Abstract
Monogamy, I’ve argued, faces a pressing problem: the difficulty of finding a morally relevant difference between its restriction on having additional partners and a restriction on having additional friends. To the extent that we’d find a restriction on having additional friends morally troubling, that puts pressure on us to judge the same about monogamy. This argument, however, has recently come under attack by Kyle York, who defends monogamy on grounds of specialness, practicality, and jealousy. In this paper I’ll argue that, pace York, these defenses of monogamy all fail.
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Notes
To be sure, some might doubt this, holding in mind York’s claim that one should be wary “whenever one sees an argument of Chalmers’ that examines a good-making feature of monogamy and points out that such a feature doesn’t justify restrictions of friendships. In such cases, it could be that the more onerous restriction on additional friendships crosses a certain threshold such that the good-making feature in question no longer compensates for the restrictions” (2020: 540). To clarify, there are two places where my earlier paper “examines a good-making feature of monogamy and points out that such a feature doesn’t justify restrictions of friendships.” The first is in one part of my response to the specialness defense. The idea there, however, is not simply that considerations of specialness fail to justify the friendship restriction; it is, rather, that “[h]aving additional friends does not make any particular friendship less special” (Chalmers, 2019: 228). In other words, rather than specialness’s being a good-making feature of the friendship restriction which is simply not weighty enough to justify it, the thought is that specialness is not a good-making feature of the friendship restriction at all. And that, in turn, is meant to make salient the question of why we should think that specialness is a good-making feature of monogamous restrictions at all; to the extent that we do, we would need to find a relevant difference between friendship and romantic relationships. So the argument here is more defensible than simply saying, “Specialness doesn’t justify the friendship restriction; therefore, it doesn’t justify monogamous restrictions, either.”
There is a second place where my earlier paper points out that a putatively good-making feature of monogamy would fail to justify the friendship restriction: a part of my response to the practicality defense (2019: 232). I acknowledge that, at least in its present wording, this point indeed runs into York’s criticism. While I believe that the point could be reformulated to be more defensible, I lack the space to do so here. More importantly, it is in any case a matter of limited interest, as direct comparisons to the friendship restriction are only a small part of my earlier discussion of the putatively good-making features of monogamy; even if I withdrew such comparisons entirely, there would, I propose, remain ample reasons for thinking that the defenses of monogamy all fail.
To avoid some cumbersome sentence constructions, in what follows I’ll generally use the singular “good-making feature,” rather than “good-making feature(s).” I do so, of course, with the understanding that monogamy might in principle be justified by multiple good-making features working together, even if no such feature is enough to justify monogamy by itself.
I say that these are the only natural candidates because prospective romantic and sexual relationships—including those that would be in addition to an existing one—are liable to be the subject of intense desire. To enforce a norm against beginning additional romantic and sexual relationships, then, one must be prepared to impose a correspondingly severe cost for violating that norm. A mild-to-moderate blame or resentment, for example, simply would not be enough here. Indeed, even the willingness to feel intense blame or resentment, or to outright end the relationship, is often not enough—as shown by the all-too-common willingness to cheat even though these typically are understood to be what’s at stake.
Note, too, that even if I’m mistaken here, and monogamy itself need not involve having such significant costs at stake, it’s nevertheless true that having such costs at stake is a part of monogamy as typically practiced. Thus, even if we reject the claim that monogamy itself has such high stakes, we’re left with a point that remains equally troubling for most defenders of monogamy (viz., that monogamy, as typically practiced, requires a very weighty justification in view of how much partners tend to put at stake for violating monogamous restrictions).
This is not to suggest that these are the only features relevant to justifying a restriction. Other features, for example, include the ease with which a restriction may be overridden. No such further features, however, have any obvious bearing on monogamous restrictions—or, at least, not the kind of bearing that would make monogamous restrictions easier to defend. (For instance, to continue the above example, it’s typically understood that monogamous restrictions are never, or almost never, to be overridden.)
Here York cites Weaver and Woollard (2008: 519).
Here York cites my (2019: 225).
As it turns out, there’s reason to doubt that being distinctive in fact makes a shared identity more valuable. If it did, then the value of a shared identity would depend in part on extrinsic features—distinctiveness being an extrinsic feature, depending as it does on whether other shared identities happen to be like a given one—and some might find such a consequence objectionable. For present purposes, however, I’m willing to set this aside and assume, for the sake of argument, that being distinctive makes a shared identity more valuable.
Here an anonymous reviewer raises a worry: “The response here seems to underestimate the ways that, once started, romantic relationships can lead to commitments and obligations. A more appropriate analogy would be a restriction on investigating career options where that very investigation may mean you are committed to move.” While I believe that this kind of worry is worth addressing, I find it more natural to do so in the context of the jealousy defense. Accordingly, I’ll address this kind of worry later, in section 5.1.
Even if one found other fulfillments to try to compensate for the worthwhile additional relationship(s) one is missing out on, this would not cancel out the loss. Given that relationships are non-fungible, there would remain something regrettable about missing out on the worthwhile additional relationship(s) here.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for articulating this worry.
Such a claim might seem surprising; what about people like those whom York quotes, those who report finding it exhausting to have even simply two partners at a time? If someone persistently finds it exhausting to have even one additional partner, does it not follow that non-monogamy itself is exhausting for him? No, it does not. For such a person could stick to one partner at a time while letting his partner be free to pursue others; such a relationship would still be non-monogamous. (In such a case, sticking to one partner for oneself would be merely a preference, not a restriction.) For further discussion of this point, see my (2019: 241).
I add the qualification “unless one has a (perhaps very) good reason to do so” in light of cases like the following: Suppose that you’ve agreed to a meet a friend for lunch, but suddenly you learn that missing your lunch meeting is necessary to stop a nuclear strike on a distant city. In normal circumstances, missing your lunch meeting might well call into question your commitment as a friend; here, however, missing your lunch meeting would not appear to do so, given that you have a very good reason for it.
This does not imply that it’s impossible to develop a committed additional relationship, but simply that the commitments in such relationships should be discussed explicitly rather than merely inferred from behavior.
Such a judgment need not be as harsh as it might sound. In particular, depending on the details of the case, we can allow that the irrationality is understandable, at least.
Here York cites, as “a broader discussion of problems with this attitude in contemporary culture,” Bauman (2014).
The mechanism for enforcing such ignorance could be analogous to that in monogamy. That is, the mechanism here could be the mutual understanding: “If I find out that you’ve taken on a job in another region, or that you’ve been seriously investigating doing so, I’ll leave you.”
There are, of course, cases here in which worry would be justified—for instance, if the new person my partner has become interested in happens to be dangerous. Such worry, though, would be importantly different from jealousy, as the concern here wouldn’t be over the mere fact that my partner has become interested in someone else, but that the person he’s become interested in poses a danger to him or to me. Naturally, an analogous worry could be called for if my partner took on a dangerous new hobby or friend; such cases notwithstanding, it remains true that when I learn that my partner has taken on a new hobby or friend, happiness on his behalf should be my default response. Likewise, I claim that happiness on my partner’s behalf should be my default response upon learning that he’s become interested in someone else.
For a fuller discussion of the badness of jealousy, see Brunning (2020).
To be fair, York does say that “except in extreme cases, the positive or negative valence of emotions is usually taken to be morally significant” (2020: 551, emp. mine), so perhaps he’d simply count my cases as exceptions. If so, however, he would owe us an explanation of just why these cases are exceptions, along with why jealousy wouldn’t likewise be such an exception. Absent such an explanation, the simplest and most reasonable conclusion is that immature feelings more generally lack moral weight.
See section 2 above.
York appears to acknowledge this condition when he writes, “Seemingly, in cases where reasons for jealousy are lacking, a couple should make agreements accommodating such jealousy only if the jealousy is beyond their ability to overcome (without exceedingly large costs)” (2020: 549).
For information on the benefits of exercise for mental health, see Mikkelsen et al. (2017). The information below about furthering self-esteem, overcoming anxious attachment systems, and regulating emotions is also relevant to improving mental health.
For some key methods of improving self-esteem, see Mruk (2006: 97-105). Although Mruk’s discussion is addressed primarily to therapists, it touches on various techniques (e.g., cognitive restructuring) that one could use even in the absence of a therapist.
What’s more, so far I have not even mentioned the prospect of neuroenhancement of relationships. This is a new frontier that could very well go on to make NON-MONOGAMY INEFFECTIVE even more difficult to fulfill in the future, should such neuroenhancement include ways of reducing jealousy. See Earp, Sandberg, and Savulescu (2012) and Earp and Savulescu (2020).
York appears to acknowledge this condition, or something close to it, when he writes, “[O]f course, even if both lovers have issues with uncontrollable jealousy, there still seems to be a requirement [if monogamy is to be justified] that they want or usually enjoy exclusivity” (2020: 550).
Weaver and Woollard consider an analogous worry: that of whether their own defense of monogamy can avoid making monogamy merely “a lamentable consequence of human frailty” (2008: 519–520). They offer multiple points in response, and here I lack the space to address them all. For now, suffice it to point out that their broader defense of monogamy rests on considerations of specialness and practicality rather than jealousy. Accordingly, their discussion here arguably does not engage (and was not meant to engage) with the worry as framed above, namely that for monogamy to be justified only by jealousy would suggest monogamy to be ultimately something regrettable.
Thanks to Justin Clardy, my students in Philosophy of Sex and Love (Oberlin College, spring 2020), and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and discussion.
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Chalmers, H. Monogamy Unredeemed. Philosophia 50, 1009–1034 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00445-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00445-0