The biggest sticking point for me is that “top priority” business. I’m fairly sure I can’t be satisfied being anyone’s second-best, or even one of three who are rated approximately equal (though the latter doesn’t bother me as much as the former).
But when I think a sort of Kantian mode of universalizing that notion, I realize that it’s unfair to be polyamorous in this way.
Yes, that’s right, I’m saying there’s something immoral about what you’re doing, not for the stupid reasons that Christian conservatives get bent out of shape about, but for a much deeper deontological reason: When you have a “primary” but still include other people who aren’t your “primary”, you’re demanding to be given something—priority—that you yourself won’t give. You’re asserting that you have a right to demand special status, but other people don’t.
The only way I can see to soften that blow is to say that some people don’t want to be number one; they don’t mind being second-best. But first of all, I find that a little hard to believe to begin with (who wouldn’t want to be the favorite if they could be?); and second of all, frankly I have trouble imagining that I would be compatible with someone who thinks that way. They can’t be much like me if they don’t care about being second-best.
For this reason, I can really only see two morally justifiable modes: Egalitarian monogamy and egalitarian polyamory. And if I’m not prepared to accept the latter, that leaves only the former.
Am I wrong? Can someone explain to me why it’s okay for me to demand priority, but then still include people in relationships that I am unwilling to give priority to?
This comment seems… fundamentally confused. It seems like it addresses me directly, so I’ll reply instead of ignoring it.
I’m fairly sure I can’t be satisfied being anyone’s second-best, or even one of three who are rated approximately equal (though the latter doesn’t bother me as much as the former).
This seems to be something about you. If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, go ahead and don’t enter into relationships like that.
When you have a “primary” but still include other people who aren’t your “primary”, you’re demanding to be given something—priority—that you yourself won’t give. You’re asserting that you have a right to demand special status, but other people don’t.
My goodness. My primary has a right to special status from me because I have the same from him. If we were monogamous, we’d be “egalitarian”ly so; but then my other boyfriends wouldn’t get to date me at all. I think this would upset them. Neither of them are counseling me to dump them so I can commit fairly to my primary. (Or begging me to run away with them instead, for that matter.) But note that I can only “demand” special status from my primary because he’s okay with that. I did not break into his house and say “I must take first priority in your love life, or else!” It’s a thing we decided to do with each other. He and I can meanwhile maintain secondaries who may seek primaries or flings or whatever-they-want elsewhere too (or not, if they don’t care to). This is all just more people having more options.
The only way I can see to soften that blow is to say that some people don’t want to be number one; they don’t mind being second-best. But first of all, I find that a little hard to believe to begin with (who wouldn’t want to be the favorite if they could be?)
Someone with limited time, who doesn’t want to be wanted more than they can find opportunity to be available? Someone less extroverted than their partner, who needs large swaths of alone time? Someone with a primary of their own elsewhere? Someone who gets off on not being treated as the favorite? I have yet to sincerely underestimate human heterogeneity.
and second of all, frankly I have trouble imagining that I would be compatible with someone who thinks that way.
This seems to be something about you. If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, go ahead and don’t enter into relationships like that.
For this reason, I can really only see two morally justifiable modes
You’ve made a leap from your own psychology to ethics in general.
first: fairness is not the same as morality*. (ignore this point if you think fairness is a crucial thing to measure in morality)
Second: Most people seem to be mutually primary. You’re getting priority from someone and giving it to them in return, but you can also have others. It’s rare that someone is poly amorous but demands monogamy from their loves. Even if they did, this leads into
Third: We’re talking about consensual relationships here. If you want priority, then you can date only people who will give you priority. Hell, if you want to date someone and have them give you priority, and NOT give them priority in return, as long as they agree why should this be a problem?
fourth: You seem to be viewing this as unfairly advantageous to a poly person, because they get “priority” and also bonus sex, but it’s also advantageous to all the secondaries, who presumably don’t care about or at least don’t need priority, and would have less romance without the poly person.
*to elaborate: People have different preferences, often vastly different. Unless you take this into account, naive views of fairness lead to perverse results. Imagine two people: Tom hates cake and loves pie, and Dave hates pie and loves cake. They live in an unfair universe where they have 3 cakes and 1 pie to divide between themselves. It seems “Unfair” to give Dave 3 cakes and give Tom 1 pie, yet this is the best outcome. An extra cake won’t do tom any good, and so dave is being deprived for no reason. Now replace desire for cake with desire for sex and imagine a person who has lot of desire for sex but is in love with someone with none. Why deprive both of them of love? Add another person, and every individual involved is happier.
I actually have changed my mind, but not due to your argument. (Your argument assumes that someone likes being second-best, which I still contend is pretty bizarre.)
I realized that there’s another side to the story I had ignored, which is that someone who is “secondary” to one person can be “primary” to another. So you can have two couples who occasionally trade off, or n such couples, or n couples and k menages-a-trois.
This means that it can be potentially fair, but it’s still incumbent upon the polyamorist to ensure that it actually is fair, i.e. that no one is being taken advantage of. I understand that there is a segment of the poly community which focuses on this sort of “responsible polyamory”; but I also understand that a lot of people self-identify as poly and don’t follow these rules at all—and people get hurt by it.
(Your argument assumes that someone likes being second-best, which I still contend is pretty bizarre.) [...] someone who is “secondary” to one person can be “primary” to another. [...] This means that it can be potentially fair, but it’s still incumbent upon the polyamorist to ensure that [...] no one is being taken advantage of.
(Data point: I am one of Alicorn’s former secondaries and was not in any other romantic relationships at the time, and I can testify that I did not feel exploited. I have no particular reason to care about what you consider bizarre or unfair.)
People get hurt in all kinds of relationships, because entering in a relationship generally means that you open yourself up to being hurt if things go wrong.
In any case, regardless of the type of relationship, the golden rule is the campsite rule, suitably generalized to all relationships: strive to leave your partner(s) in a better shape than you found them.
It’s not a bad rule, but it has a couple of serious shortcomings.
First, how do you know? You don’t see them afterward, almost by definition.
Second, if you do make someone worse off, how do you distinguish a permissible accidental harm from impermissible negligence?
Third, is this enough? It seems at least plausible that you can exploit someone even while leaving them better off. See “Wrongful Benificence” by Chris Meyers.
Well, this was annoyingly hard to find the complete answer to. (I’ve only done it for Safari.)
In Safari, create the style sheet file anywhere then select it from Preferences → Advanced → Style sheet.
In Firefox, place a file at chrome/userContent.css in your Firefox profile directory; there will be an example file called userContent-example.css there.
In Google Chrome, edit User StyleSheets/Custom.css in your Google Chrome profile directory.
Locating the profile directory depends on your operating system as well as browser; instructions for this are much easier to find but if you specify your OS I’ll look it up for you.
Note that on 10.7 and later the Library folder is hidden; the easiest way to work around this is to use Go to Folder… (Command-Shift-G) in the Finder and then type/paste a pathname such as
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/
(Do I need to mention that all of this is far messier that, speaking as a designer of software, I approve of, even for a rarely-needed feature?)
I have now done all this (I used the terminal to get there) and added the CSS line but it didn’t do anything, PDFs still download without warning when clicked.
The expected result is that PDF links have ” [PDF]” at the end of their text, i.e. a warning of the sort someone writing a comment could have inserted. I tested it on the link in the comment you originally replied to.
Troubleshooting items: Have you restarted your browser? Did you save the CSS as plain text, not RTF or other word-processor format? What is the full pathname to where you placed the CSS file?
That I, personally, agree with you seems less significant than that this is the first comment I’ve seen upvoted to +4 while it was still one of the five most recent comments.
I also note how while karma is supposed to mean “constructive”, it usually actually means “agree”. People don’t just downvote trolls, they seem to downvote anyone they disagree with.
I can tell, because usually I get upvoted… but all my posts criticizing polyamory have negative scores. I didn’t turn into a troll overnight.
To generalize that, I’ve found in the past that posts on subjects I feel very strongly about, or that I might reasonably expect interested observers to feel very strongly about, tend to be noticeably less well received unless I put a lot of effort into cooling my phrasing and shoring up any weak points in the reasoning. This might have a little to do with inferential gaps, but it’s probably driven mostly by halo effects and their negative-affect cognates: arguments that I’ve accepted as part of my worldview are likely to look a lot less good to people that haven’t internalized them. Same goes for rhetoric, but moreso.
Some people seem to be able to avoid this, but I don’t seem to have the entertaining rant patch installed. If you find your posts on these subjects being downvoted a lot, chances are you don’t either.
That makes some sense to me. Polyamory is exceptional because a number of prominent folks on Less Wrong identify as themselves poly, so they’re bound to take it personally. And maybe I take it too personally myself, having been burned by a few attempts at poly relationships that went badly.
If so, then we would all be expected to be making worse arguments than usual, and you can get caught in a death spiral of both sides taking it too personally.
In any case, regardless of the type of relationship, the golden rule is the campsite rule, suitably generalized to all relationships: strive to leave your partner(s) in a better shape than you found them.
ie. You should dump them as quickly as possible—while there is still a chance that the amazing sex offset the deterioration from aging. (You can stay with them a bit longer if you encourage them to exercize more, eat better and you give them a supply of tretinoin.)
Sarcastic, but I think it can be made into a fair point: You’re not always in control of whether someone gets better off or worse off, and is it fair to expect you to be?
Can you produce an example of someone who you know personally, or whose firsthand account you have encountered, who has been hurt by dating (a) poly(s) elsewhere-primaried, relative to how they would feel if the poly(s) were mono?
Why is it OK for me to hire an employee and give them money in exchange for doing what I want, when I’m not willing to take money from them in exchange for doing what they want? Why is it OK for me to work full time while my husband takes care of our household, when I’m not willing to take care of the household while my husband works full time? Why is it OK to have sexual relations where what I want to do is different from what I want done to me?
Or are all of those things unfair and immoral also?
Or is this notion of “priority” in a relationship somehow the most important thing ever, such that nobody could ever consider other things more worth having?
Honestly I don’t see the asymmetry in all the examples you just mentioned. You can make it sound asymmetrical, but as stated it isn’t, and if it actually were, it actually would be unfair.
It would be really unfair, if you insisted upon always being the employer and never the employee, and were never willing to ever do any work of your own in your life. (And then you expect people to give you money? For what?) But people don’t do that (maybe Donald Trump does), so it’s not a problem.
It would be really unfair, if you didn’t want to work but your spouse forced you to work and pay all the bills on the grounds that they didn’t want to work and it was “your job” somehow.
It would be really unfair, if the only thing you cared about in sex was what you want to do and have done to you, and your partner’s feelings don’t matter. In fact, in the extreme case we call that rape.
Want to try again? All your examples fail miserably, because they aren’t really asymmetrical in the way that “priority” polyamory is asymmetrical.
If you demand of anyone you are in a relationship with that you be their primary, then yes. I can see how it would be unfair to others. After all, you are demanding that each person in their relationships should make you their number 1 priority.
But, there is a large difference between wanting to be someone’s primary, wanting to be in a relationship with them, and demanding that you be someone’s primary.
Being in a primary-relationship is, for one thing, more work. Yes, your “favoritism” is higher, but so is the amount of emotional support you are expected to give. While I can imagine being in many relationships with many different people and being happy, I cannot imagine providing primary-level emotional support to all of those people at once. I’d probably end up doing nothing else and be largely unhappy. So I can’t see myself wanting to be the primary of as many people as I could see myself being happy in relationships with.
Further, it’s easy to see equitable ways for people to give each other non-primary status. Say you have four individuals: Alfred, Betty, Carl, and Diane. Alfred and Betty are each other’s primaries. Carl and Diane are each other’s primaries. Alfred and Carl decide then to enter into a relationship, knowing that neither will be each other’s primary. Neither, in this case, is demanding something they are unwilling to give. There are many other such “stable” scenarios, but frankly, as long as everyone is informed and is happier with the arrangement than they would be without it, I fail to see how your “deontological” concerns come into play.
I think rather than going down the Kantian track (deontology is not very convincing to me), I’d take the consequentialist angle:
If most people want to have special status (which seems fairly likely to me, cf the automatic jealousy reflex), you could sometimes end up in a situation where A wants to date B who is in a polyamorous relationship with C as their primary. B is willing to date A as a secondary, so A reasons (wrongly) that they’d rather be B’s secondary than not date them at all, and A and B start dating. Eventually after some misery A and B break up when A realises they can’t actually take being second-best.
Considering just this argument, polyamory will still be ok if the utility of all the happy polyamorous relationships outweighs the total disutility from all the times when the above scenario happens. I can’t say what the frequency or relative utility of either of these situations are, though.
By the way, you are overgeneralizing from your own preferences a bit. Even if you wouldn’t be compatible with someone who was genuinely happy with being a secondary, it’s not hard to imagine the existence of someone who would be. In which case, as long as all their partners were happy with being secondaries, everything would be ok.
The biggest sticking point for me is that “top priority” business. I’m fairly sure I can’t be satisfied being anyone’s second-best, or even one of three who are rated approximately equal (though the latter doesn’t bother me as much as the former).
But when I think a sort of Kantian mode of universalizing that notion, I realize that it’s unfair to be polyamorous in this way.
Yes, that’s right, I’m saying there’s something immoral about what you’re doing, not for the stupid reasons that Christian conservatives get bent out of shape about, but for a much deeper deontological reason: When you have a “primary” but still include other people who aren’t your “primary”, you’re demanding to be given something—priority—that you yourself won’t give. You’re asserting that you have a right to demand special status, but other people don’t.
The only way I can see to soften that blow is to say that some people don’t want to be number one; they don’t mind being second-best. But first of all, I find that a little hard to believe to begin with (who wouldn’t want to be the favorite if they could be?); and second of all, frankly I have trouble imagining that I would be compatible with someone who thinks that way. They can’t be much like me if they don’t care about being second-best.
For this reason, I can really only see two morally justifiable modes: Egalitarian monogamy and egalitarian polyamory. And if I’m not prepared to accept the latter, that leaves only the former.
Am I wrong? Can someone explain to me why it’s okay for me to demand priority, but then still include people in relationships that I am unwilling to give priority to?
This comment seems… fundamentally confused. It seems like it addresses me directly, so I’ll reply instead of ignoring it.
This seems to be something about you. If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, go ahead and don’t enter into relationships like that.
My goodness. My primary has a right to special status from me because I have the same from him. If we were monogamous, we’d be “egalitarian”ly so; but then my other boyfriends wouldn’t get to date me at all. I think this would upset them. Neither of them are counseling me to dump them so I can commit fairly to my primary. (Or begging me to run away with them instead, for that matter.) But note that I can only “demand” special status from my primary because he’s okay with that. I did not break into his house and say “I must take first priority in your love life, or else!” It’s a thing we decided to do with each other. He and I can meanwhile maintain secondaries who may seek primaries or flings or whatever-they-want elsewhere too (or not, if they don’t care to). This is all just more people having more options.
Someone with limited time, who doesn’t want to be wanted more than they can find opportunity to be available? Someone less extroverted than their partner, who needs large swaths of alone time? Someone with a primary of their own elsewhere? Someone who gets off on not being treated as the favorite? I have yet to sincerely underestimate human heterogeneity.
This seems to be something about you. If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, go ahead and don’t enter into relationships like that.
You’ve made a leap from your own psychology to ethics in general.
I am delighted by this phrase.
first: fairness is not the same as morality*. (ignore this point if you think fairness is a crucial thing to measure in morality)
Second: Most people seem to be mutually primary. You’re getting priority from someone and giving it to them in return, but you can also have others. It’s rare that someone is poly amorous but demands monogamy from their loves. Even if they did, this leads into
Third: We’re talking about consensual relationships here. If you want priority, then you can date only people who will give you priority. Hell, if you want to date someone and have them give you priority, and NOT give them priority in return, as long as they agree why should this be a problem?
fourth: You seem to be viewing this as unfairly advantageous to a poly person, because they get “priority” and also bonus sex, but it’s also advantageous to all the secondaries, who presumably don’t care about or at least don’t need priority, and would have less romance without the poly person.
*to elaborate: People have different preferences, often vastly different. Unless you take this into account, naive views of fairness lead to perverse results. Imagine two people: Tom hates cake and loves pie, and Dave hates pie and loves cake. They live in an unfair universe where they have 3 cakes and 1 pie to divide between themselves. It seems “Unfair” to give Dave 3 cakes and give Tom 1 pie, yet this is the best outcome. An extra cake won’t do tom any good, and so dave is being deprived for no reason. Now replace desire for cake with desire for sex and imagine a person who has lot of desire for sex but is in love with someone with none. Why deprive both of them of love? Add another person, and every individual involved is happier.
They sell one of the cakes to buy one more pie, and Dave gets two cakes and Tom gets two pie.
I actually have changed my mind, but not due to your argument. (Your argument assumes that someone likes being second-best, which I still contend is pretty bizarre.)
I realized that there’s another side to the story I had ignored, which is that someone who is “secondary” to one person can be “primary” to another. So you can have two couples who occasionally trade off, or n such couples, or n couples and k menages-a-trois.
This means that it can be potentially fair, but it’s still incumbent upon the polyamorist to ensure that it actually is fair, i.e. that no one is being taken advantage of. I understand that there is a segment of the poly community which focuses on this sort of “responsible polyamory”; but I also understand that a lot of people self-identify as poly and don’t follow these rules at all—and people get hurt by it.
(Data point: I am one of Alicorn’s former secondaries and was not in any other romantic relationships at the time, and I can testify that I did not feel exploited. I have no particular reason to care about what you consider bizarre or unfair.)
People get hurt in all kinds of relationships, because entering in a relationship generally means that you open yourself up to being hurt if things go wrong.
In any case, regardless of the type of relationship, the golden rule is the campsite rule, suitably generalized to all relationships: strive to leave your partner(s) in a better shape than you found them.
I would replace “my partner” with “everyone involved,” but other than that, completely agreed.
Fixed to include plural, thanks!
It’s not a bad rule, but it has a couple of serious shortcomings.
First, how do you know? You don’t see them afterward, almost by definition. Second, if you do make someone worse off, how do you distinguish a permissible accidental harm from impermissible negligence? Third, is this enough? It seems at least plausible that you can exploit someone even while leaving them better off. See “Wrongful Benificence” by Chris Meyers.
I’d really prefer it if people had a policy of warning for PDFs. I have much different thresholds for wanting to click those than other links.
This problem is partially amenable to a technical solution. By whatever means your browser provides, add this CSS stylesheet:
This will not, however, mark links which go to PDFs but have no extension or type hint, but in my experience nearly all PDF URLs have an extension.
I don’t know how to make a CSS addition in my browser itself.
Well, this was annoyingly hard to find the complete answer to. (I’ve only done it for Safari.)
In Safari, create the style sheet file anywhere then select it from Preferences → Advanced → Style sheet.
In Firefox, place a file at
chrome/userContent.cssin your Firefox profile directory; there will be an example file calleduserContent-example.cssthere.In Google Chrome, edit
User StyleSheets/Custom.cssin your Google Chrome profile directory.Locating the profile directory depends on your operating system as well as browser; instructions for this are much easier to find but if you specify your OS I’ll look it up for you.
OSX 10.7. And I don’t know where to find my Firefox profile directory.
Note that on 10.7 and later the Library folder is hidden; the easiest way to work around this is to use Go to Folder… (Command-Shift-G) in the Finder and then type/paste a pathname such as
(Do I need to mention that all of this is far messier that, speaking as a designer of software, I approve of, even for a rarely-needed feature?)
I have now done all this (I used the terminal to get there) and added the CSS line but it didn’t do anything, PDFs still download without warning when clicked.
The expected result is that PDF links have ” [PDF]” at the end of their text, i.e. a warning of the sort someone writing a comment could have inserted. I tested it on the link in the comment you originally replied to.
Troubleshooting items: Have you restarted your browser? Did you save the CSS as plain text, not RTF or other word-processor format? What is the full pathname to where you placed the CSS file?
I edited the file with vim directly in the Terminal according to my wizard’s instructions. I didn’t restart my browser, which could be it.
That I, personally, agree with you seems less significant than that this is the first comment I’ve seen upvoted to +4 while it was still one of the five most recent comments.
I also note how while karma is supposed to mean “constructive”, it usually actually means “agree”. People don’t just downvote trolls, they seem to downvote anyone they disagree with.
I can tell, because usually I get upvoted… but all my posts criticizing polyamory have negative scores. I didn’t turn into a troll overnight.
It is possible that your thinking and communicating on that subject really has sucked compared to other things that you have said.
To generalize that, I’ve found in the past that posts on subjects I feel very strongly about, or that I might reasonably expect interested observers to feel very strongly about, tend to be noticeably less well received unless I put a lot of effort into cooling my phrasing and shoring up any weak points in the reasoning. This might have a little to do with inferential gaps, but it’s probably driven mostly by halo effects and their negative-affect cognates: arguments that I’ve accepted as part of my worldview are likely to look a lot less good to people that haven’t internalized them. Same goes for rhetoric, but moreso.
Some people seem to be able to avoid this, but I don’t seem to have the entertaining rant patch installed. If you find your posts on these subjects being downvoted a lot, chances are you don’t either.
That makes some sense to me. Polyamory is exceptional because a number of prominent folks on Less Wrong identify as themselves poly, so they’re bound to take it personally. And maybe I take it too personally myself, having been burned by a few attempts at poly relationships that went badly.
If so, then we would all be expected to be making worse arguments than usual, and you can get caught in a death spiral of both sides taking it too personally.
Personally I have never upvoted or downvoted any post on lesswrong, ever. Politics is only mindkilling to those who have chips in the game.
ie. You should dump them as quickly as possible—while there is still a chance that the amazing sex offset the deterioration from aging. (You can stay with them a bit longer if you encourage them to exercize more, eat better and you give them a supply of tretinoin.)
Sarcastic, but I think it can be made into a fair point: You’re not always in control of whether someone gets better off or worse off, and is it fair to expect you to be?
No, ironic, facetious or merely silly. Sarcasm is different.
Can you explain why being bizarre is immoral?
Can you produce an example of someone who you know personally, or whose firsthand account you have encountered, who has been hurt by dating (a) poly(s) elsewhere-primaried, relative to how they would feel if the poly(s) were mono?
Why is it OK for me to hire an employee and give them money in exchange for doing what I want, when I’m not willing to take money from them in exchange for doing what they want?
Why is it OK for me to work full time while my husband takes care of our household, when I’m not willing to take care of the household while my husband works full time?
Why is it OK to have sexual relations where what I want to do is different from what I want done to me?
Or are all of those things unfair and immoral also?
Or is this notion of “priority” in a relationship somehow the most important thing ever, such that nobody could ever consider other things more worth having?
Honestly I don’t see the asymmetry in all the examples you just mentioned. You can make it sound asymmetrical, but as stated it isn’t, and if it actually were, it actually would be unfair.
It would be really unfair, if you insisted upon always being the employer and never the employee, and were never willing to ever do any work of your own in your life. (And then you expect people to give you money? For what?) But people don’t do that (maybe Donald Trump does), so it’s not a problem.
It would be really unfair, if you didn’t want to work but your spouse forced you to work and pay all the bills on the grounds that they didn’t want to work and it was “your job” somehow.
It would be really unfair, if the only thing you cared about in sex was what you want to do and have done to you, and your partner’s feelings don’t matter. In fact, in the extreme case we call that rape.
Want to try again? All your examples fail miserably, because they aren’t really asymmetrical in the way that “priority” polyamory is asymmetrical.
Nope, I’m done trying.
Are you okay with having one or more Best Friends Forever you’d take a bullet for, while also having buddies you just enjoy hanging out with?
This comment is an excellent example of the typical mind fallacy.
I don’t think the OP said they wanted to be top priority for all their partners.
If you demand of anyone you are in a relationship with that you be their primary, then yes. I can see how it would be unfair to others. After all, you are demanding that each person in their relationships should make you their number 1 priority.
But, there is a large difference between wanting to be someone’s primary, wanting to be in a relationship with them, and demanding that you be someone’s primary.
Being in a primary-relationship is, for one thing, more work. Yes, your “favoritism” is higher, but so is the amount of emotional support you are expected to give. While I can imagine being in many relationships with many different people and being happy, I cannot imagine providing primary-level emotional support to all of those people at once. I’d probably end up doing nothing else and be largely unhappy. So I can’t see myself wanting to be the primary of as many people as I could see myself being happy in relationships with.
Further, it’s easy to see equitable ways for people to give each other non-primary status. Say you have four individuals: Alfred, Betty, Carl, and Diane. Alfred and Betty are each other’s primaries. Carl and Diane are each other’s primaries. Alfred and Carl decide then to enter into a relationship, knowing that neither will be each other’s primary. Neither, in this case, is demanding something they are unwilling to give. There are many other such “stable” scenarios, but frankly, as long as everyone is informed and is happier with the arrangement than they would be without it, I fail to see how your “deontological” concerns come into play.
I think rather than going down the Kantian track (deontology is not very convincing to me), I’d take the consequentialist angle:
If most people want to have special status (which seems fairly likely to me, cf the automatic jealousy reflex), you could sometimes end up in a situation where A wants to date B who is in a polyamorous relationship with C as their primary. B is willing to date A as a secondary, so A reasons (wrongly) that they’d rather be B’s secondary than not date them at all, and A and B start dating. Eventually after some misery A and B break up when A realises they can’t actually take being second-best.
Considering just this argument, polyamory will still be ok if the utility of all the happy polyamorous relationships outweighs the total disutility from all the times when the above scenario happens. I can’t say what the frequency or relative utility of either of these situations are, though.
By the way, you are overgeneralizing from your own preferences a bit. Even if you wouldn’t be compatible with someone who was genuinely happy with being a secondary, it’s not hard to imagine the existence of someone who would be. In which case, as long as all their partners were happy with being secondaries, everything would be ok.
Your analysis sounds reasonable.