"Marriage Is Whatever We Say It Is"
And: Bonus "Social Construct" Alert

(Sorry, but this has to be fast...I've got a lecture to write on auxiliary hypotheses...)

This ("marriage is whatever we say it is) gets said a lot on the left, and it is false.

Marriage is not whatever we say it is any more than trees are whatever we say they are. We cannot, for example, say that marriage is the number three, nor that marriage is the identity relation, nor that marriage is the left half of my computer, nor that marriage is the relation that obtains between people's feet and their ears, nor that marriage is a relation that every person bears only to himself, nor that marriage is a relation that obtains always and only between people who have never met each other, nor that marriage is exactly and only the relation that every grandfather bears to his grandson, nor any other such absurd thing.

The concept of marriage is a concept which--for all its fuzziness, is determinate enough to rule out certain possibilities. Good thing, too, or it wouldn't be a real concept.

Marriage pretty much has to be a relation among persons, though some extremely silly people apparently like to pretend that their pets can be married. We can sort of understand what they mean by something like analogy, though it's a bit of a stretch. Marriage also has to be a relation among at least two persons--it's not a relation you can bear to yourself (though, again, we might be able to have some vague idea what someone might mean if he said he was married to himself). And it's got to have something to do with sex or children or mutual ownership of property or at least some features of paradigm examples of marriage. We more-or-less understand what's meant if we're told that king A and queen B are married in order to join their kingdoms; we can sort of understand this even if we're told that they'll never have sex, don't like each other, only met once for five minutes and so forth.

Consider, for example, a case in which an anthropologist tells us that marriage in tribe T is a relationship that obtains only between every grandfather and his grandson. "Uh, do they have sex?" we ask, shuddering at the thought. No, the anthropologist says. "Do they own property in common? Raise kids? Have some weird sexual exclusivity agreement despite not having sex with each other? Have some ceremony, certificate, something???" Suppose: no, no, no, no.

What you have here is a confused anthropologist, one who's probably just mis-translated the T term for marriage. But you do not have an astonishingly new and different concept of marriage.

The point is not, of course, that conceptions of marriage can't differ, for, of course, they can. The point is that they can only differ so much, and that not just anything can be called a marriage. Even vague concepts have limits beyond which you cannot go. Deviate too far from exemplary cases and what you've got is a different kind of thing entirely. In this case: a non-marriage, whatever else it might be.

One of the things that leads folks like Anonymous Liberal down the wrong path here is probably the disastrous phrase "social construct." Sorting out the layers of extreme confusion associated with that phrase would take a book. Here's a bit of advice: dump it and never look back. It never does anyone any good.*

Liberals like Anonymous Liberal are (or ought to be) reacting largely to the right's Marriage Definition Claim (MDC for short) that "same-sex marriage" is a contradiction in terms; i.e. that marriage is by definition a relation between one man and one woman. The MDC is false--but not because marriage is whatever we say it is. We can easily see that MDC is false, because we readily understand what people mean when they say "we ought to have same-sex marriage" or "some cultures have polygamous marriage." If MDC were true, then these claims would be incomprehensible to us, strike us as nonsense. They'd be like "I have found a square triangle" or "marriage is my toaster." But the right knows damn good and well what it means to say e.g. that two men are married. They understand what that means, and they're against it. It's not gibberish, not contradictory. So, though same-sex marriage might be wrong, it's certainly not a contradiction in terms.

So to review: though marriage isn't by definition a relation between "one man and one woman," neither is it anything we say it is. There are fairly wide, fairly vague boundaries that relations have to fall into in order to be marriage relations. (E.g.: whatever else marriage is, it at least involves persons.)

When the right's MDC fails, they like to fall back on a weaker claim: o.k., so it's not a matter of definition...well then, it's a matter of nature: one-man one-woman marriage is natural. But it isn't. It's largely conventional. Perhaps this is what leads folks like Anonymous Liberal to claim:

The idea that there is some sort of platonic essence to marriage is just rubbish. Marriage was created by human beings and human beings can choose how they want to define it.

Marriage is a legal institution grounded in a set of natural facts: humans have children and need to raise them, humans tend to be largely heterosexual, resources are scarce (so raising children isn't free), and so forth. Though marriage itself isn't natural, it's an institution with a history grounded in natural facts. The right--as usual--exaggerates the role of nature, and the left--as usual--exaggerates the role of convention. This happens almost every time these two groups discuss anything with each other. But the more important point here is: even if marriage were entirely conventional, that wouldn't mean that there were no limits to what could be a marriage. Unless you're willing to say that marriage can be my left shoe, or the number three, or Napolean's dying thought, you don't want to say that we can define marriage however we want. It at least has to be a relation--it can't be a physical object or a number. More importantly: only some kinds of relations are candidates.

To summarize by addressing the Anonymous Liberal quote (inset above) directly: although marriage is a vague concept that admits of many variations (e.g. same-sex and polygamous marriage), it is not a concept with no boundaries whatsoever. A concept with no boundaries is not a concept. With all due respect, you misunderstand Plato and misunderstand the problem with the right's MDC. As Plato might (but only might in this case) tell us, for marriage to be something at all, there has to be something in virtue of which it is what it is. This does not mean that marriage is natural, nor does it rule out the possibility of differing conceptions, nor of vague boundaries. Rather, it just reminds us that, if we're really talking about something rather than nothing, if we're not just talking past each other, if we're not just using a term that is meaningless, there are limits to what it makes sense to say.

(Sorry--fast and sloppy...but gotta split!)


* Quick footnote on "social construct" "social construction," etc. Almost every use of such terms is hopelessly confused. But ignore all that and pick out the case that makes the most sense: people sometimes say that money is a "social construct." What they ought to say is that an economy is a social institution, and that, e.g., what we choose to use for money is largely (though not entirely) arbitrary. But even in this case, it's false to say that money is whatever we say it is. To be money, something has to be used like money. If something is never used in any way that resembles currency, then it isn't money. You could call it money if you wanted to...but, of course, saying so doesn't make it so. People make this mistake all the time in such discussion...in the end, to the extent that they mean anything at all, what they seem to mean is something close to: we could use the word 'marriage' to mean anything we wanted. That is true but irrelevant. Of course we could use whatever sound we wanted to mean whatever thing we wanted, and we could use the morpheme marriage to mean dog if we so chose. But everybody, even the most conservative among us, must admit that. If all the claim comes to is that we can use words however we want, then the thesis is truely vaccuous and trivial.