3 ms·

Author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek What justifies the limitation to the binary f

Author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek What justifies the limitation to the binary form of marriage? Why not even a marriage with animals? After all we already know about the finesse of animal emotions. Is to exclude marriage with an animal not a clear case of “speciesism,” an unjust privileging of the human species? This is a question I like to entertain, and was wondering if the HN community had thoughts on the matter. Most argue that romantic/sexual relationships with animals is wrong because: 1. an animal is incapable of consent. 2. even if the relationship was "consensual", there is a power dynamic that the human enjoys over the pet animal that the animal has little control over, so the relationship is still predicated on some kind of exploitation. This suggests that we can only seek ethical relationships with intellectual and equally independent entities. Now replace "animal" with "mentally disabled" or "children". Are they capable of consent? Who are they allowed to have a relationship with? I am not suggesting that children or the mentally disabled are equivalent to animals - I just find the arguments very similar. Edit: it's my life objective to maximize HN karma, so my feelings get hurt when I get downvoted. I'd like to hear why you disagree!

amelius 10y ago
I guess it is a slippery slope. The next target might be children.
duaneb 10y ago
Marriage should be a social declaration of dependency, not anything romantic or sexual. If I want my dog to be able to visit me in the hospital, who are you to judge that? That dog is my pride and joy.
- eximius 10y ago
  That is why I've ways favored the idea of having a secular, legal idea of a civil union that is independent of the baggage associated with 'marriage'. If two people want to have a joint legal status without being in a relationship, is that not a valid desire?
  - duaneb 10y ago
    I can't agree more. There are even camps in the (academic at least) queer community that argued against gay marriage: we should not be opting to include individual minority groups (while excluding others like the poly community, though the benefits and rights with those would be an absolute headache to legislate) in heterosexual norms, but working to remove the recognition heterosexual norms from secular government. Even just renaming it from "marriage" to "civil union" would ameliorate a lot of the tension surrounding it. There's no reason a religious or personal ceremony should be of any interest to the government; it's only the rights and benefits that matter.
sevenless 10y ago
> an animal is incapable of consent. They don't exactly consent to being killed and eaten, either. Looking for consistency in human ethics, particularly sexual ethics, always seemed a bit foolish to me. We didn't develop them with ethical consistency in mind, nor do our basic biological drives care.
- ericjang 10y ago
  Without ethical consistency, of what use are the ethics?
  - sevenless 10y ago
    I'd say that ethics define a local and situational landscape of guidance, rather than global policies. There are cases where our ethical intuition breaks down altogether or gives contradictory answers depending on how you argue, such as the trolley problem, utilitarianism/deontology - and really, many of the great social liberal/conservative arguments are based on different ethical approaches to the same situation. Like the mathematical value of 0/0, it all depends on how you get there. This is to be expected, since after all, we're social animals. Our ethics, such as the sense that murder is generally wrong, evolved and developed over many thousands of years as value systems (via government, law and religion) that preserved cooperative and successful societies. I expect meta-ethics/attempts to codify our ethics, in general, not to succeed, since they never developed as cohesive, all-encompassing systems in the first place. Our society's code of law is as close as we get, and that's a long way off being ethically coherent.

amelius 10y ago

I guess it is a slippery slope. The next target might be children.

duaneb 10y ago

Marriage should be a social declaration of dependency, not anything romantic or sexual. If I want my dog to be able to visit me in the hospital, who are you to judge that? That dog is my pride and joy.

eximius 10y ago
That is why I've ways favored the idea of having a secular, legal idea of a civil union that is independent of the baggage associated with 'marriage'. If two people want to have a joint legal status without being in a relationship, is that not a valid desire?
- duaneb 10y ago
  I can't agree more. There are even camps in the (academic at least) queer community that argued against gay marriage: we should not be opting to include individual minority groups (while excluding others like the poly community, though the benefits and rights with those would be an absolute headache to legislate) in heterosexual norms, but working to remove the recognition heterosexual norms from secular government. Even just renaming it from "marriage" to "civil union" would ameliorate a lot of the tension surrounding it. There's no reason a religious or personal ceremony should be of any interest to the government; it's only the rights and benefits that matter.

sevenless 10y ago

> an animal is incapable of consent. They don't exactly consent to being killed and eaten, either. Looking for consistency in human ethics, particularly sexual ethics, always seemed a bit foolish to me. We didn't develop them with ethical consistency in mind, nor do our basic biological drives care.

ericjang 10y ago
Without ethical consistency, of what use are the ethics?
- sevenless 10y ago
  I'd say that ethics define a local and situational landscape of guidance, rather than global policies. There are cases where our ethical intuition breaks down altogether or gives contradictory answers depending on how you argue, such as the trolley problem, utilitarianism/deontology - and really, many of the great social liberal/conservative arguments are based on different ethical approaches to the same situation. Like the mathematical value of 0/0, it all depends on how you get there. This is to be expected, since after all, we're social animals. Our ethics, such as the sense that murder is generally wrong, evolved and developed over many thousands of years as value systems (via government, law and religion) that preserved cooperative and successful societies. I expect meta-ethics/attempts to codify our ethics, in general, not to succeed, since they never developed as cohesive, all-encompassing systems in the first place. Our society's code of law is as close as we get, and that's a long way off being ethically coherent.