Ab Hominem Arguments

Shouldn’t peri hominem be circum hominem?

Of course Burgess-Jackson offered no real argument. And of course he knows this, and he knows that you know it.

I think of this as the David Horowitz Gambit. It goes in four basic stages:

1. Make a patently ridiculous assertion that consists, basically, of nothing more than name-calling couched in pseudo-intellectual snark. Design it to be maximally crude and offensive. (In his original post, BJ’s implication that gays and dogs have equivalent cognitive capacities — at least viz. marriage — wasn’t an unintentional misstep, it was the point. Faggots Are Animals.)

2. When someone makes an effort to engage with your attempt at provocation, dismiss them as a close-minded member of the liberal elite, and everyone knows how those liberal elites love name-calling. (Projection is the key to this step. Lay on, as thick as you can, pre-emptive accusations against your opponent of doing precisely what you are doing.) This, naturally, makes you an Intellectual Maverick bravely tilting against overwhelming odds; good Heritage Foundation material.

3. Lather, rinse and repeat step 2 for every patient attempt to explain to you that you didn’t, in fact, provide an argument in the initial instance. The more patient and erudite those attempts are, the more leverage you have to mock them. (“Look at these smug liberals talking about Kierkegaard. I notice they still haven’t addressed me original argument, which was totally airtight! So when are they going to address it? It’ll be a cold day in hell…”)

4. Whenever you get tired of repeating stage 3, declare victory and return to a variant of your “argument” in stage 1. (“Look, when I say gay marriage is an intelligence – stupidity issue, what I mean is that gays marrying is like chimps taking the SAT… and what does that say about liberals? Jack Pimpernel from the Institute for Sophisticated Gay-bashing agrees.”)

The best way to feed into the Gambit is to treat these people like they’re at all interested in debating with you in good faith. They aren’t. BJ announced this with his initial broadside.

Leaving aside the total absence of an argument for his claim that gay marriage is like dogs voting, he also says (talking of whether he ought to respond to the criticism here):

“Does Peter Singer respond to even 1% of his critics? Did John Rawls? If they did, they’d never get any work done. David Hume didn’t respond to any critics.”

He’s modest, eh? Notice the company he places himself in.

I would have simply pointed out that while we hadn’t engaged with his arguments, it was also true to say that he hadn’t engaged with our name-calling.

(like the word ‘liberation’, for example)

Indeed, although why go that far to find an example? The word “marriage” would serve just as well… (“Say we prohibit polygamy, and then, since the word “marriage” will have no meaning at all, maybe we’ll permit gay marriage?!” Great argument; shame there were no blogs then to chew on it)

[the word ‘marriage’ traditionally has been reserved for a long-term union between one male and one female with the main purpose of procreation]

It depends on how you define “long-term”. There’s no obligation to remain married for a long period of time. Marriages are routinely annulled and dissolved after very short periods of time have passed. I understand that the intention is for a lifetime committment, but fulfillment of that committment is the exception, not the rule. 50% divorce rate, 50% infidelity.

I would also argue with the idea that marriage has the purpose of procreation. Obviously, marriage is irrelevant to biology. People reproduce whether they get married or not.

The primary purpose of marriage is the transfer of property. The property belonging to both parties separately becomes the property of both together.

Romantic notions about marriage and family are recent inventions. In the pre-modern past, people got married for survival. In order for your farm to prosper, you needed hands that you didn’t have to pay (children). In order to eat, someone had to make your food for you (wives). In order to keep property out of the hands of the lords, you had to have inheritance (children again).

The core of the pro-gay marriage argument refers to property, not romance. Gays are concerned about spousal benefits, child custody (yes, they are property, I’m afraid!), visitation rights, etc. Gay couples will be gay couples whether there is legal marriage or not.

Blogesota

I don’t think this is the case. The core of the gay marriage arguement as it was argued at the Supreme Court in Canada was that they wanted the word not just the form. They felt having an identical form with a different name e.g. civil unions was discriminatory. Think separate but equal as a reference

Ophelia, that’s the projection. Start with insults, and accuse the liberals of being the insulters.

From what I’ve seen in the past, Burgess-Jackson is a bit of a weirdo, and an inveterate troller for links – harmless, all in all, but not to be taken seriously. I made the mistake of engaging in debate with him once by email; he started posting more and more vitriolic stuff on his blog, accusing me of this or that liberal sin, and sending me email updates to let me know when he’d done it. Eventually, I got a little tired of this, and politely asked him to stop sending me emails, as I wasn’t finding his posts interesting – he sent back a pretty surly email in reply, telling me that he’d start taking me seriously when I got a tenured position in an US university (I was in University of Toronto at the time). Ad hominems how are ya. I get the sense (could be wrong) that he doesn’t get alll that many visitors to his blog in the normal course of affairs, and that trying to get liberals and lefties all het up is his way of trying to attract some traffic.

If you want me to read your prose, you must be kind and respectful. Is that too much to ask?”

As I always remark in response to this kind of prissiness, bad news for Socrates, Dr Johnson, Dean Swift, Churchill, etc.

I can see that being the case. A lot of the stuff on his site seems pretty reasonable.

that uoftoronto ad hominem is funny if you apply it to his field, philosophy. i don’t see uoftexas arlington on the list at philosophical gourmet, and toronto is pretty respectable.

The argument seems to be:

Premise 1: Dogs are not made for voting.

Conclusion: By analogy, gays are not made for marriage.

What sort of argument is that? Or is the premise already that gays are not made for marriage? In that case, the argument is circular. In other words, there is no argument.

Argument is stupid.

Of course there are things we can do about it. We can argue, talk, discuss, post, debate, write.

Minds and attitudes do change over time, even deeply entrenched ones.

The Analphilosopher says, presumably in reference to this site:

“Those of you who don’t work or study at a university may not know what goes on there. See here for an example of academic discourse. It’s snide, sneering, condescending, smug, and personal.”

a rather tenuous claim under normal conditions, and a little odd coming from someone who has claimed that conservatism is the philosophy of grownups in the course of admitting that he was once young and stupid, i.e. “liberal”

“These are the equivalent of punks on a street corner. Their sole objective is to impress each other with their wit, their loyalty to the liberal cause, and their animosity toward outsiders (read: conservatives).”

a person in a reasonable state of mind would have responded with a description of what he thought was missed, misconstrued, or misunderstood about his argument or the background knowledge or philosophy that motivated it.

the “solely to impress each other with their wit” claim is also more than a little ridiculous; at the minimum the response was jointly caused by the offensive statement of the author. which by the way is rare in an average class environment, therefore explaining the tenuous nature of the first claim.

“I call them liberal punks. They’re a dime a dozen on college campuses. They wouldn’t last a minute in a real job.”

first an assumption about the composition of commenters, in addition to insensitivity to differences in politics multiply demonstrated by frequent claims on the web site, not at all helpful to the accusation of insularity (and by the way, many of us would find the exemplars of “liberals” on your site equally distasteful and badly argued); contrast this with Eugene Volokh, who is more convincing to those who tend to disagree in part because he doesn’t employ the method of outrage.

But we can’t all live up to that ideal, and therefore it is totally reasonable to sometimes be vitriolic, out of catharsis or whatever. but accept that answering in kind will have one result, and being reasonable another. hence, this thread.

“and may I suggest until demonstrated otherwise that the original argument was simply an artifact of other (geniunely interesting) discussions about the moral status of animals on his site.”

Ah? A B&W reader told me that, too. So why doesn’t B-J say that? (Well, he’s said why, because like Hume and Rawls he doesn’t have time. But he does have time to post repeatedly about ad hominems and liberal punks. Oookay.)

Here’s two links to sites on logical fallacies:

http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/index.html#index

The question of gay marriage, or rather the debate over the issue, is confused by a lack of clear definition of “marriage”, or at least the (contestable) claim that the commonly understood defintions of the term are discriminatory. Lacking a clear definition, both sides of the debate tend to indulge in ‘question begging’, each assuming their own particular understanding of the term “marriage” as axiomatic, either on traditional or social grounds, or else on purely secular or categorical grounds.

Additionally, the debate is much broader than a simple disagreement over definition, as in essence a disagreement is over the nature and relationship between the polis and individual members, as well as between the authority of the members of one polis to determine the laws of a different polis. This includes the question as to whether it is appropriate for contentious political subjects to be determined by the Federal government at all, or whether said subjects should be referred back to individual electorates whenever possible.

The last point I’d like to make is that the vast majority of legal and political philosophy is inductive, rather than deductive, by nature. This means that although political rhetoric is reduced to simple “pro-con” positions, the reality of almost all debates is otherwise. In truth, political arguments are really a matter of the relative inductive strength or weakness of conflicting socio-political claims. In a collective there is only a general consensus because individual members never assign exactly the same weight to a given inductive argument. This is the nature of collective political organization: at times members must either, a) agree to disagree; or b) fight; or c) leave the polis.

Ah, KBJ. On his blog he wrote:

First, studies by law professor John Lott and others show that private gun-ownership reduces crime rates. This may be counterintuitive, but it’s true. There would be more crime than there is if guns were banned.

In an attempt to set him straight, I emailed him and pointed out that Lott’s studies had been refuted by better and more extensive work by Ayres and Donohue and gave him a link to my comments on Lott. Instead of responding to any of the points I made, he replied:

You sound like a gun-hater.

I wrote back: “You are mistaken. Do you care whether your claims are true or not?” Burgess-Jackson replied:

I have more faith in John Lott than I do in you, that’s for sure.

“Argument is stupid.”

No it’s not.

Notice how Burgess-Jackson has refused (openly) to actually comment on any of the posts that do engage his “argument,” including the one that Chris linked from the original CT post! If you wanted to know anything about his character, that should tell you all you need to know.

There is another form of logical fallacy masquerading as a real argument. That is the move that a reductionistic explanation of some event carries some presumption of validity. So we have “marriage is really about procreation” or “marriage is really for passing on property.” Since these explanations reduce a multi-dimensional event to something using ‘lower’ motives or reason, it is considered a proof or an argument.

But its not, its simply an assertion.

Full-blown notions of romantic love may be ‘modern’ (assuming literature from the middle-ages can be considered modern) but joining on the basis of sexual attraction is certainly not modern. In any case, the desire of gays to be together in a public commitment with legal implications is rather similar to the desires of many straight couples.

Childlessness is rather more common among heterosexuals than supposed. Is the argument that if you don’t have children your straight marriage is ‘incoherent’ and you are like a dog?

You people don’t get it, do you?

Keef Burgis Jacksoff is the ultimate troll and everybody took his bait. He fully deserves the title of Master Baiter.

He’s taking a substantive position, not a semantical one.

Hmm, I think it would be hard for you to demonstrate, because he states several times:

…
What Tuesday’s results show is that Americans are overwhelmingly against changing the traditional understanding of marriage.
…
…the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent…
…
I have no idea what the people of Massachusetts would do if presented with the option of redefining “marriage.”
…

Clearly he views it as a matter semanitcs, the meaning of the word ‘marriage’.

Why, exactly, would he object to homosexual couples being ‘schmarried‘ in the cityhall? Seems to me he should have no objection to that since all his ‘argument’ is built on the the traditional understanding of marriage.

Thanks.

Enythmeme:

I have little to add beyond what John Holbo has just said.

K J-B doesn’t offer an explicit argument in the post linked to and under discussion here. Nor does he link to any arguments he may have made elsewhere. It’s possible to read what he says as a weak semantic argument, at best, and only then if one is inclined towards charity.

Contrary to what you say above, there’s nothng substantive there. If you are convinced his dog analogy constitues some kind of substantive claim about gay marriage then I’d be happy for you to enlighten me about what that substantive claim is and be happy to debate the merits of such a claim.

In the absence of any such substantive argument all he’s done is indulge in the drawing of spurious analogies and the calling of names.

It’s particularly rich for you to say that:

“Indeed, Mr Mcgrattan seems to think that he is some kind of idiot, and that his opposition to same sex marriage hinges on some verbal quibble. ”

When a) it’s he who has engaged in calling his opponents stupid and b) when his views as expressed in the passage under discussion do consist of nothing more than a verbal quibble.

Pot/kettle/black, etc.

abb1,

Hmm, I think it would be hard for you to demonstrate . . .

Actually, I attempted to do just that by cribbing his arguments from multiple posts on the subject. For example, the first post I linked to (in the origial thread) is a public policy argument. And I believe he has stated time and again that those who oppose same sex marriage should tie their arguments to the ostensible policy aim of marriage – that of child rearing.

Clearly he views it as a matter semanitcs, the meaning of the word ‘marriage’.

Doesn’t follow.

“What Tuesday’s results show is that Americans are overwhelmingly against changing the traditional understanding of marriage” refers to the traditional understanding of the policy aim of marriage; or to what Americans understand the word to mean. It doesn’t mean that the arguments against gay marriage are semantical ones.

Same deal with the Massachusetts quote.

Same sex marriage is incoherent in the light of what he thinks are the policy aims of the institution. Again, this does not entail that it is a semantical argument. Quite the contrary.

If the government decrees that all nicotine products should be subject to a consumer tax because they are unhealthful, wouldn’t you agree that it is incoherent to assert that, for all legal, policy and taxation purposes, nicotine patches should fall under the same rubric?

Isn’t the public policy aim of the tax to discourage smoking? If so, why should nicotine patches fall under that rubric?

In this case, the decision not to include nicotine patches under that rubric could hardly be said to be a semantical one: there are clear policy reasons for not doing so. Yet that is precisely what you are asserting in the case of same sex marriage.

Why, exactly, would he object to homosexual couples being ‘schmarried’ in the cityhall?

Policy reasons, maybe??

Seems to me he should have no objection to that since all his ‘argument’ is built on the the traditional understanding of marriage.

Well, then you should have no objection to including nicotine patches under the rubric of ‘nicotine product’ for all legal purposes.

Heya Mr Holbo,

And maybe it is worth adding that the man’s actual moral arguments, plus his legal position, clearly show that the dog analogy is worthless. (The point is supposed to be that dogs don’t understand this stuff. But I don’t think even K J-B is going to say that gay people don’t understand how having property rights, visitation rights, that sort of stuff, could be in their interest.)

No, you’re misreading him. He’s not saying that gay people don’t understand marriage (clearly they do) – he’s saying that they do not have the capacity to participate in the institution (his words) _qua_ child rearers: it is a biological impossibility for male homosexuals to have children, they do not usually have children, and we are unsure as to the desirability of deviant family units for children. This is a not implausible concern – for if single parent families are not optimal for raising children, it is perhaps only prudent to ask the same questions of other deviant family units with regards to setting policy.

As I mentioned early on to Ms Benson (in the original thread):

“I agree that the analogy is unfortunate; but it’s not unreasonable if read in context: that is, same sex couples do not have the capacity of participating in an institution the purpose of which is to raise children. That is not ad hominem: it goes right to the heart of policy arguments against gay marriage. The jury, I think, is out on this – as I mentioned before; but I don’t think one can dismiss it out of hand.”

So I agree that it is an unfortunate analogy because it may be reasonably (but mistakenly) construed as abuse, but I disagree that it is an unreasonable analogy for the aforementioned reasons.

When a) it’s he who has engaged in calling his opponents stupid and b) when his views as expressed in the passage under discussion do consist of nothing more than a verbal quibble.

Oh really. Is this why he wrote: “[h]ow the amendment is worded remains to be seen. It should simply say that marriage, for all legal purposes, is a relation between a man and a woman.”

Now, I wonder why he would explicitly state the legally substantive bolded bit if it was just a matter of semantics.

Now clearly it is a biological impossibility for two men to have a child together but it’s also biologically impossible for many heterosexual couples for straight-forward medical reasons.

Right, see original thread and first link in my original post which addresses the childless couple objection.

Such couples are able to adopt children, as are gay men. Indeed, many Western countries allow for adoption by male and female homosexual couples.

Yet this begs the very questions mentioned: is this a desirable policy aim in the absence of further research into the question? And do the vast majority of same sex couples adopt if able to, thereby constituting a class of people who do fulfill the ostensible policy aims of marriage. These are precisely the policy issues at question.

I don’t think we ought to set any great store by the claim that the ‘purpose’ of marriage is chld-rearing but even if we do there’s no reason why homosexual couples (male or female) can’t participate in marriage so constituted.

See above, also see my original post in the original thread.

Oh come on… His use of the “for all legal purposes” clause occurs in his discussion of the proposed federal marriage amendment. He’s explicitly discussing the legal definition of marriage and this occurs a few paragraphs after the section I was referring to.

??? So why would he include that clause if it’s a “mere verbal quibble”, as you assert?

Yes he’s discussing the legal definition of marriage and its attendant rights and benefits. Hence “for all legal purposes”. But you just said it was merely semantical for him. So which is it? Either there is a legally substantive issue for him or there isn’t. Make up your mind.

Notice how you first say ‘post’, then now you say ‘section’. No point shifting the goal posts . . .

How else are we to understand ‘the very idea of X is incoherent’ except as some kind of semantic or conceptual claim?

Already addressed. See my response to abb1.

Enth,

Yeah, what John Holbo said (way up there). I wasn’t talking about the entirety of B-J’s argument on gay marriage; the whole subject doesn’t interest me much; I was talking specifically about his analogy. I think the analogy itself is worth disagreeing with, even if the rest of his argument is beyond reproach. I think things like rhetoric, insults whether deliberate or accidental or some combination of the two, strained analogies, comparisons to animals – I think all that kind of thing is highly interesting and also important. (I’ve written a parody guide to rhetoric and co-written a parody dictionary, so you can see my interest is genuine and not worked-up in order to answer you.) I talked about that because that’s what I was talking about, it’s as simple as that.

Suppose I concede for the purpose of this argument that a) the institution we currently call marriage has as its primary purpose the raising of children and b) that it is impossible for homosexual couples to raise children.

Even given this, why should this be an argument against homosexual couples entering into a civil union which confers upon them certain property entitlements and next of kind status and power-of-attorney in issues of health care?

This institution does not have as it’s primary purpose the raising of children. It’s a whole other kind of institution — one which reflects two people’s commitment to each other and an affirmation of mutual responsibility and care, etc.

How is the ‘marriage is ultimately about child rearing’ argument supposed to impinge upon that?

If the argument is not merely terminological i.e. about calling this new relationship between two people of the same sex ‘marriage’ then how is some set of claims about one particular type relationship between two adults supposed to render illegitimate some other relationship between two adults?

Dogs vote by proxy, having ceded the process to their more competent masters and mistresses, trusting, as dogs will, in the beneficence and more finely calibrated wisdom of the human race.
Noble, misguided Trey!
H.E.Baber-
Marriage as an institution is one more social-control device, allowing the existent dominant generation to exert shaping authority over the next. This is why both religious and civil authorities battle over and wrangle for and divvy up the licensing of marriage, and also why sexual taboos are so deeply embedded in moral systems that are otherwise concerned solely with corporal/property harm and protection. Making people feel that their sexuality is a franchise that can be bestowed or withheld at the discretion of the church or state means that sexual identity itself is in the hands of authority. This gives weight to the cunning old, and takes it away from the less-experienced young. These forces are at work in both the institution of marriage and the prohibition of sexual deviancy. The harm done by sexual deviants is not to the society itself but to the authority that governs. Making people feel that anything proscribed is a threat to their well-being is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as people surrender more of their independence and volition to that authority – “Anything that threatens the masters threatens me.”
Logic is secondary, which is obvious once you get clear of your own engagement with social pathologies. What difference does it make to the rest of us if two people give each other maple syrup enemas? None. So explain the ripples of malice and scorn that proceed from public knowledge of that practice. Explain a culture that will show videos of murder and execution on primetime news, and censor the word “shit” in a late-night movie. Any discussion of marriage, gay or otherwise, that doesn’t proceed from an admission of toxicity in the social matrices is flighty and unaware of its own context.
Our sexuality is under government license, or ecclesiastic dispensation, though we’re branded locally. This makes for a general anxiety toward sexual rules and creates that kind of collaborationist v. resistance mentality any dictatorial system generates.
Marriage is an outgrowth of human social evolution, a process that’s recently mutated wildly. Human social evolution began as a survival imperative, became a maintenance regime, and now delaminates, fragments, and atrophies as the purpose of that imperative and maintenance are called into unanswerable question.
Science can’t lead us, religion’s going the wrong way, anarchy corrodes, hedonism rots, sentimentality weakens, doing nothing gets nothing done…

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2004_11_28_dissectleft_archive.html#110158802839020884

makes me wonder why

Lol. You damn well know why – we’re all closeted homosexuals here, that’s why. And we want to get married, dammit.

I’m completely confused. Have the bunch of you gotten so worked up because you think KBJ used an unfortunate analogy and failed to provide a good argument? Or have you gotten so worked up — really, remarkably worked-up — because of the chance to rant on again about gay marriage?

I can’t speak for the others, obviously, but if I had been worked up, it would’ve been because KBJ is being insulting to people on the left for no good reason. It’s really quite discomforting unless you’re accustomed to reading such things on the internet. Gay marriage is hardly the issue here as far as being worked up is concerned, and to the extent that someone is worked up, IMHO. It’s not like people aren’t aware of the anti-gay marriage arguments.

“Hey, marriage has always been between woman and man. Why screw with that?”

Because marriage is all about procereation, duh. (sorry)

There aren’t any crusades against childless marriages as such, e.g. marriages between elderly people so I don’t think it’s likely that the procreative norm is the issue.

My guess is that members of “traditional families” feel squeezed, feel that their preferred way of life is being denigrated or in any case that it’s no longer the social norm. The media portray the lives of young urban professionals, centered around the office, after work bar and upscale restaurants and represent suburban family life as something of a joke–from the Simpsons, King of the Hill and Family Guy back to Married With Children.

Gay marriage is a symbol of the high prestige urban lifestyle that they don’t want and, in any case, couldn’t get. I think when they vote against gay marriage they’re saying we’ve got the power, we’re the “normal” Americans, we’re not a joke.

“64 comments, all generated because a blogger used a bad analogy/argument/whatever? So shoot me for marveling a bit about this.”

Sure, 64 comments, from a lot of different people. Is that a lot? Golly, I remember the time there was that dispute about where is the best place to get really good pastrami on a brioche on the long stretch of road between Kalispell and Mandan – that went up to around 6 thousand, if I remember correctly, before the nice people at CT shut it down.

Anyway. Speaking for myself and one other person (no, I don’t know which one), 1) I’m interested in rhetoric, as I’ve mentioned, so going on and on about a piece of rhetoric seems perfectly sensible and normal to me, and 2) the very bizarre reaction (bizarre and rhetorical, I might add) of B-J simply made it all more interesting. Five posts to rave about liberal punks, when he doesn’t have time to address actual arguments – now that’s interesting. Plus of course there’s the fact that he’s a philosophy professor. If he were a plumber or an airport shuttle serivce driver, I must admit, it would have been less interesting.

Someone tell Burgess-Jackson that he has no business defending traditional marriage, if his hyphenated surname is a product of his parents’ relatively recent American gender-equity custom of combining the spouses’ surnames (rather than subsuming the wife’s name under the husband’s, as “Mrs. John Doe”).

If his double-barrelled surname is the product of upper-class British origins, I take it back, but I can’t endure being lectured to about traditional definitions of marriage from someone whose parents rejected customs deriving from couverture.

Forgot: either way, people really can’t be held responsible for decisions their parents made when they weren’t even around.

That John Ray post is a classic. It’s up there with that time some commenter “diagnosed Belle”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001827.html as suffering from an “inadequate classics education” because she made a joke about Troy.

Michael Blowhard,

I mean, why should we get worked up about arguing that we should deny legal rights to some part of the population on totally spurious grounds… Clearly that’s not an issue, right…

Also, what Ophelia said (note my only other post on this thread was to say it’s a bit wierd for conservatives to invoke the value of reason).

Stephen m sez: It’s been co-opted, redesigned, reduced, expanded, weaseled and bronzed, but until very recently the idea that it had to do with children primarily was obvious and seemingly permanent.

According to Denis de Rougemont, “very recently” would be somewhere in the twelveth century.

Mr. Burgess-Jackson (is that you, osm?) could also explain to me why it is unexceptionable for Judith and William to raise William’s stepdaughter but not for Nancy and Linda to raise Nancy’s stepdaughter. I suppose one could apply some heavyweight Gunnar Myrdalesque socio-statistics to the problem and demonstrate that Linda & Nancy’s “deviant” menage will more likely than not put their child at a disadvantage to mine. But KBJ hasn’t done this at all; he blows off the question as self-evident. Well, I guess, as Barbie sez, “Math is hard work!!!”

What if the state conceded ‘marriage’ as a term for a religious institution and got out of the business of secular marriage entirely? (OK this ignores the issue that marriage may have had secular origins, but so what? If religions want a monopoly on the term, let them have it)

The state could then deal purely in ‘life partnerships’ or ‘civil unions’ or whatever. It could recognise marriages as such and register/conduct the secular variety.

All the financial discrimination issues would be separated from the religious issues and a lot of philosophical thickets would instantly evaporate.

John, I expect better of a professional philosopher. At least get the structure of his argument right. His claim that supporters of gay marriage are stupid is not a premise, which is what would be required for it to be ad hominem. That claim is the conclusion of his argument.

I really don’t understand. B-J claims that people don’t address his arguments, but it seems to me that they do, despite the fact he makes it difficult by not allowing comments or trackbacks on his blog, and by (apparently) never showing up at a blog where comments and trackbacks do allow an exchange. Instead he stays hidden away and whines about liberals this and liberals that. The same seems to go for Dissecting Leftism Man, John Ray. No comments or trackbacks allowed, along with the claim that the “Leftists are too grand to debate anything with conservatives”.

Whatever forms marriage has had over the millenia it is centered on children, on the production and nurturing of children.

Close, but no cigar. You can produce and nurture children like crazy outside of marriage. Marriage is traditionally about the establishment of unambiguous paternity, and therefore patrimony.

The Cartoon History of the Universe had an interesting take on this (not that I’m citing it as an authority). As I recall, an ancient shepherd watches his ewe giving birth to a lamb, points to the lamb, and says “Mine!” He then goes to the village, and there sees a small group of women and a large group of children. He scratches his head, and says, “????” The next step involves a marriage ritual and the establishment of laws against adultery (with punishments such as stoning). The shepherd now looks at the small group of women and the large group of children, and says, “Mine!”

I would argue that the current debate about gay marriage is not about changing the “traditional” definition of marriage. It is about establishing a brand new definition of marriage. Paternity, of course, is now a matter of DNA. We’ve been going on for half-a-century or so with the “when two people love each other very much” contemporary definition of marriage, and there’s no logical reason why that shouldn’t apply to homosexuals. The only way to argue against homosexual marriage is to throw out the traditional definition (unambiguous paternity), throw out the contemporary definition (two people very much in love), and establish some new definition, based on somehow establishing the predominant circumstances of marriage as the new purpose for marriage.

Frankly, having married someone I loved very much, who by all accounts loved me very much, and yet getting divorced in spite of it, I happen to think the “when two people love each other very much” definition of marriage deserves to be scrapped. I’m not sure that’s what conservatives are arguing; however, I do think that will be the result.

Suppose schmarriage were an option for homosexuals: I do not think you could legally deny heterosexual couples the right to schmarry, if that’s what they choose. If a non-marriage legal union were available, and open to all couples regardless of sexual identity, I think marriage rates would plummet to the point of irrelevance in short order. I know that if I had the option of schmarriage instead of marriage, I would choose it in a heartbeat (assuming, of course, a willing partner — sigh).

How is ‘civil union’ legally dissimilar?

If you view ‘marriage’ as a policy instrument, why all this talk about ‘traditional meaning’? This is a completely different venue and I don’t think this venue is particularly promising for your side.

abb1,

How is ‘civil union’ legally dissimilar?

Abrogated rights and benefits. In the case of the US, Federal benefits omitted; in the Netherlands and some Scandinavian countries, limited adoption rights, inter alia.

If you view ‘marriage’ as a policy instrument, why all this talk about ‘traditional meaning’? This is a completely different venue and I don’t think this venue is particularly promising for your side.

Why can’t the traditional meaning of marriage comport with the policy aim of the institution? At any event, this has been adequately explained in my earlier answer to this question: it may refer to how Americans understand the term; but it does not follow that the arguments against gay marriage is a semantical one.

Mr Ostrum,

Enthymeme: Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to tie justification of the institution of marriage so tightly to child-rearing? Lots of married couples do not have children, despite what you say.

I never denied that “lots” do not have children. But most do. So no, it is not a stretch to tie marriage to child rearing. I mean, what other policy aims are there that would be encouraged by the structure of our family/marriage laws? If not children, then what? Moreover, heterosexuality is a reasonable proxy for assessing whether the couple in question intend to have children or not. It could be that the demographics change with time, and with it, our lines of demarcation.

Couldn’t we avoid all these horrendoues costs of marriage you refer to (what exactly are those, that do not also accrue to “civil unions”) by not letting people get married until they exhibit clear intentions to have children?

But how would you ascertain intention without incurring prohibitive costs (one can lie about intentions, obviously), other than using heterosexuality as a reasonable proxy?

And I’ve already mentioned a few costs that might accrue to marriage and not civil unions – spousal evidentiary immunity and (possibly) adoption rights.

Don’t let old people or sterile people get married either.

But people often don’t know they are sterile until they try for children. And how do you propose to find out if a woman is indeed menopausal without violating doctor-patient confidentiality? Or indeed, what if the parties in question do not consent to fertility testing in the first place? Further, you discount the fact that many old people already have children – perhaps from previous marriages – and should not therefore (having served the policy aim) be excluded from the institution should a partner die early.

What about the fact that marriage also represents for many a solemn recognition of two people’s deep loving committment to one another as life-partners? Why should people who are capable of entering such a committment be denied having that committment recognized when others are allowed to have it recognized?

Well, if this is a question of “recognition” then I’m not sure what policy aim is being served so as to justify the costs involved. I don’t think “recognition” is a legitimate justification (recognition may after all be obtained via other ceremonial or religious means – your parish might recognize your union, for e.g. – without the costs that legal recognition entail) in light of the costs involved, however gratifying it might be for those who bear only a part of it.

Again, this is not to say that our demarcations hold in perpetua. _Autres temps, autres moeurs_, and with justification too, should the future makeup of society warrant it.

Calvin Ostrum,

it’s just so tempting when they do just make assertions (enthymeme, this is KBJ, not you: you clearly have an argument), especially when they email me, ask if I have an argument or just insults – I was nasty about KBJ in an earlier thread – and then don’t reply when I provide one. It’s a bit snide I suppose, but…

Mr Ostrum,

You don’t think that the issue of marriage being a solemn recognition of the importance of a couple’s pair bond, regardless of whether they choose to have children, is a “policy benefit”, and that denying it has “costs”, for example. Why not include those costs and benefits?

But what exactly are these? I have expressed puzzlement as to what other policy aims might be served, but you have not specified. “Recognition” for recognition’s sake – however gratifying – seems to me a facile reason. For on that count many polyamorists can also claim to lack recognition in the eyes of the law.

You suggest it would be too costly to restrict marriage more narrowly to what you say it really is good for (childrearing), but your attempts to actually measure those costs seem rather half-hearted and you don’t seem to use much imagination to figure out how such costs could be limited or avoided.

There are over a thousand Federal rights and benefits. I can only give some indicia of what the likely costs and benefits are. Of course I can’t give a comprehensive account with respect to all of them – only to some of the more significant ones. If indeed I lack imagination, then I’m prepared to be convinced; but be assured that I too think the shoe is on the other foot.

For example, how is determining whether people are lying about their intention to have children some serious cost?

Because 1. people may lie about their intentions for the indefinite future and you’d be none the wiser; 2. coercive questioning of millions of couples in an effort to determine the truth of their claims takes up resources, may be ineffective for reason 1. – and if the regime were especially draconian – would create a disincentive to get married in the first place, thereby defeating the original policy aim of marriage, in addition to incurring costs.

Let them have a licence ahead of time, so they can start to build an environment for the little tyke, but rescind it if the tyke never shows up. Big deal.

Yeah, easy for you to say. The problem with this is that it creates a pressure on married couples to have children – even if they aren’t ready for them; even if they no longer intend to have children – just so they preserve their marital status. How does this encourage the welfare of the child, implicit in the policy aim of marriage? Indeed, how does it _not_ encourage a palpable harm – that of inducing a decision to have children in onerous circumstances?

You compare forever forbidding some people to marry with temporarily restricting someone (for a couple of years or so) from drinking. Doesn’t something seem just a little amiss there to you?

No, because you’re missing the point of the comparison, which was meant to show that the law in practice has to draw bright if imperfect lines at the least cost by using proxies (age, sex) as indicia for maturity in the one case and propensity to have children in the other. Which is why merely pointing out some counter-examples won’t cut the mustard.

You suggest that lots of people would like to have polygamous marriages. Well, where are all those clamoring for this?

Old School Mormons? Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness? Muslims? – polygamy is after all permitted under Sharia law. Non-religious polyamorists? You forget that a lot of the clamoring for gay marriage is done by people who are NOT gay. Perhaps the notion of polygamy doesn’t quite accord with what liberals intuit as an ‘oppressed class’, hence the comparative lack of clamoring – despite the fact that the usual arguments trotted out for the former may just as well be used to justify the latter.

I doubt there will ever be many takers for this, though: it seems that traditionally, most polygamous marriage have been assertions of power rather that autonomously chosen relations between equals.

Traditionally, so was marriage. And your point is? Neither are there many gays, who like polyamorists, are a relative minority. Again, your point is?

You dream up all sorts of things, like, apparently, some nasty criminal marrying his nasty accomplice so they don’t have to testify against one another. Isn’t this rather fanciful?

Wait – I thought I lacked imagination; now I’m suffering from a surfeit of it.

At any event, argument from incredulity.

In any case, if you are so concerned with rational policy formation and all the costs associated with marriage, why not drop this spousal immunity thing all together? What is its logical relation to child-rearing?

Because the doctrinaire rationale for spousal immunity happens to hold: it fosters trust between husband and wife, thereby contributing, as a general rule, to marital stability. Even if the rationale were unsound, it is still a given, and barring a revision of laws cannot be excluded in the tally of externalities.

In general, where is your analysis that the current bundle of costs and benefits is just as it should be?

In the original thread, and in this one.

Your defense of letting old codgers without any young kids marry seems to be rather weak. You tar gay marriages for not being able to rear children, but then you want to restrict what they are allowed to have, civil unions, so that they cannot adopt. At one point, then, child rearing is a “benefit” when it suits you, but at another point, it is a “cost” you cannot allow civil unions to impose on us.

There is no contradiction, unless you’re being deliberately obtuse. I have addressed this point repeatedly in this as well as the original thread. See my reply to Mr Holbo, particularly the paragraph referencing Posner.

. . . There’s a lot of gap to fill between principle and policy and it can be filled with all sorts of plausible storys by a good story teller, to end up at the policy he likes on other grounds.

And yet you do not provide a plausible alternative story?

Mr Ostrum,

But I am not going to continue trying when, for example, you immediately disparage one of the main benefits of marriage as “facile” . . .

This is manifestly false. I did not “immediately disparage” what you _claim_ – without argument – to be a legitimate policy aim. Indeed, I asked you to specify exactly what policy aim was being served (surely not recognition for recognition’s sake?) in the first instance, and how, ostensibly, it is cost justified especially when there are good substitutes for “recognition” (be they “solemn” – your terminology – i.e., religious or ceremonial marriage; or legal – e.g. civil unions). In the second instance, you merely repeated the demand for recognition – again without argument and without addressing my initial response. It was only then that I remarked that it was facile (having already argued for the position), while providing yet another reason as to why it struck me as so (because polyamorists and many polyamorous men may claim to ‘lack recognition’ too).

Also, you continue to miss the point of the legal drinking age comparison. I think I have given an adequate explanation for why imperfect legal lines are drawn in practice. The specific examples I used and what they prohibit are irrelevant to the argument. The focus on said irrelevancies is just an ignoratio elenchi. I could just as easily have used drink driving laws to make the same point.

Admittedly I was being cheeky about “imagination”, but not so cheeky – because I do think that your impression is mistaken. Essentially, you’re blaming me for not coming up with the counter-arguments _you_ have failed to come up with. If so, then you’re at least as lacking in imagination as I am, innit?

More seriously though, you presume, without cause, that I have not attempted to anticipate – in an imaginative manner – some of the objections to the anti-gay marriage position (when indeed it would benefit any dogmatist to – since he would be all the harder to refute in the event); that my position was arrived at without prolepsis: implicitly, that my position on gay marriage is dogma, and only being justified post hoc.

This is unfair. My previous unthought-out (and complacent) position on the issue was the conventional liberal one. Having encountered some of the more sophisticated arguments against gay marriage, and having been unable to mount a successful counter-argument against these (not for lack of trying), I changed my position; it’s as simple as that.

Of course, it may be that I’m wrong. I was ready to be convinced, _had any of the philosophers/economists/soi-disant intellectuals here bothered to engage Burgess-Jackson seriously instead of merely piling on for a spot of conservative bashing_. (This is not to impugn Mr Holbo – he was being humorous, and humour is always excused – but his commentators were not.) Hence my exasperation. That said, I don’t think there are simple answers as to whether or not we should legalize gay marriage; but on the merits, I am inclined against.

Hmm, looking arond a little, I see that Enthymeme has been using these sophisticated arguments for quite a while. In the exchange here, for example, he criticizes his interlocutors by telling them that “Any debate about according marriage rights to homosexuals would, I take it, be altogether more nuanced [than they are being] about things.”

This is presumably why, a few lines earlier in the very same comment, he gives this highly nuanced claim: “if you have the (legal) right to homosexual marriage, then you have the right to bigamy, to polygamy, to bestiality, to consensual cannibalism, to _anything_”, and also perhaps why he decides to refer to folks who disagree with him as being “fuckwits”, “asswipes”, and “dumbfucks”…