On the 10th anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges (federally mandating “marriage equality”), it’s proper to ask whether same-sex marriage is a good idea. One reason to think that it’s not is the existence of an epistemic oddity, an oddity which strongly undermines any argument for same-sex marriage (hereafter “SSM”). The oddity in question is characterized by what may be called an "underdetermination asymmetry."
Start with the following very simple observation.
There are two ultimate positions in the SSM debate, and only two. On the one hand, there’s love or care as the basis of marriage, as in the view of SSM’s supporters. On the other hand, there’s procreation as the basis of marriage, as in the view of traditional marriage’s defenders. Any apparent exceptions will turn out to be folded into either love or procreation -- for example, commitment, which is parasitic on love and/or procreation. (I’ll henceforth ignore care -- the radical marriage reformers’ favorite criterion of intimate personal relationships -- because it cashes out similarly to love.)
The reason why SSM is supported by so many people is that everyone can see the salience of love. If marriage exists for romantic or erotic love rather than for procreation, as many people think, and if David and Ted love each other, then why not let them marry in a civil ceremony, with the full approval of the state? Conversely, if marriage exists for procreation rather than love, then why grant civil marriage at all to same-sex couples, who can’t procreate?
This is where the idea of underdetermination can help us to see the truth about marriage.
The “underdetermination of scientific theories by data” is a big topic among philosophers. The basic idea of underdetermination originated with the right-wing French Catholic physicist Pierre Duhem in the early 20th Century, and has shape-shifted and expanded ever since. The general idea is that, given a certain body of physical evidence (“data”), there’s always an alternative possible theory to the theory that is on the books. The evidence underdetermines the theory. In its most thoroughgoing sense, underdetermination entails relativism and social constructionism.
What if I told you that the pro-SSM conception of marriage is underdeterminate, and the anti-SSM conception is not -- what would you think? You would probably think, intuitively, that it gives traditional marriage a leg up on SSM, and you would be right.
If the underdetermination thesis is correct, underdetermination is pervasive in science. But more or less uniquely, the SSM debate presents a situation in which underdetermination is viewpoint relative.
For love or procreation to not underdetermine marriage, they must be uniquely fitted to marriage. Are they? The answer with respect to romantic or erotic love is “no.” Love can be exhibited just as fully in cohabitation, or other non-marital relationships, as it is in marriage. Marriage may be the ideal locus for erotic love, but human experience shows that it’s not the only locus. E.g., take an unmarried couple that has cohabited for 30 years. Must the couple’s degree of love and commitment be presumed to be less than that of a married couple that gets divorced after seven years? Of course not. In short: love underdetermines marriage.
In contrast, procreation is uniquely fitted to marriage. Even cohabiting couples understand this; they tend to get married after having a second child together. Procreation becomes maladaptive and too likely to increase unhappiness when it occurs outside of marriage. With procreation, unlike with love, there aren’t other institutions or social practices that offer a unique or equally good fit. If so, then procreation doesn’t underdetermine marriage.
There are two essential facets of procreation -- making babies and being parents. The property of being parents is the one that doesn’t underdetermine marriage. Making babies -- the other facet -- admittedly is ideally fitted to marriage: marry first, and only then have children. But this fact about ideal conduct doesn’t prevent underdetermination. Rather, what prevents it is being parents.
To see this, consider that although people sometimes are parents outside of marriage, as with divorced parents, it isn’t normal. To be sure, it might be (prescriptively) normal if divorce were good or morally neutral, rather than representing failure. Or it might be (descriptively) normal if 14-year-old pregnant girls were legally able to marry and often declined to marry any of the available males. But neither of these things is true of marriage as we know it. Thus, the procreation facet being parents doesn’t underdetermine marriage.
In contrast, having children outside of marriage is normal in that it’s sometimes unavoidable, as in cases of rape or seduction or 14-year-old mothers. (The phrase I just used -- having children -- is ambiguous between “making babies” and “being parents,” but here it obviously means making babies.) In short, the procreation facet making babies underdetermines marriage.
Hold on, though. Isn’t it necessary to notice that not all parents are biological parents, and that procreation specifically involves the latter? Well, if we’re talking about the biology of procreation, we mean biological parents. But if we’re talking about procreation in the context of marriage (the familial sense of procreation, insofar as marriage is the family-making institution), we revert to the generic form -- parents, whether or not natural parents. We do this in order to make sense of marriage as the family-making institution. Procreation is needed for that but can’t be viewed narrowly. Pro-creation, a writ-small version of divine creation (which humans are metaphysically incapable of), requires an agent doing the “creating” -- biological parents. But this fact must be qualified by a truth of analytic philosophy: “biological parent” is not a necessary condition of “parent.” (It’s a sufficient condition.)
Note what this says about adoption. Adoption can be regarded by defenders of procreation-based marriage as a coherent practice within traditional marriage. Though it’s not a perfection of procreation-based marriage, adoption’s no aberration. It’s internally part of traditional marriage.
What we’ve now arrived at is that because being parents can’t coherently be divorced from agents of (pro-)creation, it must refer to opposite-sex couples. Properly speaking, parents -- as opposed to guardians -- are male and female. That’s what the procreation criterion of marriage entails.
We’ve seen that love and procreation are phenomena equivalent to empirical phenomena in science, and that the respective conceptions of marriage are equivalent to scientific theories. One of those conceptions -- the love-based pro-SSM one -- is underdetermined by the relevant data. The other one -- procreation-based and effectively anti-SSM -- is not underdetermined by the relevant data.
This asymmetry has rather mind-blowing consequences. For it’s very implausible that, as between an underdeterminate and a non-underdeterminate theory, the underdeterminate theory is just as good a choice as the non-underdeterminate one. Preferring the non-underdeterminate theory indeed demonstrates what Pierre Duhem called “good sense" in dealing with such problems
We must reject the love-based conception of marriage, along with its affirmation of same-sex marriage. Our grounds are epistemic and not moral, strongly mitigating any controversy inherent in overruling Obergefell.
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