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jaime2000 comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
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Still, somebody on Less Wrong once told me that they thought I wouldn't be “free” to be monogamous in the US because if I stopped being so in the future the police wouldn't punish me. Of course the exact same thing applies to vegetarianism, but that person said I am free to be on a diet (and tapped out).
I think I understand the idea Eugene is getting at in the sibling thread. Let me see if I can explain it a little differently.
As Sister Y explained in this excellent article, people no longer have a way of committing themselves to marriage. This is a problem for two reasons, neither of which applies to vegetarianism.
In a sense, marriage IS commitment, and talking about a "marriage" without commitment is like talking about a "prisoner" who can leave his cell any time he wants, or a "warranty" which can be ignored at the company's discretion. Now, you could argue that this is a matter of semantics, and to some extent you would be right, but there is a deeper issue here; that marriage with commitment and "marriage" without commitment are so far apart in relationship-space that we should treat them as completely different things, and that we might be justified in not wanting to call these clusters of relationships by the same name at all (some people like to call the modern relationship cluster Marriage 2.0 for just this reason).
If you can't credibly commit to doing something, you are going to have trouble finding people who are willing to expose themselves to risk should you fail to do so. Thus, by removing your freedom to pre-commit yourself to fulfilling a marriage contract, your freedom to enter into these contracts has been reduced (indeed, the collapse of the marriage rate appears to be an empirical confirmation of this model). Thomas Schelling covered this in his The Strategy of Conflict.
Now, the term under discussion is "monogamy", not "marriage", but back to problem 1; the modern serial "monogamy" is a completely different cluster of relationships from the old monogamy, which implied marriage. Dalrock, for example, argues that serial "monogamy" is a promiscuous and immoral relationship model, which are things he doesn't believe about the traditional religious monogamy model. Whether you agree with him or not, the point is, again, that modern serial "monogamy" is pretty different from old monogamy which meant things like not marrying two wives at once, and maybe some people want to avoid overloading an existing term to incorporate such a different new concept.
For my own part, I would say that two people who are continuing to live together despite both of them preferring to stop doing so, solely because they committed to doing so at some time in the past, is at least as far away from what the word "marriage" properly refers to as two people who are living together today because they feel like it but would happily walk away from each other tomorrow if they found themselves feeling differently.
But I accept that this position is not universally accepted, and in particular that other people might use "marriage" to refer to the first kind of relationship, even among people who can't stand the sight of each other, aren't speaking to each other, don't share goals or values, etc., as long as they are barred from (for example) marrying anyone else and as long as the legal, financial and organizational obligations that go along with marriage can be imposed on them successfully.
And I can see how, for someone whose concept of marriage works this way, the analysis you perform here makes sense: I can't meaningfully precommit to not hating the very sight of you in twenty years, but if marriage is unrelated to whether I hate the sight of you, then I can meaningfully precommit to remaining married to you... and the way I do that is by subjecting myself to a legal system that continues imposing those obligations on me for the rest of my life, no matter what happens.
And, sure, I can see how such a person would similarly want words like "monogamy" to refer to such a lifetime commitment, and words like "divorce" to refer to an empty set, etc.
Just to confirm, this is in fact a decent summary of my position.
Well, in the comment I was talking about in the grandparent (which I'd link to if this thing was faster) I said “relationship with my girlfriend” rather than “marriage with my wife”, which I'd think makes clear the former is what I was talking about. Maybe “monogamy” it's a bad label for it, but ‘$word is a bad label for $thing’ hardly implies ‘I'm not free to do $thing’. (And while it's unlike traditional lifelong monogamy, it's also unlike Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory, and given that around here more people practice the latter than the former it seems more useful to me to have a word to distinguish it from the latter than from the former.)
(I'm not sure what exactly Christopher Ryan meant by “monogamy”, but he was opposing it to EEA-style sexual omnivory, which from his description sounds more like Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory than First-World-small-town-mainstream-style serial monogamy to me.)
Frankly, I don't understand this mindset at all.
You commit to the marriage when you say "I do". The idea that you cannot commit unless you have the right to sue your ex-spouse in a court of law for money seem preposterous to me on its face.
Not the right to sue; the right to be sued, which makes you less likely to become an ex-spouse, and more likely to become spouse to begin with.