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Konkvistador comments on Poly marriage? - Less Wrong
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Comments (127)
I think the real reason people in the social circles LWers tend to hang around in oppose poly marriage is because they don't want icky Muslim and Mormon men getting married to more than one woman.
People likely to practice polygamous marriage are low status in our societies, thus we tend to see forbidding that as a good idea. This is how humans work. Everything added onto this is just clever rationalization imo.
ITYM 'good'?
I've certainly heard the argument that polygamy is tied into oppressive social structures, and therefore legitimizing it would be bad. Would you say this is rationalization?
FWIW I'm very skeptical of the whole "status explains everything" notion in general.
Yes thank you for the correction.
Same argument can and has been applied to other kinds of marriage.
Yes. Because legalizing such marriage would if anything improve the legal standing and options available to the women in such marriages. It would also ensure fairer distribution of resources, not to mention custody issues in case one of the parents dies. Also Polygamous marriages in the US and Europe are a fact on the ground, a social reality, that we should deal with. Refusing to do so is just perpetuating discrimination.
Status doesn't explain everything, it does explain situations like this.
On the one hand, the argument doesn't need to be correct to be the (or a) real reason. On the other, I'd expect more people to be more convinced that polygamy is more oppressive (as currently instantiated) than vanilla marriage (and other forms, such as arranged marriages or marriage of children to adults, are probably more strongly opposed).
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When you said above that status was the real reason LW-associates oppose legal polygamy, you were implying that these people are not actually convinced of these issues, or only pretend to care about them for status reasons.
Certainly! I'd like to clarify that I don't think polyamory is intrinsically oppressive, and that I am on the whole pretty darn progressive (philosophically) regarding sexual / relationship rights etc. (That is, I think it probably ideally should be legal. There are probably additional political concerns but politics makes me ill.) I think it's kinda weird that government is in the marriage business to begin with, but probably it is useful to have some sort of structure for dealing with the related tax / property / etc. concerns. I think that polygamy does occur in some cultures that are oppressive towards women, but I don't really have a notion of how much a part of that oppression it facilitates, and I don't necessarily think that's a legitimate factor in whether to legalize the institution. I'm on your side philosophically / politically.
If polygamous people where high status they wouldn't voice nor perhaps even think of these objections.
I tend to agree. Customizable contracts would be the best solution. This way we wouldn't straight jacket people into one size fits all marriage. Some people might like marriages where infidelity is grounds for divorce and the cheating party is penalized somehow. Some people might like marriages that have to be renewed every 10 years, to minimize any hassle with any potential divorce or allow a time out on the relationship. ect.
This would make everyone from the traditionalists to those seeking novel arrangements happy.
For some reason I'm picturing the Creative Commons licenses.
I had exactly that as a sort of model in my brain. :)
I find this quite aesthetically pleasing :D
How seriously do you mean this claim?
Pretty seriously, I'm not sure why you would think I'm not. Is there something wrong with people having options to customize the legal arrangements of their relationships? And with the decline of classical marriage shouldn't we encourage all such relationships to increase social cohesion as well as contribute towards creating better environments for raising children?
Because I find it very unlikely that your proposal would make traditionalists happy, if implemented, but it was plausible that you just meant that part as hyperbole.
Why isn't it the other way around?
Do you mean that status is a better explanation that in-group/out-group bias, or that status is equivalent to in-group/out-group bias?
It isn't fully equivalent. Out-group polygamous marriages are a-ok for us, one sees little lobbying on the UN level to forbid polygamous marriage. But I think Muslim immigrants in Europe and Mormon sects in the US are low status in-group members for most citizens when thinking about such issues.
Basically in-group out-group determines who has moral relevance. Status determines with who you wish to associate or disassociate.
After some thought, I'm still unsatisfied with "status" as an explanation of the phenomena. If we must use Hansonian terminology, I think the better explanation is signalling - specifically, signalling tribal affiliation. "who you wish to associate or disassociate" is either very imprecise or circular.
Additionally, I'm uncertain about Hansonian analysis of this phenomena because it makes the thought processes seem so deliberate and considered - when real world examples don't seem all that reflexively considered. I'm doubtful that people hostile to French Muslims could produce a coherent explanation on demand, and if you waited for them to collect their thoughts, they'd say things isomorphic to "Muslims in France are behaving unFrench." (whether that is the same thing as in-group bias is a separate question - I do think your explanation of in-group bias artificially narrows its scope)