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E-PrinceThe most striking feature of contemporary philosophy of the sort practiced here at Princeton is an intense concern — some would say a fetishistic concern — for verbal precision. From the outside, the results can seem sterile and scholastic. Occasionally, however, we ...(back to the article)
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Oddly enough, feminists profess ignorance about how gay marriage can possibly be detrimental to marriage as practiced today. "How," they ask, "will letting more people get married weaken marriage?" The answer, of course, is that it will weaken marriage by removing the particulars that make marriage marriage.
If I were to insist that Rush Limbaugh's (or Randall Terry's) ideas were to be labelled "feminist" or that Jesse Helms be placed in the camp of the "anti-racists," the leftists would have a field day. Obviously in that case they can see why increasing their nominal number weakens, and not strengthens, them. But in the end they do not care about marriage, or see it as a mere legal contract no different than, say a business partnership, so the idea that the same principle applies is completely foreign to them. In the extreme case of feminists, many see the traditional monogamous union as a sinister arm of a pervasive patriarchal social system that seeks to subjugate women. They would be delighted to see traditional marriage fall by the wayside.
How about this for serious discussion:
The State should not be involved in issuing marriage licenses at all; how dare it meddle in voluntary associations and contracts. Both sides of this argument are wrong: one side wants the State to deny rights, the other to grant rights. Neither side realizes that the State has no such authority, and rights belong only to individuals.
The ACLU drones, for example, want the State to have more authority and give out more benefits (which is money stolen through taxation).
Slightly edited copy of a reply that I've sent to Prof. Rosen:
Of course, "meaning" can refer to the sense (Fregean Sinn) that a term has in a language. That kind of meaning is a matter of linguistic convention and virtually irrelevant to the common good. But surely conservatives about marriage are using "meaning" (and correspondingly, "redefinition") differently. They think that granting legal recognition to same-sex unions would change the legal (and therefore probably social) understanding of a certain moral reality--its proper structure, distinctive features and perhaps even distinctive value. By "moral reality" I mean what obtains between, for example, the maker and beneficiary of an ordinary promise, or two friends: a set of moral privileges and obligations (whose content, scope, force, dissolubility, etc. will naturally vary across moral realities).
So Prof. Rosen is right that in the latter sense of "meaning," extending the right to vote did not change the "meaning" of voting: from the fact that it's now available also to African Americans, nothing changes in the legal or social understanding of the nature of voting. People can still see that it is a condition and sign of inclusion in the political community, ideally involves considering the candidates' relevant merits, etc.
You can imagine the same being true of some changes in marriage law. Say that country X legally recognizes as a marriage the union of any man to any woman, unless either party has freckles; X will not recognize as a marriage any union that includes a freckled person. If X removed that restriction, marriage would retain its legal meaning, only the pool of people eligible to marry legally in X would expand.
Now imagine that X further reformed its laws to allow marriage between any person and an inanimate object (to take a silly/innocuous example and thus avoid seeming inadvertently to make offensive moral equivalences!). The set of people eligible to marry legally in X would remain exactly constant, but it's very plausible to think that the legal (and therefore probably social) meaning of marriage would change. Marriage would no longer be understood as necessarily interpersonal, so it wouldn't be understood to include ideally a harmony of minds, hearts, and wills. Lots more (obviously) would change.
Rightly or not, conservatives are claiming that the proposed change is similar in form to the second example. Strictly speaking, the pool of people whose unions would upon request be legally recognized would remain exactly constant. (I am not claiming that gay people should marry members of the opposite sex--just that their orientation as such isn't relevant to the state, which singles out kinds of union, not individuals.) What would change, though, is the meaning of marriage: perhaps that it wouldn't ideally include an organic union of bodies (understood such that only by becoming the co-subjects of a single bodily function counts as realizing an organic union), that it would no longer have the resulting principled or ideal link to procreation, that it would no longer ideally exemplify any other norms that depend on that link to procreation (as some think that permanence or exclusivity does), etc.
You may dispute conservatives' substantive claims. You may even think that they're inconsistent (e.g., in allowing legal recognition of sterile couples). But surely you can grant that those claims are intelligible?
lots of words have changed meaning:
war is peace
socialist is liberal
theft is taxation
Addendum: if I'm right about the relevant sense of "meaning" here, then conservatives could find no pithier way to put their argument; for changing the meaning of marriage (in that sense) is exactly what conservatives say they fear will happen, to the detriment of the common good ("weaken the institution" and all that).
Many thanks to Serif for his thoughtful comment. In my column, I offer a dilemma for those who wish to retain the rhetoric of redefinition in the debate over SSM: Their claim is either that a move to legalize SSM would change the meaning of the word “marriage”, in which case it is both irrelevant and probably false, or that such move would lead to a change in the meaning of marriage itself, in which case the charge is obscure. Sherif responds by seeking to explain the sense in which this legal change might amount to a change in the meaning of marriage itself.
His argument runs as follows. Suppose that Minnesota agreed to extend the right of marriage to inanimate objects. Even I must agree that that would amount to a change in the meaning of marriage. Marriage would no longer be “understood as necessarily interpersonal”; it would no longer be “understood to include an ideal harmony of minds, hearts and wills”, and so on. Conservatives who oppose SSM believe that a move to SSM would entail a similar change in the meaning of marriage: marriage would no longer be understood to have “a principled or ideal link to procreation”, it would no longer include “an organic union of bodies”, etc. I may deny that these changes would occur, or that they would amount to a change in the meaning of marriage. But I should not pretend to find the claim that they would amount to such a change “unintelligible”.
I do not deny that a change in the law might lead to a change in people’s “understanding” of marriage, if by this we simply mean people’s views about what a good marriage involves, and their beliefs about why marriage is important. If this is the sort of “change in meaning” that is at issue, we can drop all talk of meaning and frame the objection to SSM as follows: We should prohibit SSM because allowing it might change people’s opinions about what a good marriage involves, or about why marriage is important. … But when it is put in this way, the argument has no rhetorical (or other) force. It gains apparent force only when one adds: “And this would be a change in the meaning of marriage.” My point is that this further claim is deeply obscure. We have no idea which changes in the “social understanding” of an institution like marriage amount to a change in the meaning of that institution, and which amount to mere changes in our views about that institution. And if we don’t understand this distinction, we should drop all talk of “meaning” in this context.
Gideon Rosen is awesome! That is all.
Thanks, Prof. Rosen, for your clarification. Two more thoughts on this.
(1) I don't think it's unnatural, obscure, or misleading to use "the meaning of social institution X" as felicitous shorthand for "people's prevailing expectations and understandings about social institution X." To take another wildly unrelated but structurally parallel example, when the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Yassir Arafat (or more recently to a certain wartime President), it was perfectly natural for people to think, accurately or not, that "the Nobel Peace Prize will never again mean what it used to mean." For people's expectations or understandings of the ideal Nobel Peace laureate to change just IS for the "meaning" of the Nobel Peace Prize to change. Without much strain, the same could be said of another honorific--the legal recognition of some union as a marriage.
(2) So understood, the conservative talking-point (if true) does indeed have force for anyone who thinks that
(a) it is good for marital norms (permanence, exclusivity, a certain kind of connection to children, etc.) to be followed and for certain features of marriage (sexual complementarity, organic bodily union) to be celebrated;
(b) it is bad for those marital norms to be flouted or for those features to be relativized; and
(c) these dimensions of marriage are so connected that socially relativizing the features of marriage (i.e., changing its "meaning") would tend to undermine people's understanding of the point of its norms and, thus, their *adherence* to them.
Again, I think this is what is meant by the charge that legally redefining marriage will "weaken the institution of marriage;" this also explains why people who predict that effect honestly consider it deleterious to the common good--a strike against such a move.
So it still seems to me that the talk of "redefinition," justified or not, is both (1) intelligible and (2) relevant.
Sherif has pretty much nailed it.
Lively debate! Thanks to both of you for making the comments section what it should be - a place for lively and reasoned debate.