The only arguments I've heard are:
1. Yuck.
2. Marriage is for raising families.
3. We've always done it this way.
4. God said so.
Those are really the basic arguments for many moral positions. Taboos against public nudity and public sex. Taboos against adult-child sex. Taboos against defecating in public places, as long as you clean it up so it's not unhealthy (after all, dogs go in public). Taboos against voluntary prostitution. Lots of taboos basically face the same essential arguments.
Actually, you missed two other arguments. One maybe you consider part of #3, but I think it deserves its own line, and that is simply that society has found over many, many years of experience that it works better this way for social order. There are many things we as a society do which can't be justified on purely logical grounds but which we do because we have found that they work out best that way. For example, the strong presumption that children should be raised by their parents instead of given at birth to the people at the top of the list of availble parents judged on the basis of education, resources, influence, etc. It is certainly logical to argue that a child would have a better life if raised by Bill and Melinda than if raised by a crack-addicted single mother on welfare. But we don't as a society follow the logical argument there. We have found as a society that certain ways of organizing society work, and we should not, IMO, abandon those unless we're sure as a society of what we're doing. Certainly some of those things don't work in practice and do need to be changed -- slavery being one easy example -- but in general, I believe that the collective wisdom of people often can't perhaps be logically justified but has nonetheless a value.
The other argument quite simply is that biologically there is a purpose of relationship between one man and one woman which, whether you decide to have children or not, is nonetheless a simple biological relationship which can't be duplicated by any other relationshi. It's just the way either God or evolution made us, whichever you believe in. But either way, that's the way humans are created. |
