seigneur wrote:

But the argument is not that marriage is important because the clan designates it so. The argument is that procreation (a specific biological fact) ensures survival to the clan --> survival is important to the clan (if existence is not important, then what is?) --> the clan institutes marriage as a recognition of the importance. Where is the circularity?

Because the clan is being treated as an actual substance/biological entity which has survival and makes moral decision in the same sense that proper substances do. On this view people end up serving, in fact living and creating more leaving beings for the service of, odd emergent entities.

seigneur wrote:

Importance is neither good or bad. Neither is survival good or bad. It's merely important. If one thinks survival is not important, then isn't it an indication that one has essentially stopped thinking?

Given these correctives, none of the objections in this thread address the matter and no alternative opens up the essence for marriage and none provides a good reason to accept SSM.

How can something be important yet neither good nor bad? Surely something is important precisely because it is either one of those two? Or do you mean that merely treating something as important does not mean it is truly either of those.As for survival: if you refer to one's own survival then yes but the 'survival' in question does not refer to individual survival (the point I keep trying to stress is that we have immortality and some ersatz ‘genetic immortality’ is irrelevant) but the survival of a community, which is not the survival of a being at all but the continued holding together of a group.
 
As for those correctives they make no difference here nor there. I am not saying that means SSM goes through – no one has yet fleshed out a good argument for it and a response to perverted faculty type objections.

Last edited by DanielCC (8/18/2015 6:18 am)

Is procreation not good, in part, because it is our natural end? No doubt there is far more to it than that, but does that not suffice from a natural law perspective?

 

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Is procreation not good, in part, because it is our natural end? No doubt there is far more to it than that, but does that not suffice from a natural law perspective?

Except I've never heard anyone claim that there's a reproductive imparitive, and I think that would follow. A man who doesn't reproduce would be like a man who starves himself or who shuns knowledge or society on that line of reason, I would think: a personally stuntend and self-deforming man.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/18/2015 6:47 am)

DanielCC wrote:

Because the clan is being treated as an actual substance/biological entity which has survival and makes moral decision in the same sense that proper substances do. On this view people end up serving, in fact living and creating more leaving beings for the service of, odd emergent entities.

I'm fine with society being an "odd" emergent entity of some kind. It just doesn't follow that this entity has any of the same imperatives we have, and even if it does, it doesn't follow we have any imperative to help it.

I understand the thinking to go:

1. Society is a subsistant entity emergent from men. (given)
2. Men have an imperative to survive. (given)
3. Society, because emergent from men, has their same imperatives.
4. Society has an imperative to survive.
5. Because it's in some sense composed of and dependent upon men to be, society needs the reproduction of men to survive.
6. Society has an imperative that men reproduce within itself.
∴ Men must reproduce.

Obviously this line of thinking fails at several points. Daniel thinks it fails at 1. I think it fails at 3 (provided that we can give a better account of 1 than I have). But let's say it doesn't, why would we ever suppose that we have to help society? That society has an imperative 'for itself' doesn't mean that we are obliged to help society do anything.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/18/2015 7:15 am)

I don't personally have an implicitly atomist conception. I agree with you about the importance of family and marriage.

However, I think that NL-theory has focused merely on reproduction, and that this focus is inadequate to address the general marital crisis that homosexual marriage is but a symptom of.

I know that it's easy to totally loose where I am, so I'll do another summary:

1. There is, in some respect a general marital crisis: I generally understand this as a loss of understanding about marriage more complex than 'Marry a person for whom you have mutual romantic feelings and wish to cohabit with in a singularly committed way for an indefinite amount of time.' We understand that marriage is, ideally, life long, but we don't really think much more about it, nor do we know how to achieve this, nor do we understand why we should even try.

2. Out of 1 a push for same-sex "marriage" was made sensible to the point that it became politically possible.

3. Most conservatives recognize that 2 is related to 1 in some sense but often seem to think or at least act as if they think that (a) 2 will worsen or even cause 1 and that (b) simply stopping 2 is sufficient to aid/prevent 1.

4. Due to 3 the entire political focus and a great deal of the intellectual focus has been upon 2.

5. Most of the argumentation in 4 has centered around reproduction (NL-thinking on the matter is a paradigmatic case of this) because the most obvious thing about 2 is that reproduction isn't possible.

6. However, 5 is insufficient to defeat 2 practically because it doesn't address 1. The reason this is so is, because of 1, it's not at all clear to a great number of people that marriage is even importantly about reproduction. Marriage seems to be primarily about the maintenance and dignity of mutual romantic feelings over time for most people with children being a secondary goal. If you tell the proponents of 2 that 'marriage is about reproduction' then their thoughts are likely to be something along the lines of either:
(M1) No. You're mistaken. Marriage is about romance and recognition.
(M2) Sure, but then we don't want to marry in that sense. We merely want the dignity that has affixed to the legal institution. We think that the legal institution has that dignity for reasons separate from reproduction (namely the romantic and recognitive aspects of the institution), and we think those are appropriate for homosexuals and are best had by way of equality arguments in the courts that will allow us access to the legal institution.

7. The best way to avoid the moves in 6, ultimately, is to fix the problem in 1. All 5 can ever do (and it has just now failed at it in the US) is legally hold off institutional changes by people who don't really care about reproduction in marriage in the first place. 

Last edited by iwpoe (8/18/2015 8:01 am)