacked? What does “virtuous” mean here and what would it look like for something or someone to be “virtuous”?
I know you probably didn’t mean to get dragged into a conversation about Virtue Ethics, but I’ve seen it mentioned on LW a few times and have always been very curious about its local version.
Well, not being a virtue ethicist myself, I’m probably not the best guy to ask.
My question for virtue ethicists is “well, OK, but how do you tell who is virtuous?”
Then again, a virtue ethicist can just as reasonably ask “well, OK, but how do you tell what consequences are desirable?” to which I, as a consequentialist, essentially reply “I consult my intuitions about value.” Life has more value than death, joy has more value than suffering, growth has more value than stagnation, and so forth. How do I know that? Geez, I dunno. I just know.
Presumably a virtue ethicist can just as readily reply “I consult my intuitions about virtue.” I suppose it’s no less reasonable.
Of course, if polyamory turns out to be the best thing for almost all people, or at least lesswrongers, then a consequentialist would behave the same way.
We also have to be careful again about whether by ‘mark of virtue’ we mean an indicator of virtue (because polyamory might correlate with virtue without being itself virtuous), or whether by ‘mark of virtue’ we mean an instance of virtue.
In other words, all of this talk is being needlessly roundabout: What we really want to know, I think, is whether polyamory is a good thing. Does it improve most people’s lives? How many non-polyamorous people would benefit from polyamory? How many non-polyamorous people should rationally switch to polyamory, given their present evidence? And do people (or rationalists) tend to accept polyamory for good reasons? Those four questions are logically distinct.
Perhaps the last two questions are the most relevant, since we’re trying to determine not just whether polyamorous people happen to win more or be rationalists more often, but whether their polyamory is itself rationally motivated (and whether their reasons scale to the rest of the community). So I think the question you intend to ask is whether polyamorous people (within the LessWrong community, at a minimum) have good reason to be polyamorous, and whether the non-polyamorous people have good reason to be non-polyamorous.
This question is very analogous to the sort of question we could ask about cryonics. Are the LessWrongers who don’t want to be frozen being irrational—succumbing to self-deception, say? Or are the more cryonics-happy LessWrongers being irrational? Or are they both being rational, and they just happen to have different core preferences?
I agree that “whether polyamory (or cryonics, or whatever) is a good thing” is a thing we want to know. Possibly even the thing we really want to know, as you suggest.
When you unpack the question in terms of improving lives, benefiting people, etc. you’re implicitly adopting a consequentialist stance, where “is polyamory a good thing” equates to “does polyamory have the highest expected value”? I endorse this completely.
In my experience, it has a high positive expected value for some people and a high negative expected value for others, and the highest EV strategy is figure out which sort of person I am and act accordingly.
This is very similar to asking whether a homosexual sex life has the highest expected value, actually, or (equivalently) whether a homosexual sex life is a good thing: it definitely is for some people, and definitely is not for others, and the highest-EV strategy is to pick a sex life that corresponds to the sort of person I am.
All of that said, I do think there’s a difference here between unpacking “is polyamory a good thing?” as “does polyamory has the highest expected value?” (the consequentialist stance) and unpacking it as “is polyamory the a characteristic practice of virtuous people?” (the virtue-ethicist stance).
Perhaps what I mean, when I talk about markers of virtue, is that this community seems to be adopting a virtue-ethics rather than a consequentialist stance on the subject.
We agree on the higher-level points, so as we pivot toward object-level discussion and actually discuss polyamory, I insist that we begin by tabooing ‘polyamory,’ or stipulating exactly what we mean by it. For instance, by ‘Polyamory is better than monamory for most people.’ we might mean:
Most people have a preference for having multiple simultaneous romantic/sexual partners.
Most people have such a preference, and would live more fulfilling lives if they acknowledged it.
Most people would live more fulfilling lives if they attempted to have multiple romantic/sexual partners.
Most people would live more fulfilling lives if they actually had multiple romantic/sexual partners.
Most people are capable of having multiple romantic/sexual partners if they try, and would live more fulfilling lives in that event.
Most people would live more fulfilling lives if they at least experimented once with having multiple romantic/sexual partners.
Most people would live more fulfilling lives if they were sometimes willing to have multiple romantic/sexual partners.
Some conjunction or disjunction of the above statements.
More generally, we can distinguish between ‘preference polyamory’ (which I like to call polyphilia: the preference for, or openness to, having multiple partners, whether or not one actually has multiple partners currently) and ‘behavioral polyamory’ (which I call multamory: the actual act of being in a relationship with multiple people). We can then cut it even finer, since dispositions and behaviors can change over time. Suppose I have a slight preference for monamory, but am happy to be in poly relationships too. And, even more vexingly, maybe I’ve been in poly relationships for most of my life, but I’m currently in a mono relationship (or single). Am I ‘polyamorous’? It’s just an issue of word choice, but it’s a complex one, and it needs to be resolved before we can evaluate any of these semantic candidates utilitarianly.
And even this is too coarse-grained, because it isn’t clear what exactly it takes to qualify as a ‘romantic/sexual’ partner as opposed to an intimate friend. Nor is it clear what it takes to be a ‘partner;’ it doesn’t help that ‘sexual partner’ has an episodic character in English, while ‘romantic partner’ has a continuous character.
As for virtue ethics: In my experience, ideas like ‘deontology,’ ‘consequentialism,’ and ‘virtue ethics’ are hopeless confusions. The specific kinds of arguments characteristic of those three traditions are generally fine, and generally perfectly compatible with one another. There’s nothing utilitarianly unacceptable about seriously debating whether polyamory produces good character traits and dispositions.
I should note that my original question wasn’t (and wasn’t intended to be) about polyamory, but rather about MugaSofer’s categorizations (and indirectly about LW’s). So from my perspective, I have been having an object-level discussion, give or take.
But, OK, if you want to actually discuss polyamory, I’m OK with that too.
Were I to taboo “polyamory”, I would unpack it as the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with more than one person at a time. I would similarly taboo “monamory” (were such a term in common usage) as the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with exactly one person at a time.
(And, sure, as you say, we can further drill down into this by exploring what “romantic” means, and how it differs from intimate friendship. And for that matter what “person” means and what a “practice” is and what it means to “maintain” a “relationship” and so forth, if we want.)
So by “Polyamory is better than monamory for most people.” I would mean that the practice of maintaining romantic relationships with more than one person at a time is better than the practice of maintaining them with one person at a time, for most people.
And I would also say that someone who is currently involved in romantic relationships with no more than one person is not currently engaging in polyamory, though that’s not to say that they haven’t in the past nor that they won’t in the future. And someone currently involved in romantic relationships with no people is not engaging in monamory either.
The difference between the unpackings you propose seem to have nothing to do with different understandings of “polyamory” or “monamory”, but rather with different understandings of “better”.
I would probably unpack “polyamorous” as applied to a person either as preferring romantic relationships with more than one person at a time or as requiring romantic relationships with more than one person at a time. I don’t really care which meaning gets used but it’s important to agree or conversations tend to derail. (Similar issues arise with whether “homosexual” is understood to exclude people attracted to the opposite sex. Both usages are common, but it’s difficult to talk about homosexuality clearly if we don’t know which usage is in play.)
Here’s what I was trying to get at: Polyamory vs. monamory isn’t a fair fight, because monamory is one relationship type. Polyamory isn’t one relationship type; it’s an umbrella term for thousands of different relationship types, including:
three-person relationships only
n-person relationships only, for higher values
multiple romantic partners, but only one sexual partner
multiple sexual partners, but only one romantic or emotionally intimate partner (‘swinging’)
couples where one partner is strictly monamorous and the other is polyamorous
‘open’ two-person relationships (possibly a limiting case of the primary/secondary distinction, below)
‘closed’ more-than-two-person relationships (polyfidelity)
traditional polygamy and harems
one-night stands only
orgies only
fully connected polyamorous networks (transitivity holds for relationships)
‘rings’ or ‘chains’ (i.e., minimally connected polyamorous networks)
networks with ‘clusters’ of relative intimacy or relative exclusivity (e.g., quads)
hierarchical polyamory: ‘primary’ partners vs. ‘secondary’ (vs. ‘tertiary,’ etc.), including mistresses and concubines
treating everyone with equal romantic/sexual intimacy (omnamory)
treating an extremely large group of people (e.g., a large commune or town or cult) with equal romantic/sexual intimacy (‘tribes’)
regular polyamory broken by occasional bouts of monamory
regular monamory broken by occasional bouts of polyamory
homosexual vs. bisexual vs. heterosexual polyamorous networks
long-term polyamorous relationships
short-term polyamorous relationships
‘rotating’ polyamorous arrangements (i.e., one schedules specific blocs of time for different partners, with ‘shifts’ lasting days or even months at a time)
celibate or asexual polyamory
polyamorous relationships with a distinctive significance or theme or interest, e.g.: ‘family’ polyamory; religious polyamory; BDSM polyamory; marriage polyamory....
All of the above are off-the-table for traditional monogamous pairing. What are the odds that a majority of people would just happen to converge on exactly one ideal relationship type? If we expect people to have diverse preferences, we should expect polyamory to dominate monamory.
I suppose.
That said, not all two-person relationships are the same type of relationship either. My relationship with my husband is not very much like my mom’s (former) relationship with hers, despite both relationships being monogamous… indeed, it has more in common with several of my friends’ poly relationships.
That said, though, we can certainly ask whether there are more ways for N people to be in relationship at a time than for 2 people to be in relationship at a time? Yeah, I would expect so, I guess. (The prospect of itemizing them, as you seem to be trying to do here, seems both daunting and not terribly useful, though perhaps entertaining.)
Does the difference actually matter that much, in terms of what leaves people better off? Maybe. I’m not really sure. I’m not even sure how to approach the question.
Certainly, the more willing people are to explore a wide range of relationship-space, and the more able they are to recognize what leaves them better off in a relationship, the more likely they are to find a way of being in relationship that leaves them better off. But this seems no more (though no less) true for being willing to experiment with polyamory as for being willing to experiment with their nonpreferred gender as for willing to experiment with various sexual kinks as for many other things.
If you’re counting those as separate, you should also count homosexual vs heterosexual monamorous relationships, and long-term vs short-term monamorous relationships. :-)
Traditional Euro/American monogamy treats homosexual and short-term relationships as deviations from the ideal, not as legitimate alternative ideals. One does not choose or prefer to be a serial monogamist.
But it’s possible traditional monogamy is an unfair straw-manning of monamory in this discussion. I’m happy to include gay/lesbian couples, and perhaps some intersex/genderqueer ones while we’re at it. But I’m not so sure deliberately short-term, serial relationships should go in the monamorous camp rather than the polyamorous one; it seems to slightly break the spirit of monamory, as usually conceived, to not even aspire to have non-short-term relationships. And how do we draw the borders between relationships in serial monamory, to keep it from bleeding over into polyamory at the boundaries? To avoid haggling over definitions, perhaps we should treat serial monamory as a third category, distinct from both ‘committed’ monamory and ‘simultaneous’ polyamory.
I would certainly agree that as the set of ways to be in relationship we refer to as “monogamy” gets smaller and smaller, the odds that it’s optimal for a given person dwindle.
I’ve utterly lost sight of why that’s interesting, or why we need all these labels.
Can you back up a little and summarize your goal, here?
My two main goals are to draw attention to why we privilege ‘monogamy wins’ or ‘monamory wins’ out of hypothesis-space in the first place, and to evaluate the usefulness of the categories under discussion, as a prolegomena to settling the duly clarified questions empirically.
We can start compiling research, and proposing new research, that settles this question; but we can only do so productively if we’ve clarified the question enough to isolate the plausibly very important variables. Surely some arities of relationships (2-person, 3-person, 4-person...) are better than others; but quality of relationship will also vary based on the structure of the network (degree and kind of connectedness), the temporal dynamics of the network, the level (and kind) of experience and honesty and affection of the participants, the sexual and romantic behavior, and for that matter how the relationship type is treated in the relevant society. (E.g., monamory could be more fun in our culture even if polyamory has more fun-potential in otherwise preferable hypothetical cultures.) Asking questions like these is more interesting, more clear, and more answerable than just ‘is polyamory better than monogamy?’.
If the research is fine-grained enough, it should also address the standard deviation from the ‘ideal relationship type,’ and discover if there are distinct macro-level population clusters with importantly different preferences, or whether it’s bell curves all the way down.
Gotcha.
WRT why we privilege monogamy: well, we certainly haven’t always done so, so were I interested in the question I’d probably look at the history of marriage and the decline of polygamy and see what other factors were in play at the time.
WRT researching relationship quality, I would probably start by asking how I can tell a high-quality relationship apart from a low-quality relationship, then by going out in the world and seeing what kinds of relationship structures correlate with relationship quality.
The relationship between that second question and the “how many partners?” question is tenuous at best, but if I focus on the overlap as we’ve been doing (and thereby ignore the majority of relationship-space) my expectation is that I’d find nominally poly relationships correlate better with relationship quality than nominally monogamous ones, based on my observations about how easy it is to stay in a low-quality monogamous relationship vs. a low-quality poly relationship.
My expectation is also that this would be dwarfed by other factors we would see if we weren’t ignoring the rest of relationship-space.
Also, if we found anything remotely resembling a normal distribution of happiness around a single “ideal relationship type” that wasn’t a confounding artifact around some other factor, I would be amazed. To the point that I’d pretty much have to discard all of my current beliefs about relationships. I would probably defy the data instead.
The trouble here is that different relationship types serve different goals. You’re more likely to come up with a flowchart which takes you from values to recommended relationship type than the claim that relationship type X is better for everyone than all other relationship types.
Yup, I completely agree.
Non sequitur.
People eating what is usually called food should be a minority because there are so many other things that fit in your mouth: stones, grass, computer components …
When two people meet, what is called some kind of handshake / traditional greeting should be a minority because there are so many other potential ways of interacting: touching their head, touching their elbow …
Just because one “umbrella term” unpacks into more constituent types does not imply at all that the cumulative probability of a random human belonging to that umbrella term dominates.
Diverse preferences do not mean each atomic category is equiprobable.
Almost as if there are some … common characteristics, which preclude some i.i.d. dispersion over every conceivable category?
I’m not saying what is or is not the majority “ideal relationship type”. I’m just saying that I don’t think your argument works.
For this to be a relevant analogy, we need to have adequate reason to think that monamory, like food, deserves its privileged position out of possibilityspace. There are specific, overwhelmingly powerful reasons to think that stones, grass, and computer component are inadequate sources of human nutrition; but in the absence of such considerations, it would certainly be unreasonable to simply assume that what we’ve always eaten is the best thing we could possibly eat out of some set of options.
My claim isn’t that no possible evidence could ever show that monamory is better than polyamory. My claim is only that in the absence of strong evidence in either direction, we should expect polamory to win, for the same reason we should expect 99 randomly selected stones to have at least one stone that’s shinier than another 1 randomly selected stone. Some positive argument for monamory is needed; whereas no positive argument is needed to privilege polyamory, so long as it permits orders of magnitudes more varieties of human behavior than does traditional monogamy. It’s because no one specific behavior has yet been shown to have a privileged amount of utility that the broader category gets a head start.
With the caveat that every partner knows about it and consented to the arrangement, and not under duress. Otherwise it would be called cheating and/or coercion, which is far more widespread than polyamory. On a related note, when comparing polyamory to other arrangements, one has to account for the effects of cheating in a monogamous arrangement.
Agreed that consent and transparency are other dimensions along which clarity is useful.
I wouldn’t object to unpacking “polyamory” as requiring a high level of consent and transparency.
Agreed that various degrees of coercion in relationships (of all sorts) are far more common than perfect consent.
Agreed that various degrees of deceit and/or concealment in relationships (of all sorts) are far more common than perfect transparency.
That seems too complex.
Are people happier, for the most part and all other things being equal, having multiple romantic parters, having single romantic partners, or is there too much variation between individuals to generalize?
Dave seems to be saying that there’s too much individual variation to generalize. I don’t think I can answer the question, because I don’t know how to work out all other things being equal: right now it seems to me that lack of social acceptance makes polyamory a pretty bad choice for most people, even if they are inclined towards it. It very seriously limits the number of people you can have relationships with, for example.
I don’t quite think I’m saying this.
I am saying that there are people who, for the most part and all other things being equal, are better off (which is similar to happier, I guess) having multiple romantic partners, and there are other people who (ftmpaaotbe) are better off having single romantic partners. (I also think, though I haven’t previously said, that there are people who ftmpaaotbe are better off having no romantic partners.)
But if you insist on asking whether people are ftmpaaotbe better off with single or multiple partners, without reference to which type of person, I do think the question is answerable. I’m not sure what the answer is. I just think it’s the wrong question to ask, and I don’t care very much about the answer.
This is in a similar sense that I can tell you what a person’s chance of getting pregnant after unprotected sex is, independent of their age or gender, but it’s really a far more useful question to ask if I break the results out by age and gender.
And, yes, I agree that ftmpaaotbe conceals a wealth of trickiness. That said, “this is a bad choice because it’s socially unacceptable” is also a very tricky line of argument.
Okay, gotcha...I actually made a new years resolution not to go on this website anymore, for the sake of time management, so this is my last post. But I think I understand your point! A good note to go out on.
I know how a consequentialist (at least, one operating with the intention of maximizing ‘human values’) would unpack these questions, and I know how we could theoretically look at facts and give answers to ze’s questions.
But how, on earth, would “is polyamory the characteristic of virtuous people” get unpacked? What does “virtuous” mean here and what would it look like for something or someone to be “virtuous”?
I know you probably didn’t mean to get dragged into a conversation about Virtue Ethics, but I’ve seen it mentioned on LW a few times and have always been very curious about its local version.
Well, not being a virtue ethicist myself, I’m probably not the best guy to ask.
My question for virtue ethicists is “well, OK, but how do you tell who is virtuous?”
Then again, a virtue ethicist can just as reasonably ask “well, OK, but how do you tell what consequences are desirable?” to which I, as a consequentialist, essentially reply “I consult my intuitions about value.” Life has more value than death, joy has more value than suffering, growth has more value than stagnation, and so forth. How do I know that? Geez, I dunno. I just know.
Presumably a virtue ethicist can just as readily reply “I consult my intuitions about virtue.” I suppose it’s no less reasonable.
Of course, if polyamory turns out to be the best thing for almost all people, or at least lesswrongers, then a consequentialist would behave the same way.
Also true.
Do you believe polyamory is the best thing for almost all people? (Or at least lesswrongers?)
On balance, no. In fact, I agree with your main point; I was about to add a note to that effect when I saw your comment. Ah well.
(Disclaimer: I am not particularly polyamorous myself, and I’m certainly not in a poly relationship.)