If there is an appropriate legal structure, all participants are freely consenting, and are not causing anyone harm, why shouldn't they be allowed?
But if we're talking about symmetrical polygamy (multiple husband's and multiple wives), I see no reason why a modern secular society should care. Of course if everyone is married to everyone, is anyone married to anyone?
I vaguely recall a species in startrek that was like this.
A lot of people would be unhappy with InfoSys's CEO marrying all of its H1B applicants, or a pro-immigration activist marrying hundreds of refugees.
This is not to say that polygamous marriage couldn't work, or that nobody abuses monogamous marriages for tax or immigration purposes. But if only a tiny proportion of people want to see their real loving polygamous family relationships approved by the state, the downsides could outweigh the positives.
This is the part that needs to change imho. Marriage should have zero legal meaning outside of some sort of contract all parties sign at the time of marriage. You are essentially cofounding a business and that’s what it should stay at.
The government doesn’t make special amends (afaik) if two random people say “We are business partners” so why do it if two random people say “We are married”. Who cares, you do you.
That something was valuable and important in the history doesn't mean is it today. Do you seriously think our world is in any way similar to the world even just 100 years ago?
That's not to say that not having access to legal polygamous marriage and owning people are equal but to show that the argument doesn't really stand on it's own. The correlation between monogamy and civilization isn't necessarily causitative.
Also I'm not sure that monogamy is as paired up with civilization as you claim. Haven't Kings and leaders for large portions of history been known for their harems?
I'm wondering if that would hold true were it more culturally acceptable.
I think it also discounts that many people do have some bisexual tendencies.
In a modern society with strong property rights and gender equality monogamy would be unnecessary from a purely "maintaining civilization as we know it" point of view.
...No comment on an emotional / psychological point of view.
I have seen plenty of arguments that monogamy did not become "normal" until religion entered the picture and the idea of woman as property became a thing (ironically the fact that some religions reinforce this by a man having multiple wives).
There is absolutely no reason to believe monody and civilization matters in the slightest. At best you could argue (and I would agree) years ago needing to be concerned about a woman getting pregnant, but that does not hold any weight in a modern society.
Maybe the real problem is we now think even rich men should tightly comply with expectations of monogamy when that was never the norm.
/Devil's advocate
Assuming not....
I forgot about how only single men (ignoring any woman that commit crimes) commit crimes.
How you can only be happy if you found "the one".
That a single person will give you every single thing you ever need.
Which... is bullshit.
(In a discussion of an article about gay marriage no less.)
That also though :p
That is, whether or not the distribution of romantic partners is symmetric or not is completely irrelevant to this topic. Incels have always existed, and will always exist, under varying names (in all genders).
One man with four wives can produce four babies in a year and everyone will know the parentage of all children. One woman with four husbands can produce one child and no one will ever be certain who the daddy really is.
Even if you invent effective inheritance laws to cope with that, it still has potential to cause problems. Inbreeding is known to foster genetic issues. Avoiding that outcome seems to be one of the cornerstones of a lot of human sexual morality policies.
Without a patriarchal women-as-property model, monogamy demonstrably does not actually do that[0][1]; in a non-patriarchal, egalitarian system, removing the monogamy restriction might do that better than having it, even though monogamy is clearly better at that among strongly patriarchal women-as-property systems, where removing the restriction just means adopting polygyny where the more wealthy men have more women just like they have more of any other property.
[0] In the US only a little over 55% of adults are married, and by race only whites and Asians are over 50%, blacks at less than 30%.
[1] In fact, if women opt out of marriage in any significant numbers, and (given same sex marriage as an option) male and female homosexual preference is equally distributed (or female homosexual preference more common), polyandry is necessary to achieve almost-all-men-get-partners.
The historical model in which monogamy achieves the goal claimed of guaranteeing virtually all men a partner (and where polygamy, which on such cases is universally exclusive polygyny, does not do so) is a patriarchal, women-as-property model—this is a historically common model but generally not seen in the modern developed world, and in the modern developed world monogamy generally does not have (and generalized polygamy is not opposed to) that effect.
Marriage is no such a thing at all. It’s a kind of relationship with its own peculiar set of moral rights and obligations, like e.g. contracts or torts.
Being required to exercise care so as to not be liable in tort doesn’t make you anyone’s “property”, and neither does a contract to sell them goods.
Monogamous marriage is no doubt a restriction of freedom, just like all of the other rules that govern our society. The argument is whether such restrictions are justified, not making poorly-founded analogies to “property”.
You know, we could debate the appropriateness of the word "property" in the description all day (and I'll get back to that later in this post), but it is, in any case, tangential to the point which is that the utility of exclusive legal monogamy as opposed to tolerance of polygamy in assuring men with partners is demonstrably, empirically only present when comparing systems in which women have a legally inferior, subordinate position, and that whatever social utility can be said to derive from that effect is not achieved by choosing exclusive legal monogamy in systems with more gender-equal ranges of social and economic freedoms and choices.
> By using the word “property”, you’re invoking the mental image of some of the rights associated with physical property
Yes, deliberately so.
> like the near absolute right to destroy and use for your own purposes.
Yes, and in the systems in which monogamy has the effect of providing near-universal guarantee that men get stable partners, that is a very close approximation of the case. Women are disposed of to men by the men in the family they are born or raised in, often in explicit or implicit exchange for other property, and once so transferred the receiving man has relatively impunity to use them at will, including often the right to impose corporal punishment and the right to free sexual use at his whim without regard to her preferences; they universally include widespread legal discrimination against women in economic activity, and often include outright legal bars on women engaging in wide fields of endeavor, and often restrictions on women even owning property.
> Marriage is not such a thing at all.
I didn't ever say marriage, in general, was a relationship in which women were property, I said that the social contexts in which monogamy as the sole legal form of marriage actually produced the outcome that virtually every man was able to have and keep a partner are ones in which women (not just in marriage) are treated more as valuable property than as coequal members of society.
You don't seem to have considered the social benefits/costs of monogamy to women. It's almost as though women are an afterthought...
Maybe you think absolute freedom in these affairs is worth it nonetheless, but people before us had good reasons for how they organized their world, and we shouldn’t be so quick to discount it as just flowing from prejudice, ignorance, or evil.
Also, your understanding of the #MeToo movement is... misguided. Sexual harassment and sexual assault have nothing to do with how many sexual partners a woman has or whether or not a woman is married. #MeToo is about shedding light on sexual harassment and assault when it has historically been a “taboo” subject to speak about publicly. It’s about letting women who have been harassed or assaulted know they aren’t alone and helping others realize how prevalent the issue is. For example, in this recent thread[1] about a survey of YC female founders you can see how shocked many people were by how common it was.
And yes, the world is full of people who have been left by a partner for no good reason other than the grass being greener on the other side, including, as just one example, women being left for younger women. There are some well-known instances of this in public life right now. When there is a stronger norm of lifelong monogamy, I think people are more likely to internalize their commitment and stick it out, just like they internalize other norms of rightful conduct. There are, allegedly, fairy tale marriages out there, but most of the older folks I know who have had successful, lifelong marriages will tell you that it wasn’t always easy or what they desired at every moment, but that at various points they stuck it out for the kids, out of obligation, out of love (the commitment, not the feeling).