If marriage is redefined (in law, and hence in public opinion and practice) as simple companionship for adult fulfillment, then, for reasons to be explained, it will be harder to live by its norms and urge them on others.

Check Your Blind Spot: What Is Marriage?

by Sherif Girgis 

Sherif Girgis argues that we need to reason about what marriage is--to understand its essential features and why the state has an interest in promoting them--before we can craft sound marriage law.

Marriage as a human good, not marriage law, has an objective core whose norms the state has an interest in tracking and supporting--in a way that respects everyone's freedom.

Everyone has blind spots. It is philosophy's ambition to cure these by canceling them out, through dialogue and scrutiny of assumptions. But even academic philosophy has its dogmas. One current example is support for same-sex marriage: To question it is to be anathematized by those occupationally averse to anathemas.

So I was both pleased that Alex Worsnip reviewed my co-authored book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, and unsurprised that he misunderstood it. My former classmate in Oxford's philosophy master's (B.Phil.) program, Worsnip is sharp and serious about arguments, and consistently blind to arguments of certain sorts.

Though talented and well-trained, he makes claims clearly contradicted by a quick read of our short book. His objections are almost offhand. And he is mute on the most serious--we think decisive--challenges we pose to those who favor redefining marriage. From another pen on another topic, I doubt such a treatment would survive scrutiny by other philosophers--or even, perhaps, by Worsnip.

Our Argument in Brief

To orient readers, let me summarize the claims we defend in our book.

Marriage is a human good with its own structure, like knowledge or friendship. The present debate is not a debate about whom to let marry, but about what marriage (the human good that the law has reasons to track) really is. Two answers compete for legal enshrinement.

The first, driving the push for same-sex marriage, is that a certain emotional intimacy makes a marriage. But as our book shows, this answer can't coherently distinguish marriage from companionship, an obviously broader category. So it gets marriage (the human good) wrong.

The second view of marriage begins from basics. Any voluntary form of community involves common action; it unites people toward common ends in the context of commitment. And in these respects, what sets marital community apart is its comprehensiveness: in (1) how it unites people, (2) what it unites them with respect to, and (3) how extensive a commitment it demands.
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