Sure, but at least one partner in the marriage has to request the divorce for sterility to become an issue. There’s no common-law precedent I’m aware of that allows the government to intervene on its own initiative when a marriage has produced no children. The closest I can think of (but can’t immediately cite since I lost the book) is an old Scandinavian practice of “bundling” in which a couple would live together and only formally marry after the woman became pregnant (and thus demonstrated that both partners were fertile). If she didn’t after a reasonable amount of time, the “engagement” was dissolved. Conceivably (heh), local officials might refuse to seal the marriage even if the bundlers claimed “I know we’re not pregnant yet and it’s been two years, but we really, really like each other.” In any case, I’m not aware that this was ever discussed let alone codified in American law.
An interesting argument, given that it seems to me that it requires considerably more creative license to argue that yorick’s remarks about SSM “cheapening” marriage are not homophobic than to conclude that they are.
Actually, the more I think about Bricker’s hypothetical “majority rules” arguer, the more I’m reminded of someone who, when confronted by Fermat’s Last Theorem, declares “I can find an example! 0[sup]3[/sup] + 0[sup]3[/sup] = 0[sup]3[/sup]. Done! Fields Medal, please!”
I must have missed this one before posting my response–but I think it clarifies why I object that your method is not in and of itself even a “reason,” let alone a “reasonable argument” to oppose same-sex marriage.
If the holder of this opinion uses it because he knows others don’t share his approach–because they are swayed by other arguments, it just makes it clearer that what it is really doing is just adopting those arguments.
And if that is true, then this method is only reasonable if those you look to reach their conclusion through reasonable arguments–which means it does no work towards the conclusion that reasonable arguments are used, but just shifts the person whose arguments must be reasonable.
To put it another way–this argument has two implicit premises: (1) that others are in fact using other methods to reach their conclusions, and (2) that its holder believes those he looks to to be using reasonable arguments to reach their conclusion.
(1) really supports the argument that all this “reason” is doing is adopting the reasoning some other person or group is using–I think it stands for that on its face.
(2), however, is where the real work is done.
Without such an implicit premise, your method is no better than looking to a coin toss-it is simply a method of selecting an option, not a justification for selecting that option. It does not care about the merits of the position selected–it doesn’t even review them.
As I pointed out in my other post, if we don’t assume a premise that the person holding your opinion believes that those he looks to hold reasonable opinions, your method also risks requiring our opponent to decide in a way that is directly contrary to evidence he knows of (if the majority so opines), which I would argue is unreasonable on its face, or to avoid that risk by remaining willfully ignorant. Similarly, any method that requires willful ignorance can’t be reasonable.
On the other hand, if, as you posit in the post I quote here, there is an implicit premise that the “majority” you look to uses reasonable reasons, then as I say at the start of this post, your method is reasonable if and only if that premise is true.
The argument is hence reasonable if and only if the arguments against same-sex marriage held by those you look to are reasonable. And from that conclusion, I think it is obvious that this argument does nothing to inform us as to whether they are in fact reasonable. It just changes whose arguments we have to evaluate for reasonableness.
Further, as I have already pointed out, it is simply a fact that the majority often, or at least sometimes, does accept unreasonable arguments or wrong conclusions–so if your method is followed strictly, it is unreasonable, as it would compel a decision in favor of an unreasonable argument or wrong conclusion in some circumstances.
Further, the fact that the majority does sometimes, objectively, get it wrong, or use unreasonable arguments, suggests that there is no logical guarantee or reasoned argument that it is inevitable that those this argument looks to are deciding using reasonable methods. Absent that, your argument is reasonable or unreasonable if the reasons it looks to are reasonable or unreasonable–which is where we started, and is the question your argument purports to solve. I contend it does not.
Is it just me or have we just all essentially made the same argument about six times?
But hey! Majority rules! 
As an alternative to using majority rule as a reason, I can imagine a voter who, once in the booth, selects his favoured candidates but when it comes to the various bundled propositions (some of which might involve SSM, but most relating to other issues) just randomly pushes the buttons or flips the switches or whatever, believing it is best to let the whims of fate make the decisions.
Adding to whorfin’s observations, in addition the majority sometimes getting it wrong, how does a “majority rules” voter even know what the majority actually wants? He’ll have to rely on polls (which might be wrong) or the best guesses of political analysts (who might be wrong) or more simply he could just decline to vote at all and let the majority sort it out.
Heh, arguably that’s what every voter does, since the chances of one’s individual vote affecting the outcome are effectively nil. Just by participating (or staying out and not participating) in the process, you implicitly accept majority rule.
Fortunately, issues like this are not generally subjected to majority rule votes but decided in the relatively sober analysis of the appeals process and the constitutional amendment process, though that’s not relevant to this particular hypothetical voter.
Sure, a coin-flip is clearly arbitrary. But there are a host of issue to confront a voter today. A reasonable voter could say, for example, “I don’t know enough about greenhouse gases and anthropomorphic global warming to have an opinion on what our national policy should be, but I will go along with the majority vote, whatever it is.”
Why can’t a reasonable voter do the same thing here? In fact, why can’t a reasonable voter say, “The purpose of government is to ensure the greatest contentment for the greatest number of citizens. Legal SSM would make many people unhappy, more so than would be made happy by it. So until it seems a majority would be made happy, we shouldn’t do it.”
My response is this: how is that different from just not voting? It seems to me to have exactly the same effect, for exactly the same reason–it lets a majority of those who hold an opinion on the issue decide the rule for everyone.
And I think it’s clear that not voting isn’t a “reason”–I don’t have a problem with it as a position, but it’s not a “reason”–it is letting someone else make the decision, based on their reasons.
What if (hypothetically) the majority are homophobes, and are unhappy for entirely unreasonable reasons? Is the voter’s stance still reasonable?
I think a voter can certainly decide to let others decide–but at best, the voter then holds no reason at all, and I would argue it instead is the voter adopting the reasons held by others—whether reasonable or not. So I continue to argue the voter is reasonable only if those he lets make the decision are basing it in reasonable arguments.
I think that what bricker has been saying is tbat it is possible to advance a rational argument, i.e., one founded in reason rather than emotion, for opposing SSM. Examples might be: a court is bound to follow precedent, which so far does not recognize SSM; the extension of marriage rights to SSM is something to be decided by majority voite, by the people in referendum or by their elected representatives.
Whether these rational arguments are compelling, or even valid, is a separate question. The point is that they’re not founded in an emotional reaction to homosexuality but in rational thought, or at least in rationalization.
I happen to disagree with Bricker on the relevance of precedent or the right of the majority to legislate on a question that involves equal protection of a fundamental right. But even so, I can see his point: there are reason-based arguments which can be advanced and debated.
Considering the extremely low bar associated with this task, I would suggest that this is all I need.
Of course. I pointed this out myself above. But how is that relevant to this issue of reasonableness?
Not at all. This assumes that if one choice is reasonable, others are not, and excludes the possibility that many different choices are reasonable. It’s reasonable to choose a Honda, and it’s even reasonable to choose a Honda because that’s the best-selling car manufactorer. But that doesn’t make my neighbor’s choice of a Toyota unreasonable.
True again. But who cares? I wasn’t asked to posit a reason for the majority opposing it. I’m quite confident that the majority opposes it for unreasonable motives. But the chorus of voices here had to go further – to insist that there was no possible reasonable motive for any person to oppose SSM.
I absolutely agree that the majority cannot claim this is their reasonable motive for opposition.
Why? It builds upon the fact that we decide many things by popular vote in this country. If our hypothetical voter has not devoted the time, effort, or energy to examine the arguments for this issue, he may well decide to follow the majority, not knowing what their particular reasons are. And of course the majority may be guided by many different reasons. He simply holds that as long as the majority holds the view, he will support it.
Sure. But evolution is a question of fact. This is a question of policy. Our voter is not denying an established fact; he’s saying that the government shouldn’t override the will of the majority on a matter of policy.
But again, that’s not what my method is being used for. A better question might be: should we teach creationism? Here, my hypothetical voter might agree with the majority and say ‘yes.’ Significantly, he’s not taking a position on whether evolution is true or not, merely what we should teach. And he has a reasonable position in support of it: the fact the majority wants to.
“Rational thought” and even “rationalization” are *processes *of arguments, NOT foundations of them. To find the foundations when the person advancing the argument refuses to say what they are, you have to work back through those processes.
And that’s when you fail to find a broader moral code, or a religious doctrine, or the Constitution, or anything else whose broader principles dictate discrimination. *Only *“an emotional reaction to homosexuality”. Only that.
So what else can a “rational” person conclude?
First off a person who has no opinion on a subject is not opposed to that subject. They are not for it either. As such you cannot say they are opposed to SSM. They are for it if a majority are for it, against it if a majority are against it. But really what that person is on about is the means and not the end. They have no opinion on the end result. As such that is not a rational reason against SSM because it has nothing to do with SSM. It has to do with the method we use to effect policy change in the US and a tacit acceptance that majority rule produces the most desirable results.
Further, depends how you look at the polls on SSM. A majority opposes same-sex marriages. However, a majority favors same-sex couples having the same rights as married couples. A distinct minority favors no rights for same-sex couples (cite). That brings us back to the focus on the word “marriage” as being an odd sticking point.
So, our hypothetical person has to make a decision. If the best choice is what the majority wants how does this person decide what the majority wants? What if the majority is making a distinction without a difference (i.e. civil union versus marriage where everything is the same but the word)?
I can certainly understand opting out of an issue in which one lacks understanding or interest, and I gather that qualifies as “reasoned disinterest” (which has a formal name that escapes me at the moment), and yes, it’s a perfectly valid way to save one’s personal time by not delving into things that one doesn’t actually care about.
Unless the voter has his own polling system, how is he measuring (let alone defining) happiness? In practice, doesn’t this require guesswork or some appeal to authority where he takes the word of someone who claims unhappiness will increase?
In any case, I’ll concede this hypothetical:
A voter takes an estimate (unbiased to the best of his ability) of the net amount of happiness and unhappiness in a society where SSM is currently illegal, and concludes the following:
Anti-SSM people - satisfied that SSM is illegal, would be unhappy if it were made legal.
Pro-SSM people - unhappy that SSM is illegal, would be satisfied if it were made legal.
Most people - generally satisfied on most issues, of which SSM is just one that happens to be getting a lot of press lately.
If only short-term unhappiness is considered important (i.e. it doesn’t matter if the anti-SSM side will mostly “get over it” five years after legalization, and it doesn’t matter if the pro-SSM will still be unhappy five years from now if SSM is not legalized), the voter can reason that voting for SSM will increase unhappiness in the short term and thus SSM should be avoided. It’s not a line of reasoning I can endorse or support, but I wouldn’t automatically assume someone who had such views was homophobic per se. Just spineless and cowardly.
Since in the above example SSM could be replaced by just about any issue, the word “homophobic” can also be replaced accordingly. The spinelessness, though, remains in play.
Of course, this is all hypothetical, postulating some voter who is not completely indifferent (and thus wouldn’t bother to vote on the issue at all) and yet can act without bias. I don’t know how many, if any, Maine voters actually went through this process when making their decision.
I’m not sure I fully understand this. Is it being suggested that it is reasonable to oppose gay marriage because the majority opposes it? That’s not reasonable at all - it totally fails to take into account the relative merits of the two positions.
At best Bricker’s odd argument is a rational reason to oppose SSM at a particular time in a particular society, which is very different from opposing SSM overall.
Here’s a totally rational reason for opposing SSM at a particular time in a particular society: my state has a referendum and the two people I hate more than any others in the entire world, my biggest enemies, are a same sex couple who want to get married, so I vote against SSM in our state at this time purely out of spite. That’s rational and not homophobic (assume I hate these people for reasons unrelated to their orientation), but it’s not really “opposing SSM” in any meaningful fashion.
Here’s an even better example: there’s a ballot proposition that would both legalize SSM and also cause puppies to be tortured to death. So I vote against it. At that point I had a rational reason to vote against SSM, in that particular time and place, but did not have a rational reason to oppose SSM in general. Bricker’s hypothetical is no different than that.
Well, one assumes the hypothetical voter will support gay marriage the instant the majority does. According to raindog, at that point he goes from being called a homophobe to being called a decent human being because pro-SSM types are hypocritical or something.
I would disagree.
I would argue the categorical imperative is actually a pretty good test of reasonableness. If you’re using a method which is only reasonable because other people aren’t using it, that seems to me questionable.
You weren’t asked to posit a reason for the majority opposing it because your reason wasn’t “the same reason the majority uses.” Now that you are justifying your position through the majority holding that position, I don’t see how you can justify not looking to whether the majority is justified or unjustified in holding the position that they do.
To put it another way–if you had said “because my priest opposes it,” that would bring into play the reason your priest opposes it. Or if that is different, why?
Again, this can be framed in two different ways:
(1)in effect not voting. This does not adopt the majority’s reasoning, just acquiesces in their decision. And it would be reasonable to do so–but as I, and others have noted, it seems incoherent to call this “opposing” same-sex marriage. It’s just not taking part in the decision.
(2) you are supporting–i.e. actively adopting the majority’s view. Again, this goes back to the example I offered above–if you say “I’m taking the view my priest advocates,” the natural question is “what is his view? Is it reasonable?.”
I don’t see how you can cleanse an unreasonable argument by saying “it’s unreasonable for A to accept this argument, but it is quite reasonable for me to take the position that I agree with A.”—whether it is reasonable to agree with A, and to adopt A’s position (or the position of a herd of A’s) is inherently determined by what A’s position is -i.e. whether it is reasonable or not.
If not, then you could know the majority is opposing same-sex marriage due to the threat of raptor attacks, and still be reasonable to adopt their view.
Further, you’ve just conceded that
If this is so, and you know it to be so, how can it possibly be reasonable to adopt their position?
This is why the distinction between “acquiescing” and “adopting” is so crucial. The first is reasonable, but isn’t opposition, and the second is only reasonable if the argument adopted is reasonable.
Two points: First, I wanted to offer a reductio ad absurdum. Your “argument” would compel an individual to support a position even if he knew it was factually wrong, or unreasonable. If that is true, I would contend that the “argument” is unreasonable.
If, on the other hand, you say there is some inquiry into whether the position held by the majority is reasonable or not, and only adopting it if it is reasonable. I wouldn’t have a problem with the argument–I concede that it would be reasonable if and only if the argument used by the majority is reasonable. That is definitional–it is reasonable to adopt a reasonable argument.
However, then you are in, for all intents and purposes, the same place we were at the start of this debate–needing to posit a reasonable reason for the majority to oppose same-sex marriage (which, as you concede, cannot be the argument we are now discussing). And that conclusion means that this argument does nothing to answer the question on the table–it just allows us to shift the analysis from the argument used by our voter, to the argument used by the person or persons who our voter is following.
Secondly, same-sex marriage is a policy issue, but the arguments for and against it are not abstract. They are based in facts, in premises about facts or society, in things that are both determinable and deterimate. Things that can be right or wrong. For example, if same-sex marriage does or does not cause raptor attacks.
Similarly, a policy can be supported through reasonable or unreasonable arguments.
If I understand you correctly, you are telling me that someone would be perfectly reasonable to vote “yes” on a policy proposal because the majority supported it, even when he knows that the majority reached their decision using unreasonable arguments, based in untrue premises? That seems unjustifiable. Or, if not, what am I missing?
Let’s use that hypothetical. Let’s say you actually know that the creationism textbook misrepresents the scientific evidence. Further, you know for a fact that there is no empirical support for creationism. You seem to be arguing it would still be reasonable to vote in favor of teaching creationism. I think this is just absurd.
Now it would be quite reasonable to choose not to take a position–to not vote. But in that case, you are neither supporting nor opposing teaching creationism–you are simply acquiescing in the result. That is very different from voting “yes.”
So to summarize: I see your argument as one of two things:
(1) It is equivalent to not voting. If so, it is a quite reasonable justification for choosing not to vote (in fact, I wish more people chose not to vote on issues they don’t know about, or don’t have any reasoned reason to support either side). However, you have a long way to go to convince me that it is opposition to same-sex marriage. I contend it isn’t, by definition—instead, it is not participating in the decision, or taking a position either way.
(2) it is equivalent to adopting the reasons of the majority.
If so, this argument is reasonable if and only if the reasons used by the majority are reasonable. After all, you’re adopting them–that is, after all, what adoption of an argument is. And that does nothing to show reasonable arguments exist–it just says “if reasonable arguments exist, it is reasonable to agree with those presenting those arguments.”
Further, if it advocates adopting the reasons of the majority without evaluating them, I contend it is no better than adopting the result of a coin toss–since I could posit any reason whatsoever for the majority’s position, reasonable, unreasonable, or advocated by Glenn Beck, and your argument would still require I adopt it. And an argument that requires you to adopt, accept, or endorse an unreasonable argument, based on false premises, is, I would argue, inherently unreasonable.
Well, looks like we’re just playing the definition game on this one, only on this issue it’s “reasonable” and not (as would be the case in an abortion thread) “person.”
It’s clear to me that you have a different view of what constitutes a reasonable argument. Like the mathematicians Feynman spoke of, your reasonable argument must apparently survive a penetrating analysis.
I say it’s reasonable for the person holding this “majority rules” perspective to simply not have analyzed it the way you have.
This is why I brought up global warming. You are imposing on the voter the requirement that he walk through an analysis similar to what you’ve done. If he says, “I think the majority position should guide us,” and stops his analysis there, then he’s unreasonable?
I would venture this view: if your definition of “unreasonable” starts to include a large majority of the sample set, then it might be time to revise that definition. And I would suggest that on most subjects, most voters devote an equal measure of analysis to their positions.
Or it might not. A large majority of the population has religious views, but using this to define religion as reasonable (that is to say, reached through reason) wouldn’t follow.
That’s the assumption of democracy, but it’s not a given.