For all our promotion of comprehensive critical thinking and Socratic questioning of the life we are bringing children up to lead, we tend in fact to let reflection loose on small corners of our world, leaving the fundamental structures unexamined and often unnoticed (see my 1982 for similar thoughts in a different context). While our schools may be careful to address the parents and guardians of their students in ways that do not assume a heterosexual nuclear family norm, that is the picture of family life that school textbooks and most lessons that ever mention the family present. The children in our reading books may be of African, Indian or Chinese descent, but they all have a mother and a father on hand, together with siblings, other relatives, and pets. This "natural", taken-for-granted world deserves, if we are serious about critical reflection, to be brought into question (Robertson, 1991, argues that it needs revisiting even in those areas of social science that ostensibly deal with it already).
Illich once told us to deschool society. This paper suggests we ought similarly to disestablish the institution of marriage. If it is not convincing as an argument for such a radical move, it may yet provoke you to a defence of the status quo and that is an equally valuable outcome as far as critical thinking goes. As Mill had it, we only really know what we are committed to when we know how to defuse objections to it.
I was led to my present position by way of reaction to a recent book by Richard Winfield - The Just Family (1998, see Brandon 1999 for brief comments on aspects of the book not touched on here). The fundamental issue, and the one at the heart of this paper, is why we should bestow formal legal status on some relations between persons and not others. (And this helps to justify my invocation of Illich - Illich did not intend to stop people having schools if they wanted them, but only to get the State out of the schooling business and out of underwriting its existence in the various ways it currently does. Of course, he thought that few people would seriously want schools once they had been disestablished since they are notoriously inefficient and unlovely, but the point was not to ban them but to cease to give them legal status and standing.)
One of Winfield's useful contributions is that he makes and adheres to a clear distinction between two relations: marriage and parenting. When we are told by anthropologists that one of the few human universals is the existence of marriage and the family it is worth asking whether they are noting any more than that, up until this generation, the only way humans have had to reproduce is through sexual relations. Sex, parenting, and the characterising of children have therefore been crucial activities in the maintenance of a social formation. But these things can and do go on within and often only loosely affected by structures of relations between particular adults, the kind of relations that Winfield means by marriage.
It is important to keep marriage and parenting separate - there have always been childless marriages, for example - since it is tempting to take them as virtually equivalent. Thus, for instance, Munoz-Dardé, in examining the justice of the family, contrasts it with a generalised well-run orphanage and while she admits that there are a number of possible interpretations of what a family is she takes it as a "small intimate group in which elders are responsible for raising and caring for children" (1998: 39).
When it comes to characterising marriage, Winfield espouses an extreme view that has at least the merit of provoking resistance from hard-nosed empiricists. His view derives from Western legal and religious thinking. As the contributor to Eliade's Encyclopedia of Religion puts it, the Christian marriage ceremony "joins bride and groom into one spirit in union with Christ and God" (Eliade vol. 9, 1986: 218) or as the much more extensive discussion in Hastings' classic Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics has it: Christian marriage is "a perfect union of love and affection, and entire community of aims and interests, as also of worldly possessions, and a perfect mutual understanding" - this much, simple and practical as are its invocations of perfections, is allegedly acceptable to the positivist temper of modern times, but the real thing probably includes more - "a metaphysical basis for the union of aims, affections, and interests", a mystic or psycho-physical bond "uniting the two spirits so as to form a kind of single personality" (Hastings vol. 8, 1915: 434-5). The author suggests that contemporary metaphysicians might have found this acceptable, but I would want to argue that it is both metaphysically and ethically distasteful.
The metaphysical objection is simply the objection to the reification of fictional, "as if" entities such as are offered us by the law and many other systems of thought. It is convenient to tell stories in which schools, cricket clubs, transnational companies, and families are entities on a par with you and me, but it is not actually so. There is an ontological dependence of these institutions on actual individuals, though this is masked to some extent in most cases since the identity of a cricket club does not depend on specific individuals - anyone with sufficient expertise would do. (If we were to dig deeper we might find that we too are more institutional than real - cf. the discussion in Mackie 1977 of how personal identity is a kind of institution, conceived in ways that go beyond what is really there - but this essay is not intended to explore metaphysics as much as social ethics.)
We will turn, then, to developing the ethical objection to Winfield's position.
Winfield emphasizes, first, the merging of hitherto autonomous independent persons into a new unity, and second, the exclusivity of that bond. The first issue is that he takes seriously the idea of something new created by the act of marriage, a collectivity whose interests now override those of its members and which displaces them as ethical and legal centres of responsibility as far as is possible and countenanced by particular legal systems. The second point perhaps follows from the first - if that were fully comprehensible. In any case he sees the exclusivity of marriage as compromised by adulterous liaisons and liable to misunderstanding when people think in terms of extended families, where individuals who are merely and at most biologically related are thought of as sharing in the peculiar relation that founds marriage. For the record, I should mention that Winfield also insists on a moral demand for the full equality of the persons entering into marriage and moreover notes that there is nothing in his account to require them to be two in number, of different sexes or even of the same species. He is certainly not an apologist for "the silent majority".
Winfield gestures at the long and complex history of legislation on marriage in the West. In general he sees it as coming to recognize the irrelevance of many traditional features that degraded it into an asymmetrical gendered power relationship. But he also warns that some developments are striking at what he regards as the core element, the exclusive union of persons in one family, one legal personality. In so doing, they tend to make marriage to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from friendship, informal cohabitation, or other partial forms of association.
On the contrary, I want to suggest that we should welcome these latter developments along with the first. Instead of demanding an almost impossible mutuality of autonomous agents (Winfield himself recognises a danger of spouses micromanaging each other's lives but offers precious little indication of what the marriage of true minds is meant to look like) they begin to recognise the variability in our desires and needs to act co-operatively to achieve both personal and collective ends.
There is a dispute in the interpretation of Dewey on democracy which may be usefully invoked here. Dewey talks of people sharing interests; one school of thought interprets him to mean that everyone must be interested in what interests everyone else and supposes he would have welcomed such a confining narrowness; another school sees him envisaging that A shares an interest with B and C, B shares another interest with C, D, and E, D has a consuming passion in plainsong shared only with F, and so on - an almost endless series of overlapping but by no means universal interests. Winfield's marriage, as I call the perhaps traditional picture, wants married people to fit the first interpretation; an alternative allows that no one will share all my interests and concerns and that our commitments might better reflect the complex pattern of the second interpretation.
It should be clear that my reason for wishing to see the disappearance of marriage is not the typical moral philosopher's. Plato led the way by arguing that the brightest and the best should live communal lives so that they would not get led astray from the pursuit of the true good by the partialities of family concern. It is easy to see that other, Kantian or utilitarian, ways of thinking about the aims of morality can similarly lead one to distrust as partial an institution as the family. But my objection is not grounded in a desire for universality. I have no objection to our self-referential altruism,1 nor any desire to weaken our concern and affection for specific individuals. What we need is not to reject contingent affection in favour of abstracted general commitments but to so structure our socially available categories that they mirror the contingencies better, and also, and for this paper separately, to provide collective solutions to general problems of resource-scarcity and the infliction of harm.
It would seem that a logical development of the trends Winfield pointed to in modern western law would be the disestablishment altogether of marriage, either in a blaze of abolitionist fervour (we abolished slaves, now we will abolish spouses) or with a whimper, as fewer and fewer people bother with an outmoded institutional form and other legal provisions cease to make it salient. Despite its pleasing alliteration, the abolition of slavery is not the best analogy since the force of that was to make the relation impossible and illegal, whereas consenting adults who want to get married à la Winfield should not be prevented from doing so. But they shouldn't find anything in the legal framework of their society that aids and abets them either.
There is another line of argument that could be offered here. One of the less trumpeted achievements of modernity has been the use of the law to give protection to the weak. Laisser faire had children in the mines; the law has given them a measure of protection from such exploitation. It might therefore seem that we should look to an increasing role for the law in matters of the family rather than less. Perhaps, as Winfield fears, this would be one way actually to bring about disestablishment - enshrining single-sex marriage in law and undermining the remaining supports for inequality within families and between other partners might be necessary, society being what it is. But this concession can perhaps be handled in the way Wasserstrom (1980) argued for the rightful place, as a transitional measure, of legislation that focusses on race or gender in our attempt to reach a state of affairs beyond racism or sexism.
To abolish spouses is not to abolish parents. Munoz-Dardé has argued that small scale family type environments are almost certainly to be preferred, on grounds of social justice, to institutional boarding schools of a Platonic type - mainly because of the likely effects of generations of bureaucratic control on everyone's ability to live a rewarding life. One point from Winfield's position we can adopt is the utility of having some public identification of which people have agreed to undertake the upbringing of which children. But simply to be able to identify primary care-givers (for support and possibly arrest, if they renege) we certainly do not need to resurrect anything resembling the exclusive marriage Winfield has described. He himself admits the possibility of one-person parenting, non-biological (non-specific even) parenting, non-cohabiting parenting, and so on. The world can certainly go on without spouses, as the Caribbean has been demonstrating for a good while now.
There is an enormous material gap between the situation of most people and what would be required for my marriage-free alternative life-styles to flourish. As much as Winfield's, my position is practically undermined by the scarcity of decent accommodation, decent income, and so on - the glaring inequalities with which people enter into marriage and its analogues. But let us at least know what we should be aiming at.
Let me conclude by returning to some educational "implications". As noted at the beginning, we have here yet another puzzling absence. In earlier papers I have pointed to the absence of logic from the curriculum, despite all the concern for thinking critically and for acquiring scientific method. My suspicion is that our schooling perpetuates stereotypes of the family and fails to ask the kind of question we have been examining. We certainly do something now to get children not to produce unwanted children of their own, but do we ask them to consider the pros and cons of having wanted children inside or outside of the legal forms of marriage on offer? Or more generally to consider what sort of relationships they should seek with their peers? A recent British author at any rate deplores the absence of "family studies" from academia in the UK and remarks on the prevalence of preaching rather than analysis when family issues do arise (Bernardes, 1997).
A related issue for education concerns the ideology of the family that we offer children in social studies, family life education, and other contexts. What account do we give, either explicitly or implicitly, of what makes a family relationship different from friendship or cohabitation? If anyone is tempted by Winfield's view, or the Christian sacramentalism that foreshadowed it, I would urge them to shift to a different story, one emphasizing the historical transition from gendered oppression to free association, ignoring the metaphysical weirdness of corporate personality, and putting in question the exclusivity inherited from the bad old days.
This term, used first by C.D. Broad, conveniently captures the fact that most of our actual concerns are neither selfishly egoistic nor impartially universal but are strongest for ourselves and those closest to us, and expand and diminish as they proceed outwards. Mackie (op. cit.) has argued that a naturalistic approach to ethics would lead us to expect such a structure of concern and that we ought to pay more heed to it than moralists typically do. {Return to text.}
References
Bernardes, J. Family Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1997. {Return to text.}
Brandon, E.P. Radical Children. Access, 1, 26-32, 1982. {Return to text.}
Brandon, E.P. Review of Winfield: The Just Family, to appear in Philosophy in Review, August 1999. {Return to text.}
Eliade, M. (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1986. {Return to text.}
Hastings, J. (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1915. {Return to text.}
Mackie, J.L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. {Return to text.}
Munoz-Dardé, V. Is the Family to be abolished then? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 72, 37-55, 1998. {Return to text.}
Robertson, A.F. Beyond the Family: The Social Organization of Human Reproduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. {Return to text.}
Wasserstrom, R. A. Philosophy and Social Issues: Five Studies. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. {Return to text.}
Winfield, R. The Just Family. New York: SUNY Press, 1998. {Return to text.}
A revised version of a paper delivered to the fifth biennial conference of the School of Education at St Augustine on April 8th, 1999. This HTML version prepared April 17th, 1999 and most recently revised May 3rd.
URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/disest.html