I addressed this in another thread so I will just quote myself:
So my gut instinct is to say "no," it should not be allowed for people to legally be married to more than one person at a time. I won't change my mind until I hear of a detailed explanation for how the law would deal with such things, and even then, I would have to be okay with whatever story I am being told. My guess is, it is going to be too problematic to be practical.
Of course, who people have sex with is a separate issue, and if a group of people want to live together, that, too, is a separate issue.
(June 4, 2015 at 4:57 pm)Pyrrho Wrote:(June 4, 2015 at 4:32 pm)robvalue Wrote: Yeah, I agree. I guess there could be rules for a "custom marriage" or something. Are people who are into multiple partners actually likely to all want to get married? I have no idea.
It would be a complicated matter, and would also likely involve greater instability, with the more people involved, the more likely there would be a dissolution of the marriage. To keep this simple, let us consider the difference between 2 people getting married, and 3 people getting married. With 2 people getting married, there is only one relationship, the relationship between person 1 and 2. So for the marriage to hold, all that matters is the one relationship. But with a 3 person marriage, there is the relationship between person 1 and person 2, and the relationship between person 1 and person 3, and the relationship between person 2 and person 3. So there are three relationships to maintain, instead of only one. So even without children, it has much more going on, with a greater likelihood of instability, due to having three times as many relationships that need to work in order for the marriage to last. (With a fourth person, you would add in 3 more relationships, for a total of 6 relationships, as the fourth person would have a relationship with each of the three added to what is already there. So you can see that each addition dramatically impacts the complexity of what is going on.)
And with children, things get very complex very quickly. Who is responsible for which children, and how much responsibility does each person have? Suppose one of the three stays home to take care of the children, and the other two work. That might be a very practical arrangement, as long as it lasts. Now, suppose that one of them leaves the relationship. This is going to screw up the balance of income versus child care, and everyone is going to be very significantly affected. Now, for the adults, it was their choice, so too bad for them, they made their bed, so they must lie in it. But the children did not agree to this arrangement, and we have allowed for the instability by allowing the marriage in the first place. And the children are all affected by this, regardless of which people in particular are the parents, so that even a marriage partner who is childless is still a part of the totality that affects all of the children.
Figuring out the law of that would probably be a nightmare (and a source of great job security for lawyers dealing with the fallout if polygamy were allowed).
So there may be practical reasons to reject polygamy, though one would want to look into the matter in much more detail than I have here.
So my gut instinct is to say "no," it should not be allowed for people to legally be married to more than one person at a time. I won't change my mind until I hear of a detailed explanation for how the law would deal with such things, and even then, I would have to be okay with whatever story I am being told. My guess is, it is going to be too problematic to be practical.
Of course, who people have sex with is a separate issue, and if a group of people want to live together, that, too, is a separate issue.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
