Should polygamy be legal?
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Polygamy is the practice of marrying multiple spouses. Worldwide, different societies variously encourage, accept or outlaw polygamy. So is it unethical? Should it be legal?
Polygamy should be legal
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Pro Everyone should be free to do anything that doesn't harm others. If it is a free choice between the parties involved, marrying multiple people doesn't harm others and should be allowed.- Pro Exclusivity in marriage fundamentally derives from marriage's origins as a system of property ownership, whereby one member of the relationship - the wife - is effectively owned by another - the husband - and this is a binding legal agreement specifically between two parties. This is no longer the context that marriage exists in, despite the many unfortunate hold-overs from its status as an institution of control, and thus it no longer makes sense to retain the peculiarities and particularities of contract law when it comes to such relationships.
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Con When polygamy is allowed, polygyny (one man, many women) becomes more common than polyandry (one woman, many men), so in practice a polygamous society leads to a polygynous society, which violates the dignity of women.
Objection Polyandry could also violate the dignity of women through the mechanism of spousal abuse. Monogamy has been shown to violate the dignity of women in some circumstances too. Therefore, this is an argument against certain kinds of cultures, independent of the parity of unions, not against polygamy in the most general sense.
- Con Polygamy leads to some people having no spouses because some have more than one, which generates resentment and destabilizes society.
- Objection Nobody has the inherent right to a spouse, and if they are upset by someone having multiple spouses, then they could always simply ask to join as yet another spouse in that group. The only reason that someone would reasonably be left alone if relationships could exist in any size and shape, is if they were simply not pleasant to be in a relationship with or if they did not want to be in a relationship with anyone else, for whatever reason, and monogamy doesn't fix that.
- Objection There's also some people with a lot of money and others with none, which generates resentment and destabilizes society, but (in liberal economies) we don't forbid people from having a lot of money just because other people can't handle it.
- Objection There are proposals to do just that, some implemented, so it is an inapt analogy.
- Objection In monogamous society there are also people with only one spouse while others without, and that doesn't cause particular resentment or social instability.
- Con Polygamy implies that each spouse gets only a fraction of the time, attention, resources and love of their partner.
- Objection You're thinking in the vein of "their partner", whereas one in a relationship with many different partners would rather have more time with their partners overall, albeit likely less one-on-one time with each individual partner; still, each member of the relationship will overall get more attention, resources, and affection, since any given member of the collective might, say, need to go to work, but another might stay behind.
- Objection This is true for all relationships. People have multiple family members, multiple friends, coworkers, etc. that they split time with. In these cases, having more members within a group is typically seen as a positive because it creates diversity.
- Con If a person can marry as many people as they like this will render marriage meaningless. Every adult person could in theory be married to every other adult person infinitely.
- Objection Marriage is already meaningless except as it exists in the context of an agreement between two different people. If every single adult person in the world agreed to be married to every other adult person in the world - which is sadly impossible, as I do not agree to be married with Phil Swift, inventor of Flex Tape - but if we imagine this were the case, then it would surely be a momentous and incredible occasion for humanity as a whole, not some meaningless and drab affair.
- Objection A person can engage in sexual relationships with as many people as they like, but not everyone is constantly having sex with everyone else.
