Too much choice (1)

[james_davis_nicoll]

It seems to me that if you let people marry who they like, this can only inevitably lead them to want to exercise choice in other fields of human endeavour and then where would we be? Today it's three people getting married but tomorrow it could be drinking water with a bit of lime in it instead of a more economically strategic soft drink or someone deciding they don't want to work 80 hours weeks.

I'm talking to you, Brazil

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that there would probably have to be a relatively low cap on the number of people who could be involved (maybe take a hint from the Qur'an and say five), just to keep the associated complexities from getting too hard to handle.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

That's why I say limit it to one mutual spouse per person.

It comes down to the 0/1/infinity rule for choosing limits (here, being the number of other people in the civil marriage).

With zero, you'd have a pure kinship system, where giving nonkin rights would require special legal paperwork. It's doable, but it would be so common that there's a benefit in going to a standardized form.

So the question comes down to if there's a benefit in allowing arbitrary numbers. And the thing is, like so many things, the complexity builds by induction here... once you have the ability to handle groups of five, it's very easy to extend that to six, or higher numbers. The number of relationships may shoot up, but the amount of truly new things to deal with drops off quickly (like with Rubik's cubes... if you can do a 3x3x3, a 4x4x4 requires only a little bit more to figure out in order to solve, if you can do the 4x4x4, the 5x5x5 requires only a slight adjustment, and if you can do a 5x5x5, you can do any higher order cube, the difference being the amount of work, not the complexity of the task). The biggest steps are the first few... so the question becomes should you jump from one to introducing any more complexity at all (which is why it's 0/1/infinity and not 0/1/N/infinity, the point of the rule being to avoid arbitrary limits unless there's an extremely good reason for a specific value). And I just don't see a reason why. The system is already set up to handle couples, and can also be used to handle larger groups... it just requires going through extra legal paper work to define it. Which is a perfectly fine solution to the complexity, because offering a standard package like limiting things to groups of five isn't going to please everybody, even those that don't want more than four spouses. Because when you get to larger groups like that, you start getting to the point where some members might not want a full partnership with all the other members (for example, like with business partnerships, there's increased liability with larger groups... which is why when large number of partners go into business together, they typically go for incorporation, which also detaches things so you don't have to worry about the issues that arise from when a partner dies or leaves). There is a lot of complexity added to the system right from groups of three: do they want something resembling a fully equal triple, three couples (and why shouldn't this be allowed over four people), two couples, or one couple plus one. Which is why I think it's better to just stick to having the government support the simplest case with a default package and letting anything more complicated having to spell itself out legally from the start. If there's a market for specific packages that emerges from that, with some paperwork becoming standard practice, then the government can consider if it wants to offer those as well.