Polygamy Ascendant?

THE dissolution of behavioral boundaries with the consequent extension of individual choice has long seemed to many intellectuals to be the most urgent or important task confronting them. Since few social boundaries can be defended with entire philosophical consistency, a world without any such boundaries has seemed to those intellectuals to be not only intellectually honest but also desirable: for only then will man’s natural goodness be able to emerge from the dross of the past, with all its inherited petty prejudices, compromises, and hypocrisies.

It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that supporters of polygamy should now come forward to claim their “rights,” their place in the sun of non-discrimination. Those harmless folk the necrophiliacs will probably be next. After all, the object of their affections cannot complain or have its interests damaged, for by definition it can have no feelings or interests; and as John Stuart Mill so powerfully argued, the mere disgust of the majority, be it ever so large, is not a good enough reason to prohibit a practice. If someone wished, say, to eat live earthworms in public, assuming that such creatures are not sufficiently conscious to experience suffering, and eating them does not endanger the public health, on what consistent grounds could we stop him?

About the Author

Anthony Daniels

Mr. Daniels, a retired doctor who worked in several parts of the world, is the author of Mass Listeria, a book about health scares.

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THE dissolution of behavioral boundaries with the consequent extension of individual choice has long seemed to many intellectuals to be the most urgent or important task confronting them. Since few social boundaries can be defended with entire philosophical consistency, a world without any such boundaries has seemed to those intellectuals to be not only intellectually honest but also desirable: for only then will man’s natural goodness be able to emerge from the dross of the past, with all its inherited petty prejudices, compromises, and hypocrisies.

It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that supporters of polygamy should now come forward to claim their “rights,” their place in the sun of non-discrimination. Those harmless folk the necrophiliacs will probably be next. After all, the object of their affections cannot complain or have its interests damaged, for by definition it can have no feelings or interests; and as John Stuart Mill so powerfully argued, the mere disgust of the majority, be it ever so large, is not a good enough reason to prohibit a practice. If someone wished, say, to eat live earthworms in public, assuming that such creatures are not sufficiently conscious to experience suffering, and eating them does not endanger the public health, on what consistent grounds could we stop him?