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EHeller comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
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Not so, and this is an outrageous reading of what I have said. People will still be able to get divorces, just they will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault. I didn't irrevocably bind my future self when I rented my house, but if I break the lease I'll have to pay compensation to the landlord.
Your comments above suggest that perhaps you don't understand the state of law, at least in the UK.
No it isn't, at least in the UK. All I want is for marriage to be subject to normal limits on contracts, not the special limits on contracts that apply only in the case of marriage. I say "damages in the case of breach" and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It's so strange.
Look at the following graph of divorce over time.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons
Note the sharp discontinuity after 1969. What happened then? Oh yes, the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, meaning you no longer had to prove fault to get a divorce (and divorce settlements were also not based on fault).
Now look at the marriage rate:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/resources/gmr_tcm77-258471.png
Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn't enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
There is no sharp discontinuity around 1969. If you smooth out the weird peak around ww2 (which we expect was caused by ww2), the plot of divorces follows a fairly smooth exponential trend (which we expect due to population growth), until the late 70s (the tapering in the 80s is due to both declining marriage rates and a stabilizing divorce rate).
Marriage rates really don't start collapsing until the early 80s (they don't drop below 1930s levels until 1981).
I would think for the story you want to tell, you'd want to compare divorce rates to the marriage rate, but it doesn't hold up. Divorce rates were stable all through the 90s, but the marriage rate continued to plummet.
Except population growth has been trivial over this period compared to the rise in divorces.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44549000/gif/_44549854_uk_pop_226.gif
No. In my grandparents time, people were inculcated with the morality that divorce was awful and shameful. Hence when they started to liberalise divorce, few took advantage of it; social pressure was enough. But over time that social pressure weakened because informal mechanisms are weak compared to formal ones. Hence that social pressure gets harder and harder to maintain, and divorce looks more and more acceptable to the new generations. I think we have now bottomed out of that vicious cycle, but unfortunately it has meant a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire.
The post WW2 baby boom lead to a boom in marriage-aged people in the 60s and 70s. You can see it on the second of the plots on the post you linked to- look how the total number of marriages is increasing between 60 and 72.
And my point isn't that the rate of divorce wasn't increasing, it was (though not as much as a plot of total divorces would have you believe, much better to plot the rates).
My point is that 1969 wasn't a special year in the data. There is no discontinuity on the plots you linked to, and no discontinuity in the data.
This whole paragraph feels largely unresponsive to what I said. My point was that divorce rates stabilized in the late 80s, but marriage rates continued to fall. You can tell whatever story you want, but we have to agree on what the data is doing.
If whoever voted me down for this post, and the post previous in the thread would explain why I'd appreciate it.
In objective discussions about graphs, I feel like we 'aspiring rationalists' ought to be able to come to an agreement about the data in the graph (if perhaps not the causal story behind it), and downvotes for discussing the actual graphs linked to seem to me to be counterproductive.
If I've broken some social norm, I'd appreciate being explicitly told.
That is because the Church of England (or RCC, or pretty much any other major Christian denomination) told them so.
And you don't think that the King's example was enough?
So, do tell. What's wrong with divorce?
More precisely, what the RCC says is that there's no such thing as divorce, and even if a judge purports to have cancelled your marriage, as far as God is concerned you're still married.