A philosopher debunks the box turtle fallacy

Good for Steve Gimbel clearly and carefully explaining why gay marriage won't lead to human-turtle unions.

Steve emphasizes that the gay marriage debate concerns marriage as a legal construct, not as a social or religious institution. On a legal level, marriage is a recognition that people pair up to form households. Marriage is a legal combination plate that subsumes a whole bunch of rights, privileges, and obligations under a single "I do." Instead of signing a joint property contract, and a durable power of attorney contract, an inheritence without will or probate contract, etc., etc., we have a package deal called "marriage."

Steve elaborates:

Marriage exists to eliminate ambiguities in law that arise from the fact that we do tend to couple up. We arrange our lives in such a fashion that it makes it impossible under the social contract which organizes society to give rights and responsibilities to individuals whose lives are completely intertwined. There is not my money and my wife's money, there are our assets. There is not my house and my wife's house, there is our home. There are not my children and my wife's children, there is our family. When talking about tax liabilities, child welfare decisions, and life choices in general, the responsibilities and benefits are ours together. We are what Thomas Hobbes called an "artificial individual; it makes no sense to think of us as two completely different people in some legal circumstances because we decide and act as a single entity and the law must account for that. If one of us were in an accident that caused that person to be incapacitated, the decision making rights for that person immediately go to the other partner. If one should pass away, all assets and liabilities, all responsibility for the children immediately go to the survivor. Questions about these sorts of thing need to be completely unambiguous to avoid problems like the Terri Schaivo fiasco where different family members were trying to wrest control from each other to further their own agendas. Marriage exists to make perfectly clear who has what rights and responsibilities and who shares what rights and responsibilities.

Anyone who wants to deny same-sex couples the opportunity to enter into this legal agreement is wrongfully discriminating. Religious institutions are private clubs that can have any rules they want. The fact that marriage between two men or two women doesn't feel "real" to some people is beside the point. They're entitled to whatever cockeyed sociocultural construct will pass muster in their group, but their feelings are irrelevant to the legal principle at stake.

The law isn't allowed to engage in sex discrimination when we enter into other kinds of voluntary contracts. We abhor the provisions of Sharia that impose gender tests on other legal proceedings (testifying under oath, inheriting property, criminal justice, etc.). Our prohibition of legal gay marriage is exactly the kind of legal sex discrimination that we object to in conservative interpretations of Islamic law.

There's been a lively debate about whether opposition to gay marriage is homophobic or bigoted in and of itself. I would argue that the answer is yes. There is no legal reason to oppose equal opportunity to enter into a marriage contract. The only reason to oppose legal marriage for gays is if you believe that it is somehow bad, wrong, or destructive for gay couples to entwine their legal and emotional lives in an exclusive pair bond, and that society should be allowed to make their lives more difficult because you disapprove of their choices. That's bigotry.

As Steve points out, there is no reason to think that eliminating sex discrimination for marriage licenses will change the institution in any other way. It will not open the door to unions between children or animals because they lack the legal status of consenting adults. A box turtle can't self-incorporate, serve on a jury or assume any of the other rights and responsibilities of an adult citizen. Unless conservatives have a secret agenda to upgrade the legal status of box turtles to that of humans, gay marriage will not threaten the institution we know and love.

Comments

[John]

Good article, but I don't think an elaborate argument was necessary to posit that gay marriage won't lead to box turtle nuptials. Let's make this simple:

Marriage = Legal union of two consenting adults

or at least that's what it should be because otherwise it's discrimination. The rest of the debate is extraneous. Talking about box turtles and the "historic tradition" of marriage only plays into the hands of the homophobes. Their ludicrous arguments don't merit serious debate. Being a liberal I realize that issues are often more complex than conservatives would like us to believe, but not in this case. Let's keep this one simple.

[Fitz]

“Instead of signing a joint property contract, and a durable power of attorney contract, an inheritence without will or probate contract, etc., etc., we have a package deal called "marriage."”

I think it does one’s intellect a disservice to reduce marriage to a mere legal formality. The more intellectually sound way to approach it with integrity is to admit that as an institution it operates legally/socially/culturally – historically and so on. That these understanding are intertwined, overlap, and effect one another.
(its also telling that this reveals how many of the “benefits” of marriage are attainable through private contract)

“Anyone who wants to deny same-sex couples the opportunity to enter into this legal agreement is wrongfully discriminating.”

This seems to be question begging. Its can definitely be categorized as “discrimination” (the law is about line drawing after all) but to qualify it as “wrongful” is to answer the question before you have posed it. This is neither intellectually honest nor a liberal approach.

“As Steve points out, there is no reason to think that eliminating sex discrimination for marriage licenses will change the institution in any other way.”

Well, maybe my intellectual circle extends beyond “Steve” .. because I have familiar with multiple opinions that say it will change the institution.

For such a complex and divisive subject, I have noticed a intellectual detachment and retrenchment on the part of the cultural left. They seem to be content with the most cursory understanding of legal “discrimination” under the law, and reflexive shouts of bigotry. One expects at least a bit more.

[belledame222]

You know what it is, it seems to me sometimes: is that the whole notion of "consenting adults" isn't particularly built into the framework a lot of the anti-gay-marriage folks are coming from to begin with.

That, and this: a general suspicion of being badly cheated, somehow, somewhere. Perhaps gay folks are just the handy "tag, you're it!" for those rumbling semi-conherent thoughtfeelings; or perhaps, too, there's something particularly galling about the notion of *people being able to marry and/or have sex just because it makes them happy.* Because perhaps these proponents of "traditional marriage" have only a very dim sense of what this "happiness" thing is supposed to be in the first place. I mean, it's not as though there's any dearth of joyless, passionless, duty-bound straight marriages, God knows.

Once I got into it at some length with a troll from (as it turned out) a Catholic apologetics board, a stealth evangelist (he wasn't very good at it, and he swore up and down that this wasn't his goal, but it was fairly clear he wasn't just there for the huntin'). Anyway at one point I got fed up and asked him:

"Look, you're married, right? How would *you* like it if someone told you you couldn't marry the person you loved, just because it offended their sensibilities?"

His reply, roughly:

"I wouldn't like it at all. But if I had to, for moral reasons, I would submit. I imagine anyone else would do the same."

...after I finished boggling at that, I wrote:

"Yes, but what if you didn't happen to agree with the other person's 'morality'?"

His reply:

"Then one of us would have to be wrong."

...While I'm sure that a lot of the "no to gay marriage!" people aren't operating off of anything so deeply rooted than that, I do want to take that mindset into consideration for a moment. Because 1) I think it's more prevalant than a lot of us think and 2) personally, I find it completely alien. And sad, and horrifying. I mean, "submit" said it all. And it certainly went with the guy's whole 'botlike persona; afterward I was speculating that in fact peoples' online behavior *isn't* probably all that separate from who they are in real life, trolling or otherwise. This guy came off like a 'bot because to all intents and purposes he *was* a 'bot. Morality comes from without; one's interior compass, one's own thoughts and feelings, one's *desires,* don't matter.

And from there, it was very easy to understand why people would be against gay marriage. Daddy Said No. We do what we're told, we *feel* what we're told; why can't you?

[belledame222]

Alright then, Fitz. I'll ask the question I never seem to get an answer to:

How is legalizing gay marriage detrimental to the institution as a whole? How does it (negatively) impact individual differently-sexed couples?

Because, short of a compelling answer to those questions, I have no problem using the shorthand of "wrongful discrimination" here.

[Dan Schneider]

John:

Marriage is a union of consenting adults (plural), and not limited to two. Monagamy id a severakl centuries old variation on polygamy that dominates tribal cultures.

Polygamy will make a comeback because once gay marriage makes it, there's no legal way to deny polygamy.

That's a good thing.

[Fitz]

Belldame 222

Well you wrote (negatively) impact the institution as a whole.

Steve was less narrow- when he wrote, Steve points out, there is no reason to think that eliminating sex discrimination for marriage licenses will change the institution in any other way.

Activists and scholars like Jonathan Rauch & Andrew Sullivan advance the thesis that eliminating sex discrimination from marriage will positively effect the institution. Their arguments tend to be twofold; that it will rejuvenate our marriage culture by reemphasizing the importance of stable, legally recognized monogamous marriages & also that it will domesticate the gay community into more stable and lasting relationships.

Now this (of coarse) is seen as a positive impact. If we were to get into a argument about possible negative impacts- its not unfair to mention that prominent proponents of SSM tacitly believe it will have an impact on the wider marriage culture.

For others to take the opposite line seems rudimentary. Surelyyou have read up on these arguments outside the occasional flame war?

[bob mcmanus]

"Marriage is a union of consenting adults (plural), and not limited to two."

I can also imagine extending Steve's understanding of contractual obligation to various other kinds or relationships:two brothers, cousins, grandmother/granddaughter, friends without sexual or romantic relations, communes. There are a lot of people who would appreciate the rights listed in the quoted paragraph:two divorcee sisters sharing a house with their children, for instance.

But then the use of the word "marriage" starts to become uncomfortable, doesn't it.

[Fitz]

The title of this post was

"A philosopher debunks the box turtle fallacy"

A)There is no “box turtle fallacy”
B)This Philosopher did not “debunk” it.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I don't think that most people would want the entire package of rights that go with traditional marriage unless they are actually running a family (in which case I don't care what they do in bed, or whether they're also related by blood, it's all between consenting adults).

I've never seen a proposal that could work polyamorous marriages into the existing legal framework for two-party marriage. In my mind, the legal problems are way bigger than the social or cultural obstacles.

Socially, and as a matter of fairness, if there's a trio of folks down the street who live together in a mutually committed relationship and they call themselves married, I'll recognize them as having as much right to that social status as a couple.

However, the legal details get very complicated. Historically, societies that allow multiple marriages restrict the privilege to one gender and to hetero marriages.

If polyamory is going to follow from gay marriage, we're going to have to deal with a system in which A can be married to B who is married to C who may or may not be married to A...

Suppose A gets married to D, who's partnered with A and nobody else. Then D divorces A. What percentage of A's property does D get in the divorce settlement? A's divorce settlement will affect B who also has some claim on A's property, and if B loses money, C loses out because B and C presumably have assets in common.

I'm not saying that these problems are insurmountable. We've already figured out how to handle divorce and remarriage, custody, surrogacy, and lots of other complicated family scenarios.

However, it's not going to be a simple segue from gay marriage to poly marriage. If we're going give legal recognition to n-tuple couples, we're going to have to self-consciously create a new legal framework in which to do it.

[Trystero]

I've often argued that we'd be able to speak more clearly on this issue if we could "divorce" the cerimonial and legal aspects of marriage.* So that, as bob described, the contractual package would be available to more people in more kinds of relationships, while churches and whatnot would remain free to argue that they could only sanctify certain kinds of relationships. But then, I'm one of those raging liberals who likes to keep church and state things seperate.

In theory I have no objections to polygamy, but I can't support it until the usual abuses are more vigorously prosecuted. One of the reasons Hilldale/Colorado City (Or Juniper Creek if you're a "Big Love" fan) have persisted for so long was Utah's (and the LDS church's) desire to avoid embarassment by basically looking the other way and pretending it wasn't happening.

*In some ways this is already done. At a wedding I attended in Italy, the religious part seemed pretty much limited to "before God", and AFTER the priest was finished, the couple went over to a little table with the Italian version of a justice or court officer to fill out the paperwork.

[Joe]

I think this is entirely a problem of definitions, but I don't think limiting the discussion to 'legal' ones solves any problems.

Marriage historically was an issue of property rights and inheritance of same. It was much simpler, legally speaking, when women were considered property. I don't think legal simplicity makes for a good moral argument.

The gay marriage problem really starts with the modern defintion of marriage, ie the one we have been using for the last hundred or so years in the west. Marriage, although it still is about property rights no longer has the same importance in that regard... modern paternity tests eliminate the legal necessity for 'til death do us part'. (The birth control pill/abortion sets women free from having a child she doesn't want.) No man has to fear being on the hook for another man's children.

Nowadays people get married for 'love', and that is really where the problem lies. Love was never an implicit part of marriage. And one can see the damage that 'love based' marriages have done to the institution of marriage. People fall in love, and out all the time and we have a divorce rate that reflects this.

This is why religious people, who have a spiritual interest in marriage, one that is supposed to be 'eternal', feel so put upon. Marriage is falling down around them and this implicitly questions their religious faith which is heavily invested in 'marriage', because in the past, it HAD to be. Religion has taken a backseat in our somewhat secularized society which makes it a double whamy for them.

Finally the one consistency in marriage, historically, was man/woman(in some cases man/women, but for the most part the male/female pairing is preserved.) Even modern technology can't get around man/woman biology. This is therefore the last 'solid' aspect of marriage that people can both spiritually and scientifically cling to. It makes sense to encourage people to pair up in order to promote a new generation. We can't, in a free society, compel people to have kids, but its in everyone's interest to encourage it as much as possible, even with a 3rd world population explosion, which is really a separate issue. They should be having fewer, we should be having more.

The problem is, as I said, nowadays people marry for 'love' (which in my view is just stupid, but people are, what are you going to do) and that fact, more than anything else, creates a problem for gays who feel left out.

The only way for gays to justify their inclusion then, is to eliminate or downplay, the biological component and play up the importance of 'love'.

Personally I think, with a 50% divorce rate, its simply a bad legal move for gays to try and imitate such a convoluted heterosexual tradition. And once you eliminate biology, there really is no other 'unquestionable' aspect of marriage. That said, I don't forsee many turtle marriages (fallacy or not, its a stupid argument for sure) but people create partnerships and corporations all the time for business purposes... it does open the door for all kinds of unions, once the heterosexual biological fact is elminated. And that DOES threaten the SPECIALNESS of marriage between man/woman. Its unavoidable.

My brother takes care of my dad and both work and contribute to a common household, why shouldn't they be able to share benefits, if its not a male/female thing, they certainly love each other.... just don't tell them I said it. Even so, I doubt they would take advantage of this loophole, but some would, and eventually many would after it becomes socially acceptable.

If its all about love, there are no rules left, all is fair.... as they say. And that scares people. Discounting their concerns as simple prejudice is simply unfair, in my opinion.

[mudkitty]

"If it's all about love, there are no rules left, all is fair..." Where the hell do you get that idea?

[Dabodius]

"...it does one’s intellect a disservice to reduce marriage to a mere legal formality."
A contract is a legal formality; isn't it more than mere, because if it is a contract and not a nudum pactum, you can ask a court to intervene if it's breached? Marriage is a contract.
I don't know what meeting of minds or agreement a person could reach with a box turtle or donkey, but she can't make a contract of any sort with either because in the first place they aren't persons. She can't make a contract with a minor because a minor can't consent. She can make contracts of many sorts with another adult woman, provided they are not contrary to public policy.
Just now, same-sex marriage is contrary to public policy, but it need not be: it is up to us to change the law or not. Certainly allowing her to marry another woman would look more like the already recognized contracts she could make with that woman than any pacts naked of legal protection she might want to make with a box turtle or minor. It isn't a question of the very intelligibility of the institution of marriage being at stake, just of changing an accident of public policy.
As for polygamy, the question of changing that accident of public policy can be argued on its own merits, which have nothing to do with those of same-sex marriage.

[Anon]

Ahem. Fafblog fafblog fafblog fafblog fafblog.

"...and the next thing you know you're being tied up by a trio of polygamist lesbian powerbooks and you can't get out because the safety word is case sensistive!"

http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/slipperiest-slope-as-you-all-know.html

[Fitz]

I think Joe has a solid take on things. He does suffer however from the tendency to collapse history into an overly simplistic narrative. The bit about marriage being about property rights has been repeated ad-nausea for way to long now. Obviously marriage performs multiple functions; the overemphasis on romantic love does have a tremendous impact. I’m a little confused by Dabodius take on the subject. Its all very well to have a detached approach, but in the end were talking about a very important institution. I’m also not sure what he means by marriage being an “accident of public policy.”

The following link is a very astute take on the subject in a social/historical vein. It by the author Lee Haris who happens to be a gay man; making its conclusion (sadly) a bit surprising. Solid work though.

http://www.policyreview.org/jun05/harris.html

[parse]

Lindsay, I think the paragraph I've quoted below (as well as much of the rest of your argument) is presumptuous.

"There's been a lively debate about whether opposition to gay marriage is homophobic or bigoted in and of itself. I would argue that the answer is yes. There is no legal reason to oppose equal opportunity to enter into a marriage contract. The only reason to oppose legal marriage for gays is if you believe that it is somehow bad, wrong, or destructive for gay couples to entwine their legal and emotional lives in an exclusive pair bond, and that society should be allowed to make their lives more difficult because you disapprove of their choices. That's bigotry."

As you pointed out, legal marriage bestows privilege--privilege that is unavailable to people who remain single. A reason to oppose gay marriage that you fail to consider here is as part of a broader opposition to legal marriage generally.

One might also oppose gay marriage out of concern to the effect legalization would have on gay culture. Some of us happily resist the pressure to become assimilated to heterosexual norms. I'm not particularly supportive of gay folks who demand to be allowed equal access to an institution that doesn't work terribly well for straight people, despite the obvious financial and social rewards offered to those who can force themselves into the box of lifelong monogamy.

I do believe that it is believe that it is "somehow bad, wrong, or destructive for gay couples to entwine their legal and emotional lives in an exclusive pair bond," but I don't think that belief is evidence of bigotry on my part.

[greensmile]

"...the institution we know and love."

The relationship of most people to the institution, especially as expressed in popular culture outlets such as stand-up comedy and some sitcoms is decidedly a love/hate relationship. All this talk of contracts of various sorts is important because contracts generally have clauses stating causes for termination. While divorce is common and increasingly so, some sects concieve of marriage as unbreakable: "whom god has joined, let no man put asunder". Yet, in the face of so much dismal evidence, the feeling some people have and most people hope to invest the proceedings with are "forever" and "happily ever after". Not a little surprising that at a moment when ego boundries are at their most fluid and we are feeling atypically inclusive, we should enter not just one but several contracts. This is all just to say how I understand that indeed we do lump a lot of tacit contracts under the "I do".
In every other walk of life, contracts are rarely unbreakable, seldom tacit, and backed by libraries full of case law and precedent. Discrimination about who may enter into a contract is generally confined to questions of age and mental competance and perhaps conflict of interest. These considerations are actually not so different from the few reasonable discrimination that the laws impose against child marriages and polygamy. Beyond that, I find most of the discrimination in laws against or about marriage are mostly religious dictates legislated to parties who do not belong to the religion. The legalized discrimination against gay marriage, shorn of the culture of leviticus, has no more justice than a law denying Jews the right to own land or denying blacks the right to vote.

In fact, there is only one thing about marriage that is "forever" and that is procreation...which ought to have an explicit and unbreakable contract.

[Alon Levy]

Lindsay, I think that there is a way to handle poly marriages, or at least polyfidelitous ones.

[mudkitty]

One woman, one child. Save the world.

[Matt McIrvin]

We can't, in a free society, compel people to have kids, but its in everyone's interest to encourage it as much as possible, even with a 3rd world population explosion, which is really a separate issue. They should be having fewer, we should be having more.

Why? We rich First Worlders are the ones who eat up the most resources and do the most damage per capita. And because of immigration, our society is in no danger of collapsing from underpopulation. (Is the real worry that the immigrants are the wrong kind of people?)

[Matt McIrvin]

The proposal to separate the religious or quasi-religious sacrament of marriage from the legal contracts seems logically and morally unobjectionable to me (my wife and I aren't even religious, and for a variety of reasons we had a tiny legal ceremony a few days after the big family celebration that we considered our wedding, so I guess we were already doing this in a way).

But politically it would be a disaster. If there were any significant movement to get rid of "marriage" as a legal term as a result of the gay marriage debate, you know what the instant tagline would be: "We told you the gays and the liberals wanted to destroy marriage, and now they're going to do it."

[Dan S.]

" Morality comes from without; one's interior compass, one's own thoughts and feelings, one's *desires,* don't matter."

To thread-drift a little - this ties in with a common phenomena in theist-atheist debates: the contention that without God there is no source of objective morality, and nothing to stop people from running amok. Us atheists tend to be view such claims with complete bewilderment and a little (mostly mock) trepidation (if the speaker really feels this way, what happens if they lose their faith?).

Some folks have basically taken the above view - coturnix, for example, talks about that

. . . the difference between what psychologists call "external locus of moral authority" and "internal locus of moral authority". The internal LOMA, brought about by modern, loving, nurturant parenting, makes you behave right because it is a part of you, your second nature. Doing "bad" is just not something you consider. It has no appeal to you. It's easy.

The external LOMA, on the other hand, gets built by Dobsonian-style strict-to-abusive parenting. As a result, the person behaves right because of fear of punishment. The flip-side of this is that behaving right is not a second nature - the person is constantly tempted to do "bad" . . .

I tend to think that's too simple an explanation, but interesting none the less . .

[Dan S.]

"They should be having fewer, we should be having more."

Why? Everybody probably should be having fewer - why on earth should we be having more? Other concerns aside, social success in the middle-to-upper echelons of our society is based on having (or really, being one of) relatively few, very expensive children, something that's been the case (in varying degrees) for over a century now.

Granted, the anti-contraception crusaders want to get rid of all this*, in what it's hard to not describe as part of a plan to third-worldify the US . . .

* At least for the unworthy-since-not-affluent folks . . .

[Dan Schneider]

Lindsay,

Your ideas against polygamy are solved with one concept- prenups. That's the one thing that would have to be added in any poly- situation.

Not diff at all, and the lawyers will only get richer.

The real quandaries come after polys, when machines become sentient, and human-android, human-robot relationships hit us in the 22nd Century, or sooner.

[SamChevre]

Lindsay,

I think your argument makes sense from your premises, but that one of your premises assumes a fact in dispute.

That is, On a legal level, marriage is a recognition that people pair up to form households. Most religious conservatives would be more likely to say, "marriage is a recognition that people pair up to have children." Start with that basis, and it is much easier argue that male-female is part of the form of marriage, not one of the accidents.