Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015

Gondolinian

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

No relationship is secure against any and all changes. That's absurd. If the universe undergoes heat death, marriages will suffer. But see above for why transactional ones are more stable than non-transactional ones. Which is more common, permanent brain damage to one party in the relationship, or one party in the relationship having a passing fancy for someone else?

I think the intuition that you're getting at with your car crash example, as Caue says above, is that I shouldn't want to leave her in that situation. And that there's something bad/unromantic/unacceptable if I do. But if I still want to stay, we haven't left a transactional relationship at all. The response "Yeah, in those circumstances, the time I spent with my partner would be nightmarish, but I'd stay with them anyway just to make them happy" is equally bad/unromantic/unacceptable. So I don't think non-transactional wins over transactional here.

You also bias the question by the type of change. I think it's no coincidence that you and knb both choose the example of a vehicular accident, where the injured party is presumably innocent. How about if one of the partners is unfaithful, or takes to drugs, or violence, or whatever. If you truly cared about your partner "as an end in herself" you still wouldn't leave. Care to bite that bullet?

Incidentally, I disagree fundamentally about obligation - that's not outside transactional relationships. Indeed, binding your future self is the key to most transactions. If you exchanged vows to stay with the other party in sickness and in health, and then the other party gets sick, you should have to stay (or pay damages) if they get sick. You made a transaction, and you should have to stick to it. Obligation, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any place in a non-transactional relationship; as everyone was acting purely for their own ends to begin with, there can't be any debts or obligations. So if people change their minds, they can just waft out of the relationship and abandon their partner. Yet another reason why a transactional view of relationships promotes stability.

You could make the argument that someone in a relationship in which serious changes have happened should precommit to keep in the relationship even if it changes. The precommitment is bad in the case of some changes, but makes the relationship more stable and reduces the chance of there being such changes in marginal cases (such as one partner becoming incrementally less attractive and the other partner having an incrementally greater chance of cheating on the first partner).

Doing things out of obligation, even though they don't benefit us, is just our wa... (read more)

0gjm11y

For the avoidance of doubt: I agree, and I was not in any way making the argument "I can imagine a situation in which a transactional relationship would be imperfectly secure, therefore transactional relationships are bad". Rather, it was: "It seems like in many quite common situations a purely transactional relationship might be less secure than we would like our relationships to be, where a not-so-purely-transactional one would be stronger in a way that's probably better overall". [...] The latter, obviously. But (1) it's by no means only permanent brain damage that leads to the kind of situation I described and (2) I don't see any reason to think that a purely transactional relationship is more secure against passing fancies than a not-so-purely transactional one. [...] Bad, yes (in the sense that the policy of abandoning your partner in such situations generally produces net harm and that we'd all be better off if it weren't generally adopted). Unromantic has nothing to do with it (except that if "romantic" is one opposite of "transactional" then the unromantic-ness of abandoning your partner might make less-transactional relationships more secure in such situations). Unacceptable, meh, I dunno; I don't see any reason why you should care whether I accept what you would hypothetically do in that situation or not. [...] I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. Perhaps the following questions will help: Do you agree that, other things being equal, a relationship in which neither partner would abandon the other in such a situation is probably a better one overall? What sort of qualities would make a relationship have that property? Are they more or less likely in a purely transactional relationship? [...] I'm not sure exactly what position you're arguing with and why you think it's my position, but: if my wife (I do, as it happens, have a wife) were unfaithful or became addicted to drugs, I would not necessarily want to end our marriage on that account. I w

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