Hegel and the New Natural Lawyers on the Moral Possibility of Polygamy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The opening up of marriage to same-sex partners has raised the question of where its moral boundaries are to be drawn, particularly with regard to the recognition of polygamous marriages. This question has been taken in two directions: (i) those who argue that marriage's boundaries ought to follow the demands of expressivism - those forms of love, friendship, and commitment that individuals understand are necessary to be fulfilled, self-constituting, and flourishing human beings - thus allowing marriage to admit of polygamy; and, (ii) those who argue that marriage is undergirded by an order (biological, traditional, natural) that does not admit of the expansion of marriage beyond a heterosexual monogamy. This paper explores the question of marriage's boundaries by looking at the moral possibility of polygamous marriage. It locates a third path between expressivism and naturalism by turning to Hegel's account of marriage as by nature monogamous, and the new natural law theorists attempt to defend the moral boundaries of monogamous marriage. What the paper suggests, is that both Hegel and the new natural law theorist provide theoretical resources - albeit obscured by their apparent naturalistic accounts - for thinking about marriage as a moral project with its own internal boundaries that must be adhered to in order to carry the project off. These boundaries become matters neither of nature nor expressivism, but of a profound kind of self-constitution or marital autonomy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".