Maybe some EAs would only want to be married to a person until it no longer maximizes utility, but feel more is expected in a marriage, and don’t want to commit to more. I don’t expect this accounts for much of the difference, though.
[Disclaimer: I notice that I felt weird about your comment to an extent that may not be reasonable, so my own comment here may be odd/have an odd tone. Also, I’m recently married, so maybe somehow I’m feeling defensive, but I really don’t know why that’d be.]
My knee-jerk reaction is that that mindset, at least as phrased, would be quite naive consequentialism, for two main reasons:
Getting married may itself change how much happiness a relationship provides and how long one wants to stay in it.
One part of what I have in mind is analogous to “burning one’s boats”, and the related notion in game theory that one can sometimes improve one’s payoffs by cutting off some of one’s own options.
Regularly running the decision procedure “explicitly try to work out what personal life decisions would maximise utility” will not necessarily be the best way to actually maximise utility.
Relatedly, Askell writes: “As many utilitarians have pointed out, the act utilitarian claim that you should ‘act such that you maximize the aggregate wellbeing’ is best thought of as a criterion of rightness and not as a decision procedure. In fact, trying to use this criterion as a decision procedure will often fail to maximize the aggregate wellbeing. In such cases, utilitarianism will actually say that agents are forbidden to use the utilitarian criterion when they make decisions.”
That said, whether to get married is a large decision that doesn’t arise often, so it’s plausible that that’s the sort of case where it is worth thinking as a consequentialist explicitly and in detail.
(That said, even if this way of thinking would indeed be quite naive consequentialism, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that many EAs think this way, so your comment could still be onto something.)
I think these are all good points, and I agree that these are good reasons for marriage. I didn’t intend my comment as a good reason to not get married.
One thing I had in mind is that if someone feels that there’s a good chance they’ll divorce their partner (and the base rate is high, so on an outside view, this seems true), then marriage vows (“till death do us part”) might feel like lying or making a promise they know there’s a good chance they won’t keep, and they might have a strong aversion to this. Personally, I feel this way. If I make a promise that I expect to only keep with ~50% probability, then this feels like lying. 90% probability feels like lying to me, too. I’m not sure where it stops feeling like lying.
However, this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get married anyway; interpreting or rewriting the vows as slightly less demanding (but still fairly demanding) is better and not necessarily lying. I had this thread (click “See in context” for more) in mind about the GWWC pledge.
I don’t know what’s normally expected, but I’d rather be somewhat explicit that we can get divorced for any reason, as long as we make an honest effort to work through it (say for a year, with counselling, etc.), with exceptions allowing immediate divorce for abuse or one of us acting very harmful to the other or others.
That all sounds reasonable. And yeah, I wasn’t interpreting your comment as actually intended as an argument against marriage (just a hypothesis as to why EAs may tend to be less inclined to get married).
One thing I’d note is that I’m not sure “till death do us part” is actually required or default. The celebrant for our wedding just said:
I am to remind you of the solemn and binding nature of the relationship into which you are about to enter. Marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of a two people to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.
(And this was just her default; we didn’t have to request a move away from “till death do us part”. Note that this was a non-religious ceremony and celebrant.)
Maybe that has the same literal meaning as “till death do us part”; I’m not sure. But I feel like I’d naturally interpret the phrasing my celebrant used as meaning that the two parties have thought really seriously about this, and do presently intend for this to last for life—without it necessarily meaning they totally commit to sticking with it till death or that they predict a 100% chance of that.
(My partner and I also had more explicit conversations about this sort of thing.)
I think that’s reasonable. Here’s one example to illustrate what might be making my intuitions differ a bit; I feel like you could say “He has spent his life working to end malaria” when someone is alive and fairly young, and also that you could say “He spent his life working to end malaria” even if really he worked on that from 30-60 and then retired. (Whereas I don’t think this is true if you explicitly say “He worked to end malaria till the day he died”.) In a similar way, I have a weak sense we can “enter into a union for life” without this literally extending for 100% of the rest of our lives.
But maybe my intuition is being driven more by it being a present-tense matter of us currently voluntarily entering into this union. Analogously, I think people would usually feel it’s reasonable for promises to not always be upheld if unusual and hard-to-foresee circumstances arose, the foreseeing of which would’ve made the promise-maker decide not to make the promise to begin with. (But this does get complicated if reference class forecasting suggests an e.g. 50% chance of some relevant circumstance arising, and it’s just that any particular circumstance arising is hard to foresee, as it was in many of those 50% of cases.)
In any case, I guess I really think that whether and how partners explicitly discussed their respective understandings of their arrangement, in advance, probably matters more than the precise words the celebrant said.
Again, a reasonable question. I don’t think we disagree substantially.
Also, again, I think my views are actually less driven by a perceived distinction between “for life” vs “till death do us part”, and more driven by:
the idea that it seems ok to make promises even if there’s some chance that unforeseen circumstances will make fulfilling them impossible/unwise—as long as the promise really was “taken seriously”, and ideally the promise-receiver has the same understanding of how “binding” the promise is
having had many explicit conversations on these matters with my partner
Finally, I’d also guess that I’m far from alone in simultaneously (a) being aware that a large portion of marriages end in divorce, (b) being aware that many of those divorces probably began with the couple feeling very confident their marriage wouldn’t end in divorce, and (c) having a wedding in which a phrase like “for life” or “till death do us part” was used.
And I think it would be odd to see all such people as having behaving poorly by making a promise they may well not keep and know in advance they may not keep, at least if the partners had discussed their shared understanding of what they were promising. (I’m not necessarily saying you’re saying we should see those people that way.) One reason for this view is that people extremely often meansomething other than exact the literal meaning of what they’ve said, and this seems ok in most contexts, as long as people mutually understand what’s actually meant.
(I think a reasonable argument can be made that marriages aren’t among those “most contexts”, given their unusually serious and legal nature. But it also seems worth noting that this is about what the celebrant said, not our vows or what we signed.)
Direct response, which is sort-of getting in the weeds on something I haven’t really thought about in detail before, to be honest
What do you think the “for life” adds to the pledge if not “for the rest of your lives”?
One could likewise ask what “He spent his life working to end malaria” means that’s different from “He spent some time working to end malaria”. There, I’d say it adds the idea that this was a very major focus for perhaps at least 2 decades, probably more than 3 decades. Whereas “some time” could mean it wasn’t a major priority for him at any point, or only for e.g. 10 years.
It seems to me perhaps reasonable to think of “entered into for life” as meaning “entered into as at one of the core parts of one’s life for at least a few decades, and perhaps/ideally till the very end of one’s life”. Whereas “till death do us part” is very explicitly until the very end of one’s life.
Out of curiosity, I’ve now looked up what dictionaries say “for life” means. The first two results I found said “for the whole of one’s life : for the rest of one’s life” (source) and “for the rest of a person’s life” (source). This pushes against my (tentative) view, and in favour of your view.
However, I’d tentatively argue that 2 of the 5 of the examples those dictionaries give actually seem to me to at least arguably fit my (tentative) view:
“She may have been scarred for life.”
Obviously, people can say this as an exaggeration. But I think they can also say it in a more serious way, that people wouldn’t perceive as an exaggeration, even if they actually just mean something like “scarred in a substantial way that resurfaces semi-regularly for at least 2 decades”. (That’s still a lot more than just “scarred” or “scarred for a while”.)
“There can be no jobs for life.”
Another dictionary tells me “job for life” means (as I’d expect) “a job that you can stay in all your working life”; not till the actual end of your life.
Two of the other examples are about being sentenced to prison for life; I think that also arguably fits my view, given how life sentences actually tend to work (as far as I’m aware). The fifth example—“They met in college and have remained friends for life” -could go either way.
(And again, I think it’s common for people to not actually mean the dictionary definitions of what they say, and that this can be ok, as long as they understand each other.)
Maybe some EAs would only want to be married to a person until it no longer maximizes utility, but feel more is expected in a marriage, and don’t want to commit to more. I don’t expect this accounts for much of the difference, though.
[Disclaimer: I notice that I felt weird about your comment to an extent that may not be reasonable, so my own comment here may be odd/have an odd tone. Also, I’m recently married, so maybe somehow I’m feeling defensive, but I really don’t know why that’d be.]
My knee-jerk reaction is that that mindset, at least as phrased, would be quite naive consequentialism, for two main reasons:
Getting married may itself change how much happiness a relationship provides and how long one wants to stay in it.
One part of what I have in mind is analogous to “burning one’s boats”, and the related notion in game theory that one can sometimes improve one’s payoffs by cutting off some of one’s own options.
Regularly running the decision procedure “explicitly try to work out what personal life decisions would maximise utility” will not necessarily be the best way to actually maximise utility.
Relatedly, Askell writes: “As many utilitarians have pointed out, the act utilitarian claim that you should ‘act such that you maximize the aggregate wellbeing’ is best thought of as a criterion of rightness and not as a decision procedure. In fact, trying to use this criterion as a decision procedure will often fail to maximize the aggregate wellbeing. In such cases, utilitarianism will actually say that agents are forbidden to use the utilitarian criterion when they make decisions.”
That said, whether to get married is a large decision that doesn’t arise often, so it’s plausible that that’s the sort of case where it is worth thinking as a consequentialist explicitly and in detail.
(That said, even if this way of thinking would indeed be quite naive consequentialism, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that many EAs think this way, so your comment could still be onto something.)
I think these are all good points, and I agree that these are good reasons for marriage. I didn’t intend my comment as a good reason to not get married.
One thing I had in mind is that if someone feels that there’s a good chance they’ll divorce their partner (and the base rate is high, so on an outside view, this seems true), then marriage vows (“till death do us part”) might feel like lying or making a promise they know there’s a good chance they won’t keep, and they might have a strong aversion to this. Personally, I feel this way. If I make a promise that I expect to only keep with ~50% probability, then this feels like lying. 90% probability feels like lying to me, too. I’m not sure where it stops feeling like lying.
However, this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get married anyway; interpreting or rewriting the vows as slightly less demanding (but still fairly demanding) is better and not necessarily lying. I had this thread (click “See in context” for more) in mind about the GWWC pledge.
I don’t know what’s normally expected, but I’d rather be somewhat explicit that we can get divorced for any reason, as long as we make an honest effort to work through it (say for a year, with counselling, etc.), with exceptions allowing immediate divorce for abuse or one of us acting very harmful to the other or others.
That all sounds reasonable. And yeah, I wasn’t interpreting your comment as actually intended as an argument against marriage (just a hypothesis as to why EAs may tend to be less inclined to get married).
One thing I’d note is that I’m not sure “till death do us part” is actually required or default. The celebrant for our wedding just said:
(And this was just her default; we didn’t have to request a move away from “till death do us part”. Note that this was a non-religious ceremony and celebrant.)
Maybe that has the same literal meaning as “till death do us part”; I’m not sure. But I feel like I’d naturally interpret the phrasing my celebrant used as meaning that the two parties have thought really seriously about this, and do presently intend for this to last for life—without it necessarily meaning they totally commit to sticking with it till death or that they predict a 100% chance of that.
(My partner and I also had more explicit conversations about this sort of thing.)
“for life” sounds just as permanent to me, if less morbid, than “till death do us part”
I think that’s reasonable. Here’s one example to illustrate what might be making my intuitions differ a bit; I feel like you could say “He has spent his life working to end malaria” when someone is alive and fairly young, and also that you could say “He spent his life working to end malaria” even if really he worked on that from 30-60 and then retired. (Whereas I don’t think this is true if you explicitly say “He worked to end malaria till the day he died”.) In a similar way, I have a weak sense we can “enter into a union for life” without this literally extending for 100% of the rest of our lives.
But maybe my intuition is being driven more by it being a present-tense matter of us currently voluntarily entering into this union. Analogously, I think people would usually feel it’s reasonable for promises to not always be upheld if unusual and hard-to-foresee circumstances arose, the foreseeing of which would’ve made the promise-maker decide not to make the promise to begin with. (But this does get complicated if reference class forecasting suggests an e.g. 50% chance of some relevant circumstance arising, and it’s just that any particular circumstance arising is hard to foresee, as it was in many of those 50% of cases.)
In any case, I guess I really think that whether and how partners explicitly discussed their respective understandings of their arrangement, in advance, probably matters more than the precise words the celebrant said.
What do you think the “for life” adds to the pledge if not “for the rest of your lives”?
Backing up to clarify where I’m coming from
Again, a reasonable question. I don’t think we disagree substantially.
Also, again, I think my views are actually less driven by a perceived distinction between “for life” vs “till death do us part”, and more driven by:
the idea that it seems ok to make promises even if there’s some chance that unforeseen circumstances will make fulfilling them impossible/unwise—as long as the promise really was “taken seriously”, and ideally the promise-receiver has the same understanding of how “binding” the promise is
having had many explicit conversations on these matters with my partner
Finally, I’d also guess that I’m far from alone in simultaneously (a) being aware that a large portion of marriages end in divorce, (b) being aware that many of those divorces probably began with the couple feeling very confident their marriage wouldn’t end in divorce, and (c) having a wedding in which a phrase like “for life” or “till death do us part” was used.
And I think it would be odd to see all such people as having behaving poorly by making a promise they may well not keep and know in advance they may not keep, at least if the partners had discussed their shared understanding of what they were promising. (I’m not necessarily saying you’re saying we should see those people that way.) One reason for this view is that people extremely often mean something other than exact the literal meaning of what they’ve said, and this seems ok in most contexts, as long as people mutually understand what’s actually meant.
(I think a reasonable argument can be made that marriages aren’t among those “most contexts”, given their unusually serious and legal nature. But it also seems worth noting that this is about what the celebrant said, not our vows or what we signed.)
Direct response, which is sort-of getting in the weeds on something I haven’t really thought about in detail before, to be honest
One could likewise ask what “He spent his life working to end malaria” means that’s different from “He spent some time working to end malaria”. There, I’d say it adds the idea that this was a very major focus for perhaps at least 2 decades, probably more than 3 decades. Whereas “some time” could mean it wasn’t a major priority for him at any point, or only for e.g. 10 years.
It seems to me perhaps reasonable to think of “entered into for life” as meaning “entered into as at one of the core parts of one’s life for at least a few decades, and perhaps/ideally till the very end of one’s life”. Whereas “till death do us part” is very explicitly until the very end of one’s life.
Out of curiosity, I’ve now looked up what dictionaries say “for life” means. The first two results I found said “for the whole of one’s life : for the rest of one’s life” (source) and “for the rest of a person’s life” (source). This pushes against my (tentative) view, and in favour of your view.
However, I’d tentatively argue that 2 of the 5 of the examples those dictionaries give actually seem to me to at least arguably fit my (tentative) view:
“She may have been scarred for life.”
Obviously, people can say this as an exaggeration. But I think they can also say it in a more serious way, that people wouldn’t perceive as an exaggeration, even if they actually just mean something like “scarred in a substantial way that resurfaces semi-regularly for at least 2 decades”. (That’s still a lot more than just “scarred” or “scarred for a while”.)
“There can be no jobs for life.”
Another dictionary tells me “job for life” means (as I’d expect) “a job that you can stay in all your working life”; not till the actual end of your life.
Two of the other examples are about being sentenced to prison for life; I think that also arguably fits my view, given how life sentences actually tend to work (as far as I’m aware). The fifth example—“They met in college and have remained friends for life” -could go either way.
(And again, I think it’s common for people to not actually mean the dictionary definitions of what they say, and that this can be ok, as long as they understand each other.)