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Sexual Ontology and Group Marriage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Stephen R. L. Clark
Stephen R. L. Clark
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Extract

Philosophers of earlier ages have usually spent time in considering thenature of marital, and in general familial, duty. Paley devotes an entire book to those ‘relative duties which result from the constitution of the sexes’,1 a book notable on the one hand for its humanity and on the other for Paley‘s strange refusal to acknowledge that the evils for which he condemns any breach of pure monogamy are in large part the result of the fact that such breaches are generally condemned. In a society where an unmarried mother is ruined no decent male should put a woman in such danger: but why precisely should social feeling be so severe? Marriage, the monogamist would say, must be defended at all costs, for it is a centrally important institution of our society. Political community was, in the past, understood as emerging from or imposed upon families, or similar associations. The struggle to establish the state was a struggle against families, clans and clubs; the state, once established, rested upon the social institutions to which it gave legal backing.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 58 , Issue 224 , April 1983 , pp. 215 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1983

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References

1 W. Paley, Works (Edinburgh: Nelson &Brown, 1828), sgff. (Moral and Political Philosophy Book III).

2 Paley, op. cit., 59.

3 Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 103.

4 Paley, op. cit., 65.

5 Augustine, Confessions 8.5; pace T. Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 47, this is not what Paul means in Romans 7.23.

6 SeeE. Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (London: Cape, 1974).

7 See P. Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

8 L. and J. Constantine, Group Marriage (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 28.

9 Paul, I Corinthians 74ff.: any acquaintance with other late Hellenic and early Christian thinkers shows how liberal and level-headed Paul was.

10 Indeed, without at least a strong bond of friendship between the same-sex partners we have only an interlocking series of couples, not a real group.

11 Paley, op. cit., 61.

12 Solemnization of Matrimony: Prayer Book (1928).

13 M. Mead, Growing up in New Guinea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942).

14 J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (trans. H. P. Barnes) (Methuen: London, 1957). 371.

15 Sartre, op. cit, 3i7f.

16 M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith) (London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1962), 167.

17 A doctrine not unrelated to the assumption that non-human animals are all a-social beasts: see ‘Men, Animals and “Animal Behaviour”’ in Ethics and Animals, H. B. Miller and W. H. Williams (eds) (Humana Press, forthcoming).

18 S. Ruddick, ‘On Sexual Morality’, Moral Problem, J. Rachels (ed.), 2nd edn (New York: Harper &Row, 1975), 23.

19 R. D. Laing, The Divided. Self (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965), 86 (originally published in i960).

20 See E.Jong, How to Save Your Own Life (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1977, Panther, 1978), 264. This is not quite the point made by Nagel in his original paper, ‘Sexual Perversion’, Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969), reprinted in Rachels, op. cit., 3-15, that in an orgy there must be a degeneration ‘into mutual epidermal stimulation by participants otherwise isolated from each other’ (omitted in Nagel, op. cit., 39-52)—the participants in an orgy do not feel themselves isolated.

21 C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Bles, 1960), Ch. 3.

22 M. Kelly, ‘Polygamy’, New Universities Quarterly 32 (1978), 454IF.

23 M. Douglas points out that something like this sort of life is enjoyed by pygmies: Natural Symbols (London: Barrie &Rockcliff, 1970), I5ff.

24 R. Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Ktav, 1967).

25 Paul, Ephesians 5.32.

26 See H. Zimmer, Philosophies of India, J. Campbell (ed.) (London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1952), 581ft.

27 Matthew 19.5.

28 See B. Mitchell, Law, Morality and Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 27ff.

29 Constantines, op. cit., 85.

30 See L. Williams, Challenge to Survival (New York: Harper &Row, 1977), also S. R. L. Clark, The Nature of the Beast (Oxford University Press, 1982).

31 A. Jolly, The Evolution of Primate Behaviour (New York: Mason, 1972), 253.

32 See G. Devereux, ‘Greek Pseudo-homosexuality and the Greek Miracle’, Symbolae Osloenses 42 (1967), 69: on the connection between the failure of Greek fathers and the institutionalization of pederasty.

33 Earlier versions of this paper have been read in Lancaster, Edinburgh, Glasgow and an Open University Summer School in York. I am grateful to all my auditors.