I would like to argue that any type of social contract and commitment of the form which appears in marriage, those that involve interactions of individuals’ personal lives are fundamentally unethical.
Given the subjectivity of value systems one particular action can be thought both justified and unjustifiable, in the same time, but with respect to different perspectives. (From now on, I shall refer to perspective as reference frame for the reasons of personal interest.) Nevertheless, marriage is an interaction which causes the personal aspect of people’s lives not to remain separable. On the other hand, while this entanglement is formed, marriage doesn’t give any mechanism to create a shared a reference frame, which is a source of catastrophe in these type of commitments, i.e. there is no way of having the same value system for two different people in all important aspects of their lives.
As a trivial idealised example consider a heavy smoker who knows all the consequences, but believes smoking is a vital action for him/her to maintain a happy life. So he/she chooses to do so… There is nothing here to argue, as he/she has chosen to perform an action consistent within his/her reference frame. Now imagine he/she loves someone who really hates smoking. In such a case at least one person should give up her/his attachment to the a priori value system.
What is more subtle is even given a shared reference frame, lack of a common threshold will make the relationship again unethical. As one may like something up to a threshold, not being bothered by it up to a second threshold, but as soon as that thing gets more, it’ll become intolerable for him/her. While the same intolerable could be pleasant for his/her partner!
More dramatically, by the entropy arguments, one can say the more socially sensitive the individuals are (the more stuff they have to care about) the deeper this conflict gets.
One might argue that by this reasoning almost all of the human activities are unethical, as most aspects of their lives are in one way or another entangled. Nevertheless, this is irrelevant. Because most of the events in people’s lives had not much influenced at any time when their backward light cone had overlap. Of course those which did have any noticeable effect should be carefully considered, but there are surely very few of them.
One may still choose to act unethically for the benefits she/he gets from these accepted norms of the society. At the end of the day it’s the society which finds its ways.
One question remains: whether it is possible to arrive at a conflict free personal interaction, in the sense discussed above. I think the answer is not obvious. But I believe the least price would be departure from a minimal set of today’s accepted values, e.g. monogamy or accepted commitments in partnership (e.g. non-open relationships).
August 22, 2011 at 1:12 pm |
I’m just gonna think out loud here since in fact I don’t have much interest regarding this issue. About what you called a reference frame: well assuming relativism, a certain action can indeed be given different values by two different people as you said. What I think is missing is that not only different actions are given values (good/bad, efficient/inefficient, etc.) but that they are “interpreted” by people first and foremost. Two partners might give different values to different actions (one of them thinks smoking is bad, the other thinks otherwise) but it could be the case that they both interpret the event in a more or less the same manner, namely “smoking costs money”, “it’s almost certainly unhealthy”, or “people who smoke are cool” for that matter. And as you did mention a given interpretation does not necessarily lead to a unique value. Someone might interpret smoking as an unhealthy habit but still commit to it whereas for somebody else being unhealthy is enough prevent smoking. This actually leads me to another aspect of the problem that I think you missed: commitment to action. If I think doing something is good it is not necessarily the case that I’ll actually go ahead and do it, on the other hand I might do something repeatedly while thinking that it is a bad thing to do.
So to summarize, I think there is “value system”, there is interpretation, and there is commitment to action. In this context I don’t think two people not sharing their value system “completely” causes much of a problem. Actually in the light of interpretation and commitment to action a value system kinda fades into the background.
Besides, uniformity seems like a nice thing to shoot for if one’s living, say, in Amish country. Difference and variation are I think more interesting.
August 22, 2011 at 2:27 pm |
It’s a pleasure indeed to have your comment here, although you find this topic not particularly interesting and perhaps you felt my force for doing that
>> his actually leads me to another aspect of the problem that I think you missed: commitment to action.
This is a very good point. Reminds me of a conversation with Afsoon Ebrahimi on the ethics of vegetarianism and people who find it ethically wrong to eat meat, but still do it. I concluded that this has to do with the problem of critical mass. Something I couldn’t proceed any further due to the fact that it getting very technical in a field that I’m not an expert at all.
>>Difference and variation are I think more interesting.
Sure, but let’s not confuse difference with conflict. I argue that conflict is a by-product of marriage, in the way it’s practised nowadays. The colonial polygamy I’ve been advocating, I believe, is a way out of the conflicts. There will surely be differences which makes the rainbow of life beautiful, but I think it gives ways out of the conflicts and the type of inconsistencies I mentioned.
August 23, 2011 at 8:38 pm |
Amir,
I wish the wordpress had like botton for comments!