WWTD? (What would Tiger do?)
Robert Wright argues in today’s New York Times that “in its own way, the Tiger Woods scandal is as important as Kandahar and the Catholic Church.” Why? He provides a list of reasons, including:
5) Moral sanction matters. Though monogamous marriage may be, on average, the best way to rear children, a lifetime of monogamous fidelity isn’t natural in our species. And extramarital affairs have a way of leading, one way or another, to the dissolution of marriages – not unfailingly, by any means, but with nontrivial frequency. And even when an affair doesn’t end a marriage, it can permanently change the marriage – and child-rearing environment – for the worse.
So we’re stuck with this unfortunate irony: the institution that seems to be, on average, the least bad means of rearing children is an institution that doesn’t naturally sustain itself in the absence of moral sanction – positive sanction for fidelity, negative sanction for infidelity. And negative sanction often involves sounding judgmental – something that, in addition to incurring the wrath of a columnist’s readers, raises genuinely thorny intellectual problems.
This is a pretty instrumental view of morality. Wright is essentially arguing that Tiger’s infidelity vitiates cultural support for monogamous marriage. On his account, that’s bad because monogamous marriage is good for children, but without moral sanction, it’s a difficult institution to preserve.
But why is good childrearing so important? The only answers are really (a) it provides for the best, most successful propagation of our species or (b) it’s something we owe both to our own children and to the next generation in general to help them thrive and succeed.
The first option is one that seems logical, but actually has trouble finding a rational foundation until you get down to some inherent human dignity. And the second option refers to that dignity directly.
But once you’re in the field of human dignity, it’s hard to suppress issues of choice, freedom, etc. that call into question both emphasis on monogamous marriage as a lifestyle and a ethical structure that uses moral injunction to support a cultural practice.
-Sam
Photo by Flickr user Keith Allison used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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- Healthcare and human rights cont.
- No hall pass
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