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Marriage , Coronavirus. Public Policy , Parents. First Name. Last Name. Email Address. Institute for Family Studies P. Box Charlottesville, VA michael ifstudies. Contact Interested in learning more about the work of the Institute for Family Studies? A Pew Research Center survey published in found that Muslims around the world are divided about polygamy: While majorities in several sub-Saharan African countries and pluralities in parts of the Middle East describe polygamy as morally acceptable, Muslims living in Central Asia as well as Southern and Eastern Europe tend to say that polygamy is immoral.
In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data. Please support our research with a financial contribution. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.
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It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. I'm single, but the thought of being forced to live in a different country than my "other half" makes me shiver. Besides, there are legal consequences of being related to someone. Marriage gives a bit of control over that by establishing legal kinship where biology does not. I can see no possible rational way to claim that's a bad thing.
I think this is a fascinating proposal, Mark. In a libertarian society, people would form whatever contractual arrangements they wished, so long as they committed no fraud, and the government would have no business regulating their relationships. I don't have a problem with this off the top of my head — but does anyone know any good arguments for why the government should have any hand whatsoever in marriage? Perhaps it should not.
Well, that depends. Currently, there are benefits to marriage that cannot be contracted any other way. For example here, at least marriage means a relatively easy pass through immigration. The notion that polygamy is OK is the point in question here. I am not an expert on the topic, but my understanding of polygamy historically and as practiced currently is that it is for the most part patriarchal. Men, who have historically dominated cultures, dominate women in a domestic arrangement where the male has a selection of women at his disposal.
It's every horny lad's dream to have multiple women in his bed. I don't really see that as an enlightened approach to the advancement of our society or the rights of individuals in that society. Now, CAN we envision polygamy where there are multiple wives and multiple husbands? I don't see it — for a couple of reasons. People are not so "liberated" that they would be comfortable with such an arrangement; I think it flys against our basic instincts. But, mostly I don't see it working because polygamy historically relies on a single very dominant person and multiple submissive partners.
Sure there may be a few rare individuals that could live with this new arrangement, but I for the most part expect we would see a constant state of failure in such a polygamous marriage especially in our modern society. These marriages would be more unsuccessful than marriages between two people? Hasn't the recent reinvention of marriage as a purely contractual relationship, terminable at will, resulted in the majority of these marriages failing or simply with people opting out?
The fact that such marriages would likely fail certainly cannot be a serious objection. I think the question is, if some group of people wanted to get married, is there anything ethically wrong in this by itself?
Whether it would tend to work, or whether many people would actually go for such an arrangement, is a separate issue. After all, you could point out that half of all two-person monogamous marriages fail to work, but I don't expect you'd use that as an argument for making them illegal …. My first response to the Santorum insanity was similar to yours: to wonder if we'd all been a bit too quick to grant the absurdity of Santorum's reductio.
But I was firmly convinced by the first argument of the following post presumably penned by the same Jean Kazez in comments above :. Essentially: There's nothing intrinsically wrong with polygamy. However, in actual practice, in most societies, sexist norms will tend to shape polygamy in ways that are unfair and harmful to women.
We could debate whether or not this contingent harm merits legal prohibition on polygamy — but it seems clear that this is not a harm attendant to gay marriage, and therefore that the inferences Santorum attempts are invalid.
Thanks very much Regina. By having gone through the comments section here, read the link you included, and giving this all a bit more thought, I think I've come round to the position you hold. Nothing intrinsically wrong; but in actual practice there may be society-wide harms that merit legal prohibition. Regina — I found this quote from a Simon May paper recommended by Sam in the comments section … it speaks to your point about polygamy in the "abstract" vs.
Social practices include not only patterns of similar behaviour, but conformity to rules and ideals. These norms might be constitutive of the relationship itself—part of what it means to be married—or background values that specify how it is to be desired, promoted, and respected. No critical assessment of monogamy and polygamy can focus exclusively on their abstract structures, since this would ignore how these relationships reflect morally significant social expectations.
Thus, very little about whether the cultural practice of polygamy is inherently objectionable can be learned from some imaginative example of countercultural hipsters who enter an asymmetric marriage as an ironic gesture or a playful exemplification of the contradictions of post-modernity.
Such examples say little more about the ethics of polygamy as a cultural tradition than masked balls say about the ethics of veiling.
It is amusing that a Christian conservative brings up polygamy as something negative given all the Biblical examples of holy people in such marriages, not to mention the divine regulations of the practice. If it was bad, presumably the divine regulations would just ban it. From a modern Western moral perspective, it doesn't seem that practical legal or emotional complexity, nor social side-effects, are strong enough arguments against polygamy. People are free to engage in all sorts of complex activities that might be bad for society say found cults or political parties with crazy agendas , but their autonomy is regarded as more important than keeping things neat and balanced.
I would assume a workable anti-polygamy argument would need to show some significant harm befalling the participants or an outside party. One possible argument might be that polygamous marriages lack some property marriages must have to be valid, and hence are not valid marriages.
I would imagine this to be the preferred tack of conservatives arguing against them, saying that the numeric duality is indeed an essential aspect of marriage just as they would say it has to be between a man and a woman.
But increasingly secular and pluralist societies are treating marriages as a contract with religious or social embellishments — there is no reason except tradition and inertia for it to be dual.
The conservative might say that this leads to plenty of invalid "marriages", but outsiders might not care. It might be a bit like how most conservative Christians do not seem to be outraged over the existence of non-Christian married couples, despite their often stated claim that marriage must involve a divine component which they presumably do not think the non-Christian marriages have. Anders: agree with most of what you say, but I think you're too quick to dismiss, generically, "essential aspect" objections to innovations in marriage.
Institutions like marriage are living institutions, and they evolve as they go at least they do these days. But this fact alone doesn't license wholesale, freelance innovation. There are core elements that seem to have to be there — at least de jure if not de facto — that secular, pluralist societies still insist on, just as there are regarding the treatment and disposal of dead human bodies. In both cases you could argue "where's the harm in innovation X?
In this case, it's because young people are generically useless at time-consistency, while the institution of marriage is totally based on time-consistency. So young people shouldn't have access to an institution to which they're badly-suited. Giving year-olds rights to marry wouldn't work, and the costs of all those failed marriages would not be completely internalised by those failing couples — it would also spill over to others intending or participating in "marriage".
It would act to trivialise the institution, by undermining credibility in a core aspect of marriage. In that case, rather than forcing the existing institution to incorporate the innovation, I'd argue that we should — to the extent we think the ambitions of the challengers are legitimate — encourage other or new institutions to step up, rather than torque the foundations of the institution initially under challenge.
But the commitment undertaken as a marriage ought to be a marriage-like commitment, not another sort of commitment onto which marriage has been ill-fittingly shoe-horned.
Thanks for bringing up the irony of the Christian conservative arguing against polygamy on presumably biblical grounds, when the forefathers of the Christian conservative's own religion were divinely-sanctioned polygamists. I meant to include that point somewhere in the post, but couldn't see where to fit it in. I also appreciate your point that complexity, bad side-effects, etc. Those are great points, Anders. I have, in fact asked myself similar questions about the conservative Christian perspective.
Kvinnans position. Rikedom som accumulerats i en familj, kommer splittras. Ja visst men jeg skriver paa engelsk, fordi det er en engelsk blogg, i England. It's a good point, that one the one side, very few men would accept being in a multiple-man relationship with a sole woman, and that, as a consequence, the single-men vs.
I doubt that, as you said, this would cause a higher rate of birth of men if I got the language correctly , but it seems plausible that the social paradigms would slowly change and become norm, possibly leading to a negative change of men's behavior toward women. So, we all agree that polygamy is not morally bad. It seems, however, that a country where it's widely practiced would have to develop tools to curb this change of behavior and prevent sexist attitudes.
Just for the sake of curiosity: a former Egyptian classmate of mine defended polygamy on the grounds that "if a man has enough money to support 8 women, why would it be bad? It's good for the women, and good for the men".
As we now know, the number of wives is in many places a token of wealth and prestige, meaning that wives are considered prestige goods just as BMWs and high-tech gadgets. I suppose this is what you meant with the change in people's mentality. I dare to guess that polygamy will hardly ever be installed in our overloaded, financially-worried society.
Simplicity itself is an argument for homossexual marriage and for the distinction between homossexual marriage and polygamy: the basic laws for the former are already there, it's practice does not severely change our social structure.
The latter would require a major rework on many levels. But I concede: Santorum did well in this one. This just shows us how well prepared his team is, as coming up with this answer seems like the stuff of well trained philosophers.
I tried to summarize his arguments in my post, although I didn't quite well understand it also. I think you're asking exactly the right question, Brian, but for the wrong reason. I'm sorry to say it, but Santorum has got you into a sticky mess. Maybe polyamorous marriages do have bad features. Suppose we identify some, like the ones Jean points out — e. Suppose these features make permitting polyamorous marriages obviously wrong. Then it might seem like Santorum's slippery slope argument against gay marriage is successful.
But it isn't — because as soon as we've identified the bad features of polyamoruse marriages X, Y, Z, we can now perfectly well block the slippery slope argument — unless the features X, Y, Z equally occur in gay marriages in which case, the slippery slope argument would be otiose. We can say "Everyone should habe a right to marry anyone else, so long as marriages of that kind don't have bad features X, Y, Z. The fact that it keeps coming back like some demented zombie is one indication that we need to teach philosophy and critical thinking in schools.
Hi Simon — I agree with you that there are different ways to block a reductio argument. One way is to say that Santorum has stated the proposed principle incorrectly; that it's not fully-stated unless it carries the addendum "unless X Y Z"; another way would be to say that the principle in its original formulation doesn't actually entail acceptance of polygamy; and a third way would be to deny that the acceptance of polygamy is absurd and therefore invalidates its spawning principle.
Some of Jean's points suggest to me that perhaps, indeed, we are — if not in principle, than in any conceivable practice. I simply wanted to raise the question; not deny that there are other ways to respond to Santorum! This is a great article. There is nothing wrong with polygamy. You can't force people to abide by an outdated model of marriage, one man, one woman. As a Christian, I don't understand why so many others of my faith don't understand the origins of our own Bible.
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon and many other prophets from the Bible practiced polygamy, as commanded by God, whose right to reign it is. This excludes the fact that polygamy has been practiced by Buddhist, Hinduism, Judaic, and Islamic practicioners for millenia. True liberty demands freedom of choice. Consenting adults should be allowed to marry whom they choose. That's what I intend to do with the Mormons. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone.
Gallichan, Walter M. Gallichan, p. The American Journal of Comparative Law. Brian: polygamy is a broad and a confusing term. Most kings and many of our mythological figures had more than one wife. There is no way to get out of a dual marriage in spite of a legal ban. He adds that it is relatively easy for a Hindu man to remarry because temples don't hold records.
Though she laid claim to compensation from the government, the court ruled in favour of the first wife.
Agarwal suggests that stringent and time-consuming Hindu divorce may force many men to resort to bigamy. The Quran only offers conditional permission for a man to take four wives: in times of war or a crisis that sees women outnumber men. Among Muslims, it was
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