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| The Marriage Commitment—Reply to Landau | |
| Συγγραφέας: Dan Moller Dan Moller: The Marriage Commitment—Reply to Landau (pdf, 6 pages) The Bachelor’s Argument against marriage, as I described it in this journal,1 says  that  marriage  involves  taking  an  imprudent  risk  of finding oneself committed to a relationship with someone one does not love. The evidence indicates that many people who marry eventually  find  themselves  without  the  feelings  for  the  other  person which  made  a  marital  relationship  seem  worthwhile  in  the  first place; and were that to happen to us, it would seem highly undesirable nonetheless to be locked into a relationship with our spouse as a result of the commitment we made when we married. I went on to argue that several obvious responses to this argument fail. In particular,  if we  enter  into  marriage  without  genuinely  intending  to keep our promise of maintaining a relationship with our spouse, we will be making an insincere promise. Alternatively, if our promise is sincere, but the morality of promise-keeping is such that when our feelings  for  the  other  person  fade  away  the  moral  force  of our commitment is cancelled, then the commitment itself seems otiose. However, I did not consider all of the possible responses to the argument, and Iddo Landau has recently made an interesting suggestion about how to interpret the marriage commitment in a way that does not render it immoral or pointless.2 His proposal is that what  we  are  committing  ourselves  to  when  we  marry  is  ‘to  invest work in performing certain acts that are likely to sustain the love’ that underlies our wish to be in the relationship (476). On this view, marriage involves trying to cause ourselves to continue having the emotions  that  make  the  relationship  worthwhile,  and  conversely trying  to  avoid  things  which  would  diminish  or  counteract  those emotions. Although our feelings may not be under our direct control, as Landau points out, ‘there are many acts that indirectly, and with sufficient degree of success, do help to strengthen or weaken, maintain or destroy, love’ (476)... | |
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