This book addresses fundamental questions about marriage in moral and political philosophy. It examines promise, commitment, care, and contract to argue that marriage is not morally transformative. It argues that marriage discriminates against other forms of caring relationships and that, legally, restrictions on entry should be minimized.

This article centres on the legal recognition of same-sex marriage with a view to exploring the issue of unspeakability; that is, the condition whereby some questions cannot be articulated because of a lack of words. More specifically, the article will explore what happens to those social practices that are not given legal speakability and thereby legal recognition/protection. To this end, I first focus on how words are produced in the sphere of everyday life and their dependence on the existence (...) of a widespread normality. I then discuss how the law sees to the preservation and the reproduction of normality by providing a set of categories which are made available to law-abiders to settle disputes when they arise. In doing so, I elucidate the twofold role played by law as both a selective and a creative device. To cast some light on the particular way law operates, I discuss an important decision by the Italian Constitutional Court in 2010, which provides a telling example of how legal officials are able to seal off the set of legal categories and to leave some issues in the sphere of the unspeakable. I then unearth a paradox: while unspeakability reveals a condition of powerlessness, the acquisition of speakability could bring about even harsher exclusionary effects. I conclude by arguing that the entry into the sphere of official law is always a Janus-faced achievement, but can play as an effective instrument of critique. (shrink)

Reviewers of Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals (MM) came to no consensus on the purpose of the work. Some saw it as advocating love in marriage, others as destroying marriage and still others as an attempt to justify promiscuity (Kayden, Tract on Sex and Marriage: Review of Marriage and Morals by Bertrand Russell. The Sewanee Review 38(1), 104–108, 1930; Pan, Review of Marriage and Morals by Bertrand Russell. The China Critic 3(8), 186–187, 1930). Their (...) confusion is understandable given the tensions in the book. This chapter proposes that these were partly the result of an unsuccessful attempt to combine two incompatible value systems: aristocratic values and the new morality which Bertrand Russell and his wife at the time, Dora, promoted. The book also reveals a couple in crisis—whose ideals had proved impossible to realize in their life together. (shrink)

Clare Chambers argues that marriage violates both equality and liberty and should not be trecognized by the state. She shows how feminist and liberal principles require creation of a marriage-free state: one in which private marriages, whether religious or secular, would have no legal status.

Marriages come in a very wide variety: if the reports of anthropologists and historians are to be believed, an extraordinarily wide variety. This includes some of the more unusual forms, including marriage to the dead; to the gods; and even to plants. This does suggest that few proposed marriage relationships would require 'redefining marriage': but on the other hand, it makes giving a general theory of marriage challenging. So one issue we should face is how accepting (...) we should be of the reports: to what extent reported 'marriages' really are marriages. This paper defends the view that almost all of these reported marriages are in fact marriages, and suggests some theoretical approaches that may be generous enough to account for this. (shrink)

With the publication recently of two valuable studies on Attic demes, we are now more fully aware of what we know, and do not know, of the deme. With Osborne's work, we now have some idea of the tendency of Athenians to own and maintain property in the deme of origin, but the role of marriage in consolidating property in that deme is more difficult to assess. In contrast to Osborne's focus on the ancestral deme, this brief study will (...) concentrate on the deme into which the woman married; such a deme will be termed the deme of marriage or the marital deme. The study will focus particularly on the families who contracted more than one alliance for their kinswomen into the same outside deme and will emphasize the importance of siblings in securing and maintaining these alliances in the marital deme. (shrink)

A number of Black writers have cast Black marriage in a state of emergency – Black folks are not getting (or staying) married like they used to. Yet in seeking to address the Black marriage problem many have left marriage's ‘monogamous-only’ condition unexamined. In this article, I take a different approach. I draw on a long-standing prevalence of de facto non-monogamy among those marked Black and argue that the numerical constraint making marriage between two people violates (...) equal treatment. To make the case, I show how anti-non-monogamy attitudes have been racialized in ways that are expressive of anti-Blackness. In my view, the effects of this racialization include ongoing and disproportionate impacts on an already burdened group – Black polyamorists. A failure to reform the monogamous-only condition of marriage tacitly endorses anti-non-monogamous attitudes of the past where Black intimate relationships were thought inferior and therefore deserving of an inferior social standing. Finally, I look to an account of minimal marriage as a site of possibility for establishing a marriage institution that is more just in relation to equal treatment and a site of repair for racialized non-monogamists whose historical denial to accessing marriage has had the effect of accumulated social and political disadvantage. (shrink)

Alain Locke, an often neglected classical American Pragmatist, developed a pluralistic value theory as an antidote to the "value absolutism" he considered the root cause of social conflict. Values, for Locke, are not immutable features of a transcendent reality, but rather emerge from human functional attitudes, or what he calls "feeling-modes." However incommensurable the contextualized values of diverse cultures may appear, they can always be traced back to common modes of valuing. Recognizing the common character of our human faculty of (...) valuation allows us to see a basic functional equivalence among superficially conflicting values, thus undermining value absolutism. This paper suggests that one reason the debate over same-sex marriage in the United States has persisted is that the arguments have been advanced primarily in absolute value terms. Re-casting the debate in terms of a Lockean pluralistic value dialogue suggests a path out of the stalemate. (shrink)

A philosophical inquiry into whether, and, if so, why, marriage is good.

In the following article we first present the growing trend of incorporating neuroscience into the law, and the growing acceptance of and trust in neuroscience’s mechanistic and reductionistic explanations of the human mind. We then present and discuss some studies that show how nudging peoples’ beliefs about matters related to human agency (such as free will, decision-making, or self-control) towards a more deterministic, mechanistic and/or reductionistic conception, exerts an influence on their very actions, mentality, and brain processes. We suggest that (...) the neuroscientific view of the human mind exerts an influence on the very cognitive phenomena neuroscience falsely believes to be studying objectively. This holds especially when we consider the systematic integration of neuroscience into the public domain, such as the law. For, such an integration acts as a reinforcement of the public’s and legal decision-makers’ endorsement of and trust in neuroscience’s view of human nature that further changes how people think and act. Such looping effects of neurolaw are probably inevitable. Accordingly, we should be aware of the scope of neuroscientific explanations and be careful not to overstate neuroscientific evidence and findings in legal contexts. (shrink)

After four decades of China’s family planning policy, the shrinking family size and increasing life expectancy pose special challenges for the one-child generation in terms of providing care for aging parents. The current study explored young adults’ responses to such pressure by examining their concerns about elder care, attitudes toward nursing homes, and living arrangement after marriage in a sample of 473 Chinese working young adults from six cities in China. Results showed that although most of the young adults (...) reported to have thought about the issue of parents’ elder care, the majority did not worry a lot about it. Only children expressed similar levels of worrying as those with siblings did. However, educational level, rather than sibling status, was systematically related to concerns about parents’ elder care and attitudes toward nursing homes. People with higher education tended to worry less about elder care, and were less likely to consider placing parents in nursing homes as a violation of filial piety. Analyses of the married sub-sample revealed that only children were more likely to co-reside with parents after marriage than those with siblings. And the main reason for co-residence was that the younger generation needed their parents’ help for childcare, rather than to better take care of their parents. Implications for parents’ elder care among Chinese only children were discussed. (shrink)

The ecological realist concept of information as environmental specification is discussed. It is argued that affordances in ecological realism could, in principle, rest on a notion of partial specification of environmental circumstances. For this aim, a notion of Gestalt quality as a hierarchical structure of affordances would have to be adopted. It is claimed that such an account could provide a promising way to deal with problems of intentionality in perception and action, awareness and problem solving.