From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Mon Nov 08 1999 - 16:15:12 MST
> Overall, I think the scales are clearly tipped against fidelity. It may
> work well for some small fraction of the population, but I expect that a
> large majority of us would be better off with some alternative system.
There's a long list of pros to marital fidelity not mentioned here,
but I agree that moral actions--not values themselves, merely the
actions one takes to support them--have to change with technology,
and the problems that will arise from our failure to structure our
society with that in mind will greatly increase. The destructive
points of marriage are mostly not the institution itself--freely
entered contracts creating mutual obligations for mutual benefit
are the very foundation of civilized behavior--but rather the
cultural and legal baggage that surrounds it.
The primary technological changes that affect the usefulness of
marital fidelity are birth control, medicine, and general economic
growth. Throughout most of human history, children wouldn't eat
unless they had two healthy adults caring and providing for them;
so a mother had a great interest in securing the promise of food
and protection for her children, and fathers had an interest in
ensuring that their investments were actually going into their
own children. Today there is reliable birth control, so purely
recreational sex is possible--which it never was during the time
of our evolution. Secondly, economic growth makes it common for
a child to have more than adequate care from one parent. Today
we know about the evolutionary source of kin-preference and can
overcome it (I would probably care for stepchildren, for example,
rather than killing them as my ancestors would).
I've always though something like Heinlein's "line" marriages
would be better suited to a modern society. Plenty of people
around to pool resources, care for children, and have some
degree of sexual variety while keeping intimacy and maintaining
a history and consistent values.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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