Some interesting correlations between the aftermath of hurricanes and an decrease in the birth rate. However, tropical storms show a correlation in an increase in the birth rate. Expect a small baby-boom after Hurricane Irene in the upper East Coast.
Awesome interactive graphs on the sexual mores of people. Note: the surveys were done in Britain, but I think most of it can be similar to American standards as well. It would be interesting if they could do the same thing for Americans.
Women who want casual sex typically go after sexist men. Eh, not really. It should really be titled “Sexist Women Who Want Casual Sex Seek Sexist Men.” The main reason is that men use either heavy come-on lines or very aggressive initiatives, and the sexist women (meaning against their own gender) find that women should be “in their place” and be dominated by men as acceptable.
K-Y Brand Lubricant introduces a new commercial with lesbians:
Some realnumbers about HIV breakouts that compares the porn industry and the rest of the population. It turns out that HIV within the porn industry is statistically better than the population at large: “the rate of HIV infection among the LA porn population is somewhere around 0.0007% of the population versus the general population’s 0.0016%.”
I’ll be taking Philosophy of Mind (maybe) and a Continental Class dealing with the boundaries of the self (for sure). I saw this and thought it would be perfect to get me prepared for this class and help get me in the mood of post-structuralism, post-modernism…basically post-(fill in the blank):
Plato may not have believed in Platonic Love after all. Dr. Jay Kennedy finds codes within The Symposium suggesting that Plato believed that sex was important in love, but within moderation.
This is my third, and possible last, installment on my interests in philosophy pertaining to the philosophy of love and sex. My previous blog dealt with various philosophers on sex and the blog before dealt with various philosophers on love, flirtation, and marriage. As before, if there’s anything that I need to add to this list, please let me know.
This book is about how being monogamous is hard, but offers ways to stay monogamous and to fight our biological urges.
This book is divided into two sections. The first part is about swinging, but the second part is about the dynamics of monogamy.
*Penn & Teller questions Family Values, plus Stephanie Coontz is in it! (note: it’s got some language):
Here’s part two:
The Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance named after Victoria Woodhull. The site argues that sexual freedom is a basic human right where one should be free to express their own and unique sexuality.
Need legal help to live in an alternative relationship? Look here. From what I hear, the book gets updated every year.
*Many people unfamiliar with polyamory usually ask how to counter jealousy. It’s tricky business, but most assume that jealously is an innate emotion and we can’t deny that. I’m skeptical of that claim, but this essay really hits it home on why jealousy can be something to deal with.
There’s a lot of websites dedicated to the polyamorus lifestyle:
The Polyamorous Misanthrope. Polyamorous blog about the polyamorous lifestyle. Browsing around, it looks like readers can submit questions and she will respond.
I’m not sure if it fits in the polyamory section, but here’s an interesting article on how “stayover” relationships are becoming more popular among college students and college graduates.
**Plato argues in the Republic, Book V that in the ideal city, the families will be communal, lovers will be done by lot, and if the offspring aren’t to good standards, they’ll be left to die.
**Do you owe your parents anything? After all, they loved you, protected you, and raised you. Most would say yes. But Jane English says that you really don’t owe your parents anything. It’s because familial love is similar to friendship: strictly speaking, you don’t owe your friends anything if they sacrificed anything for you.
**Should we license parents to have kids in the same way we license people to drive cars? Hugh LaFollette says yes.
Everything has been romanticized to a pedestal to the point where it has become unreachable to obtain the goal. This also includes motherhood.
Brenda Almond laments that the family has been fragmented and she offers a natural law view that suggests we need to uphold the traditional family so that the social ills can be remedied.
Here is an audio clip describing Aristotle’s friendship.
**Epicurus gives a hedonistic account of friendship arguing that true friends don’t evaluate us according to the social criteria, it’s only the core that they’re interested in. Thus, the love from friendships remains unaffected by your appearance or position in the social hierarchy, so you have no qualms in dressing in old clothes or revealing that you made little money this year. They are most important defense against insecurity and are our greatest sources of strength.
Cicero’s analysis of friendship, or for a quicker summary. Or listen to this recitation: Overall, it’s better to be friends in the private realm rather than in the public realm.
To love your friend selflessly, you must first love God according to St. Augustine.
Kant finds friendship problematic because they don’t act based on rules, but based on love. Indeed, in heaven, there will be no friends because heaven is a place of perfect morality.
*Suppose your friend does something objectionable. Should you interfere? Most would say no. Ellen Fox says yes. Sometimes, you must be paternalistic to your friends because you love your friends.
Loners Unite! Eh, nevermind. Anneli Rufus argues that being alone does not equal loneliness. Indeed, she writes a manifesto about it.
**Bella DePaulo has really put this on the map and I’m hoping she will get more attention. She argues that singles have been discriminated but this has been hidden and hiding behind the shadows that we simply take it for granted. She tries to wake us up from our dogmatism of coupledom. I think people have unfoundational anuptaphobia or monophobia.
A great, and very humorous article about how if one is lonely, you only need to think about your possible girlfriend and you’ll be ok again.
*Not about being single, but the DINK lifestyle is still against the grain in society that people regard childless couples as a non-complete relationship to the point where it’s almost like a “more committed” single lifestyle.
An interesting study suggesting that if one is in a committed relationship and having sex, one is less likely to be a delinquent in the future. It’s mainly because being with the significant other makes one less likely hang out with friends that could lead them into trouble. I’m suspicious because this seems more like correlation rather than causation. Jump to the paper here.
Future generations will look back with bemusement on a time when airline passengers couldn’t pay extra for a flight that’s guaranteed first place in the runway queue, and more generally on our odd reluctance to embrace prices. They’ll be unable to imagine why we thought it was better to let people die of liver disease than to pay organ donors, or why the “net neutrality” cult had a problem with Internet content providers being able to purchase resources to serve their customers better.
Future generations are likely to be appalled by the moral blindness of either their pro-life or pro-choice ancestors, though I’m not sure which. Like slavery, this issue will eventually be settled, whereupon the losing position (whichever it is) will start to seem not just wrong but unthinkable.
Future generations might look back tenderly on the naivete that led us to believe we (meaning, say, middle-class Americans) could go on much longer leading lives mostly untouched by violence.
Choose a random movie made before, say 1990, and the odds are good that all of the plot complications could have been resolved in the first five minutes if only somebody had a cellphone. Choose a random movie made today and the odds are good that all of the plot complications could be resolved in the first five minutes if only the characters were polyamorous. (Of course, then there would be a whole new set of complications.) As incomes, lifespans, and the quality of communication continue to improve, I expect that our societal fixation on monogamy will wither, and our grandchildren will look back in wonder at their ancestors’ blindness to the lifestyle options they could have chosen.
The moral circle will continue to expand. As we look back in horror on our ancestors’ harsh treatment of slaves or of Native Americans, our descendants will look back in horror on our treatment of immigrants and our reluctance to trade with foreigners. Slogans like “Buy American” will strike our grandchildrens’ ears the way “Buy White” would strike ours.
Our treatment of animals might seem almost as horrific as our treatment of foreigners.
Our descendants might well wonder why so few of us chose to be cryonically preserved (or to put this another way, why so many of us chose to die), and wish they could come back and shake some sense — and some life — into us.
I find most of this accurate, although number 2 seems to be a stretch. I don’t think the abortion issue will be solved in a complete moral category for a few generations, although some of the commentators think it’s going to head to a pro-choice view. Some of the comments are insightful too. Most think that the War on Drugs will be eradicated. I suspect 4 will be true overtime, but many of the commentators think it’s wrong.
Let me add two thoughts:
8. I think religious affiliation will go down. More and more people will start to see themselves as “spiritual but not religious” overtime. With that, religious literacy will go down to where people won’t even know what they are supposed to believe in their religion. Eventually, I think many people of the future will look at our generation and think that we must have been crazy to have had these beliefs. Perhaps this will or will not lead to atheism, but certainly a downward trend to religious sensibilities.
9. This will take a good while, but the whole notion of race will be gone because everyone will be more-or-less the same hue. I hear it’s going to be some conglomerate pumpkin color of some sort. Perhaps our descendants will look at our different races and consider them weird in the same way we look at our evolutionary ancestors as weird.
I posted an overview on various philosophers on erotic love, flirting and marriage. Here, I’ll be looking at the philosophy of sex and many sub-categories with it. As before, if there’s something that I’m missing, please let me know. This list is not exhaustive. These are mainly articles or books that I’ve either read or skimmed through. Please note that if you do contribute, it may not be here immediately as I would like to at least skim it.
*If you need a good place to start, go here and here. Again, Alan Soble is extremely helpful with this.
*Speaking of which, Alan Soble has gone through many editions of this book and the articles are great. Always current with the latest stuff.
**This is a repeat in the love section. Alan Soble’s The Philosophy of Sex and Love is a great introduction from an analytical view. He also doesn’t shy away from some Continentals like Foucault. But he goes through the various arguments of Plato, Kant, traditional Catholicism, feminism, and current views. Great read!
Social construction of sexuality at its best. Foucault argues that the whole concept of sexuality is something we made up because of the structures of power/knowledge. Here he is distinguishing between pleasure and desire:
Wasserstrom argues that adultery isn’t wrong in itself, but because of the lying. Indeed, open marriages allow multiple partners. Does that constitute adultery? In other words, adultery isn’t always wrong. That requires another argument.
Wreen argues that adultery is always immoral because we can’t universalize adultery under Kant’s categorical imperative, and that sexual exclusivity is a necessary condition for marriage, at least in western culture.
J.E. and Marry Ann Barnhart argue that adultery may not necessarily be wrong as long the people involved agree to some degree of extramarital sexual intimacy.
Do we regard intersexed individuals as “abnormalities,” and thereby preserve our traditional understanding of biological sex as a binary, or do we regard intersex individuals as counterexamples to our traditional understanding of biological sex? Anne Fousto-Sterling explores this and frames a new look on how we construct sexuality. Hear her:
**Robert B. Baker is concerned that our language of crude words is tainted with sexism. For example, “Jack fucks Jill” makes sense in our society. But “Jill fucks Jack” sounds weird? Why? It’s because the fucker is doing the acting while the fuckee is the passive recipient. But this makes the actor into the superior, thus leading to a patriarchal framework. Unfortunately, I can’t find the article, but you can get it from this book.
**Not really a response, but definitely looking at sexual language to the opposite route than Baker did. I talked about it in a previous post. A great article from Neil Sinhababu pertaining to how one should embrace obscene sexual expressions because they actually connote positive things.
Perversions
Thomas Nagel’s classic piece on how normal sexuality is where the people involved are mutually sensing each other. Anything that doesn’t do that is by definition a perversion. Examples would include fetishism, bestiality, voyeurism, and necrophilia. There are no complete arousal systems in those behaviors.
*Defending Pornography claims that pornography is a constitutional right under the First Amendment. Yet, she also argues that it actually helps everyone to be equal whereas censoring pornography actually hinders women.
Goldman also defends pornography from a hedonist point of view arguing that conservative or anti-porn feminists are arguing from a non-foundational ideology rather than looking at the evidence.
*I’m not sure if this fits under the category of proper sexuality, but maybe under a general category of desire. This comes from Plato’s Republic, Book I. In it, the first person that defines “justice” is Cephalus. Before this, however, Socrates first approaches Cephalus and indirectly asks him, “How’s your sex life?” (You’ll have to read between the lines, but it’s there.) Cephalus’ answer is really interesting. Basically Cephalus is an old man and he says that it’s so much better being old because once you’re old, sexual desire has gone away and you can finally control yourself and do what you want to do instead of following what your sexual desires want to do. It’s as if once the sexual desire is gone, the burden has been lifted off of your shoulders. Typically with young people, fulfilling sexual desires is a great pleasure and if it is a burden, it’s not as drastic as Cephalus makes it. Amusingly, I can imagine a young Cephalus going over his business books and saying to himself, “Let’s see how my accounts are going with the different cities today so that I…Ah damn it I’m horny again!” I wish I could read a paper–or better yet, write a paper–on this topic. It probably has some similarities with St. Augustine where the sexual desire really isn’t you, but is something that controls you and as soon as that sexual desire is gone, it’s such a relief.
*Epicurus gives a hedonistic account of how sex is an unnecessary desire because the pleasures derived from satisfying these desires in some cases may not be worth it, since they are likely to create as many problems (pains) for ourselves as benefits (pleasures). Be moderate in ones pleasures. Sexual gets the people involved into unnecessary needs and vulnerabilities. It goes like this: Lust –> infatuation –>consummation –> jealousy or boredom. Thus, it leads to anxiety or distress and that process continues. The only pleasurable thing in that whole process is the sex itself, but it’s not worth it. The question is still being posed on whether Epicurus got it right.
For St. Augustine, sex is always shameful: it controls the inner will, this sexual appetite is like an robber invading your mind.
**Kant’s view of sexuality is extremely strict, but it fits with his categorical imperative. However, I find that it only pushes the question back because the metaphysics only seems to work in a religious context.
The Vatican states that sex is only permissible in a loving, committed heterosexual marriage with the purpose of procreation.
Not so fast. Luc Bovens argues that discordant heterosexual couples should be able to use condoms because it’s still compatible with Catholic doctrines such as the Doctrine of Double Effect.
**According to Alan Goldman, sex is just plain sex! There’s nothing special about it.
When is sex morally ok? According to Thomas A. Mappes, sex is permissible if and only if when the parties involved are freely consenting.
According to Howard Klepper, consent isn’t sufficient. Beyond consent, we must be considerate of the other’s needs, such as privacy, their feelings, and make sure that the relationship is non-exploitive.
Vincent Punzo agrees with Klepper saying that sex is is an expression of one’s moral self by affirming some values that one has and that there is a mutual commitment. This can only be done in marriage.
*Ah yes, but what is consent in the first place? Robin West wants to know.
David Benatar finds a dilemma within sex: the pleasure view (which means rape and pedophilia ok) or some deeper significance view (within some form of commitment or love). The former is morally repugnant, the latter makes noncommittal sex wrong. What to do? Perhaps a hybrid of the two.
Casual sex reveals what kind of character one has. Raja Halwani, coming from virtue theory, shows that it actually doesn’t ruin people’s characters.
There will be a new book coming out on Christian Sexual ethics. You can see the table of contents here. To get a glimpse of the essay, you can read some of it here. Basically, the author argues for the ontological status of one flesh while arguing for a phenomenological basis in natural law theory.
Raja Halwani argues that casual sex and promiscuity may lead to objectification, but that objectification could be overcome. I’ve blogged about it: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five.
Using phenomenology and Kant, Yolanda Estes argues that prostitution is psychologically damaging, even if the person consents, and is therefore morally wrong.
*Lois Pineau argues that current laws surrounding date rape are already biased against the victim. Instead, the presumption should show that the perpetrator did not rape the victim.
Interesting patterns between being single, being married, and being obese. The short answer is that if you’re a married man or a single woman, it pays to be obese. However, if you’re a single man or a married woman, your wage is lower.
Ethics
If you receive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to your right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), it will affect your moral judgment. Read about it here, or just watch it:
A vegetarian might actually kill more animals than omnivores. Yet, a vegan may do the least damage. Either that or start eating whale. Overall, getting eggs and dairy is best from humane sources to lessen the damage.
Women drinkers have better sex lives. Basically two glass of wine a day would do it. But this doesn’t seem like causation, more like correlation if anything.
Not really about sex, but against it. With typical dating sites, there are always some people who sign up for the purpose of some sexual encounter. Not with this one. The purpose for this dating site is for purely dating, not sexual encounters. The founder wanted to find a dating site where it didn’t lead to sex and so she started the site.
As many of you know, my specialty within philosophy is the philosophy of sex and love. Many people have asked me what sort of readings are there about that topic? Well, below are readings, speeches, and ideas to this wonderful subject. I will cover love, flirting and marriage in this post. Eventually, I hope to cover familial love, friendship, all forms of sexuality, pornography and singledom.
* = Really good
** = Must read
Websites
To start you off, here are some sources online:
SPSL: The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love.
*The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. This is a nice anthology of the major philosophers, even when these major philosophers only mention love briefly. For example, Spinoza has a philosophy of love in his Ethics, but Solomon and Higgins take those parts in the book. This only concentrates on erotic love, so it’s more specialized.
*Philosophy of Sex and Love edited by Robert Trevas, Arthur Zucker and Donald Borchert. This covers a lot of areas within the fields such as pornography, adultery, marriage, fornication, prostitution, perversity, homosexuality, and rape. Great for those who want a nice range of topics.
Eros, Agape, and Philia edited by Alan Soble. This covers only love but of all types. It mainly looks at current articles.
Love Analyzed edited by Roger E. Lamb. Mainly articles from the analytical tradition.
Special issue of Essays in Philosophy dealing with the topic of love and reasons.
Specific Philosophers on Erotic Love (in historical order):
Empedocles’ world is a mixture of love and hate as the foundations. It’s probably not erotic, but someone has a love of him:
Mozi started a following of Mohism stating that universal love is the key to a great society, but not in the erotic sense.
**Socrates may have had the best speech in Plato’s Symposium(or here for a better translation)…
Yet, this is my favorite “musical speech” from Phaedrus and Pausanius:
Possibly the most famous, and well-known speech of the Symposium. Unfortunately, it is also the most influential:
**Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view in the Metaphysics of Love has driven love to a biological/psychological view. It is stark, yet things that are stark may have an element of truth: love is an illusion in order to propagate the species for the sake of the Will. I will just put part one for your enjoyment:
There is no overarching idea behind Nietzsche’s view of love. Overall, it seems that he views friendship in higher regard than eros. Here’s a great article summing it up.
Does everything revolve around sex for Freud? In this regard, he is a philosopher. On Narcissism details that romantic love is an outgrowth of a primary state of narcissism. With mature love, it’s a move to find an external object to desire and there’s a tradeoff for one’s narcissism. But this may affect self-esteem.
**Sartre is another pessimist on love by looking at it from a phenomenological route where all relationships come down to conflict by trying to steal another person’s freedom. Start with Part III, Chap. 3.
*Simone de Beauvoir is another phenomenologist but also looking at it from a feminist route. Love is a matter of culture and interpersonal dynamics and not some essential nature. For women, love is “irresistible” but she will always be second place compared to man. Genuine love would be “the mutual recognition of two liberties.” Start with Part VI, Chap. XXIII.
Jose Ortega y Gasset. This is a rare find, yet truly a treasure. He mainly criticizes Stendhal’s defintion. But it has an existential character where love is a choice and it changes your character through that choice.
Shulamith Firestone gives a radical feminist critique of love arguing that it is actually harmful for women because it keeps women in their place. Start with chapter six. For true equality, technology must catch up so that artificial births would generate equality.
Irving Singer is another big name who makes a difference between appraisal and bestowal in love. Go here to see him lecture.
Robert Nozick isn’t known as a philosopher of love, but he states that love is forming a “we.” Here’s a summary.
Annette Baier offers a Humean account of love. Love has many risks in it, but it’s worth it because the alternative is solidarity and loneliness.
Robert C. Solomon views love as a virtue, in order to broaden our view of ethics, and that it shouldn’t be downgraded as it has been in the tradition.
*Speaking of Solomon, he has two books. The first is an argument on how love is an emotion that shouldn’t be riddled with myths and metaphors. It works great until he brings in the Aristophanes’ tale and how love is like that. The second is broader view and more matured where love starts off as a passion, but then is informed by a phenomenological outlook of selves-in-the-world where there’s a feedback loop between the selves. In other words, it’s Aristophanes again but in a complex way a stating it.
**Alan Soble’s The Philosophy of Sex and Love is a great introduction from an analytical view. He also doesn’t shy away from some Continentals like Foucault. But he goes through the various arguments of Plato, Kant, traditional Catholicism, feminism, and current views. Great read!
A more complicated view of Soble where he certainly loves structure. It’s very analytical, but makes very good arguments along the way. Love of a romantic parter starts with eros, but tends toward agape over time.
*Alaine de Botton is a great philosophical novel going through all aspects of what a loving relationship is about. It’s a great story too.
*Helen Fisher isn’t a philosopher, but she gives some interesting insight what the brain looks like when one is in love. A lot of brain chemicals kick in and… I’ll just let the TED talk explain it:
Levinas offers an account by suggesting that ethics cannot be reduced to the Same, that one must look at the Other as Other and respect the Other’s otherness. One can extract this into an account of love.
M.C. Dillon gives a critique of the tradition as well: we reduce others into a projection of what we desire. We need to get beyond the tradition to have genuine loving relationships. Let’s get beyond romance.
Here is Derrida making a distinction of who you love as opposed to what you love stemming from Plato. “Fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what”:
*Luce Irigaray combines the features of Levinas and the feminism of her time. We need to respect the Other in their sexual difference. The previous tradition has ignored this. Twobooks help explain this idea out.
*Against Love? Laura Kipnis is. Great polemic against traditional love, especially the chapter entitled “Domestic Gulags.” Overall, it’s a critique of the notion of coupledom and that there’s nothing wrong with being single.
Slavoj Žižek says that love is always trying to fit the other into our ideal fantasy, but this can lead to violence:
Troy Jollimore asks what kind of experience is love. It seems that it violates a lot of epistemic and moral norms, but by investigating the experience of love, it turns out that we only need to focus on the visual aspects of it and the violation is mitigated.
Flirting
*Carrie Jenkins started the field asking what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for flirting. Her answer is that flirting must be intentional. There is a difference between flirting and flirting behavior.
*Daniel Nolan has replied to Jenkins saying that flirting can be accidental, thereby flirting doesn’t necessarily have to be intentional. Interestingly, both Jenkins and Nolan are partners.
Listen to Jenkins here. (Note: you’ll either have to subscribe to the podcast or buy the episode.)
Social research on flirting, such as where to flirt, who to flirt with, how to flirt in both verbal and non-verbal formats (note: it doesn’t matter what you say, but how you say it), what to say (note: opening lines don’t matter; don’t waste your time on those), how to listen, and how to part. As an interesting tidbit, 80% of women responded that the three words they want to hear is not, “I love you,” but “You’ve lost weight.”
Steven Pinker mainly talks about language, but he uses flirting as an example. Basically, we are always indirect with flirting because of epistemological concerns of the other. Keep watching to the very end to see how and why flirtation works:
Marx and Engels found marriage as a form of capitalistic oppression. It traps women into unpaid work, and it keeps the inheritance to the biological children. Communism will change that, but a short cut would be to give men and women equal rights in marriage and socialize the care of children.
Emma Goldman is known as a feminist and anarchist, but her view of marriage is that it’s an economic institution that keeps women in their place. So marriage encourages women to be unequal. She asks for a change in the economic institutions for women to be emancipated. Here’s an interview about anarchism and same-sex love.
Bertrand Russell gives an unconventional marriage at his time, but it would be mild nowadays, or perhaps even antiquated: let the people live together before they get married, sort of like a trial.
Lawrence Casler offers an alternative to marriage such as open marriages, trial marriages, communes, group marriages and nonmonogamous matrimony.
On PhilosTV, Simon May and Elizabeth Brake discuss marriage. Around 4:30, they talk about same-sex marriage in which both are in favor of based on political liberalism (meaning that the state is neutral when it comes to a conception of the human good). They consider objections to same-sex marriage and they both show that those objections don’t work. Around 13:00, May raises a concern on whether the public should give a positive recognition to same-sex couples in the same way we give opposite-sex couples, thereby giving up political liberalism as a foundation. Brake’s reply is that previous types of marriages have been considered wrong and it was unjust that the state did not intervene, and so the state can uphold a sense of justice while still remaining neutral. Also, one can still embrace a sense of care to same-sex couples without endorsing a conception of the human good. May brings up another possible objection at 17:06, why should the state remain neutral? Why can’t the state say that an activity is a moral good and so the state should endorse it? Brake’s reply is that everyone has different moral and religious views that if the state endorses a view, then it’s favoring one side of the human good. If so, the state is not treating the citizens as equals. Around 21:39, May brings up a concern that if the state should remain neutral, wouldn’t this mean that polygamy would be allowed? But polygamy has been traditionally been a patriarchal institution which doesn’t seem to benefit anyone. Brake replies that neutrality would hold that polygamy should be allowed. This would include polyandory, polyamory, or simply groups. One could visualize that they are all equal instead of one as the head of the marriage. To be neutral is to extend marriage to all groups. The state right now doesn’t make patriarchal marriage between two people, the same is said for group marriages as well. There are, after all, egalitarian group marriages. The typical argument from conservatives is, “If we allow same-sex marriage, then we must allow polygamy.” To which Brake replies, “of course.” This changes when it comes to children, however. Around 34:28, May brings up the argument that if the state should remain neutral when it comes to marriage, why does the state even need to get involved in marriage in the first place? Why does the state need to get in the marriage business? After all, there is no public recognition for making friends, so why marriage? Why have a law of marriage at all? Brake admits that this is a challenge and she brings up a lot of interesting authors and philosophers that bring up the same challenge that May brought up. However, some possible reasons why that state should still get involved in marriage is that the citizens prefer them. It is here that Brake brings up her solution: minimalmarriage: the state is required to support all sorts of relationships. This would include all sorts of groups, no matter the number, tribes, and even non-sexual friendships where they live together. It would give more entitlements to these type of relationships. At 45:40, May brings up an egoist argument, why should I care about these other type of caring relationships? And at 47:06, May asks if these other relationships are just as good as marriage? Does care need to be expanded out? If so, this doesn’t seem neutral. Brake replies using Rawls suggesting that there are primary goods and one of these (controversial) primary goods is the state making sure that you can live out your life in order for you to reach your conception of the good. One of these are caring relationships; that is, a caring relationship is a primary good. She relates it with self-esteem where being in a caring relationship reinforces a sense of value to oneself. The state can distribute the social bases for a caring relationship. Around 54:50, May brings up the issue of polygamy. Usually, polygamy is circumscribed around cultural practices which has significant meanings. If so, then it’s implicitly suggesting that this is more valuable than other forms of relationships. This could create an asymmetry within marriage. Brake’s reply that this could happen within monogamous marriage, thus that faces the same challenge. May replies that it’s not inherent within monogamy whereas it’s within polygamy because of the cultural practices. Overall, this was a great discussion and it has inspired me to read both May’s and Brake’s works.
Speaking of Brake, she’s written a book on this topic, which I have reviewed here.
If there is anything that I’m missing, please let me know. But note that this list is not exhaustive. I’ve included books and articles that I’ve either read or skimmed through. If you do contribute something, please allow me some time to at least skim through the material so that I may add it.
UPDATE: Aug. 17, 2011-I have added a journal article by Fahmy.
UPDATE: Nov. 24, 2011-I have added a radio interview with philosopher Simon May. I have also included a discussion with Elizabeth Brake and Simon May that was on PhilosTV in the marriage section.
UPDATE: Feb. 3, 2013-I have added a book review of Elizabeth Brake’s new book Minimizing Marriagehere.
Shaun Miller's Ideas 