This week, we discussed Lukeprog's article "Pluralistic Moral Reductionism" - which is philosophical fancy-talk for the understanding that when people talk about moral concepts like "good" or "right" they define those terms differently ("pluralism"), and may smuggle in their own preferences and perspectives in the meanings of the words themselves, so it's really important to explicitly define your words ("reductionism").
Folks had lots of interesting stuff to say, as always - one thing we discussed that stuck out to me was when the conversation turned to gay marriage. One of our members observed that in discussing the issue with folks in the "anti-" camp, the thing that most came up was strong reservations about changing the definition of "marriage" - which they saw as having a long history, being the traditional mating system of their ancestors. What they objected to, it seems, is not being inclusive of gay people, but with the purity of the word.
This is a "fight about words" in a different sense than that which arises over the definition of "sound" in the tree falling in a forest problem. This is a word overstuffed with meaning and nobility, which encapsulates aspects of civilization, institution and religion, and is tied strongly to our future as well as our past.
Even though I am very pro marriage equality, I can identify with this sentiment. Getting married and having kids in a more or less traditional manner has been one of the great boons of my life. My intuitions on this are not structured in such a way as to be exclusionary, but I can understand how one might feel changing a concept which holds a central place in one's life as a violation.
As it happens, I believe marriage is going to drastically change in structure in the coming decades due to various social convulsions we're experiencing now around sexual politics and relationships, and in terms of the past, the meaning & structure of marriage is nowhere near as stable as the tradcons think it was. That, and the simply awful outcomes for gay people if we don't update our institutions to address their needs means marriage equality wins.
This is a "fight about words" in a different sense than that which arises over the definition of "sound" in the tree falling in a forest problem. This is a word overstuffed with meaning and nobility, which encapsulates aspects of civilization, institution and religion, and is tied strongly to our future as well as our past.
Even though I am very pro marriage equality, I can identify with this sentiment. Getting married and having kids in a more or less traditional manner has been one of the great boons of my life. My intuitions on this are not structured in such a way as to be exclusionary, but I can understand how one might feel changing a concept which holds a central place in one's life as a violation.
As it happens, I believe marriage is going to drastically change in structure in the coming decades due to various social convulsions we're experiencing now around sexual politics and relationships, and in terms of the past, the meaning & structure of marriage is nowhere near as stable as the tradcons think it was. That, and the simply awful outcomes for gay people if we don't update our institutions to address their needs means marriage equality wins.
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