英语自由主义、自主和夫妻之爱

CHRISTOPHER BENNETT LIBERALISM, AUTONOMY AND CONJUGAL LOVE � ABSTRACT. This paper argues that a liberal state is justified in promoting relationships of conjugal love – the form of relationship that is the basis of the institution of marriage – on the grounds that they are essential to the development and maintenance of autonomy. A deep human need is that the detail of our lives be recognised (accepted, affirmed, granted importance) by others (or by an other). Autonomy can be compromised when this need is not met. So a state concerned with autonomy ought to be concerned with relationships in which people can be given recognition. This argument justifies support for friendship as well as conjugal love; why is the latter particularly special? The answer is that in conjugal love partners value each other exclusively (i.e., in a way they do not value anyone else). Conjugal relations therefore recognise the uniqueness and individual value of a person’s life in a way that friendship does not. KEY WORDS: friendship, liberalism, love, marriage, recognition INTRODUCTION: MARRIAGE AND THE LIBERAL STATE Should the state support marriage? Traditionally it has been the conser- vative, with their unexplained notions of “naturalness” or “the sacred”, or with an overriding concern for social stability, who has given an affirmative answer to this question. It might be thought that insofar as the liberal can support marriage, the relevant grounds would have to do with having a family and bringing up children, rather than with marriage itself. For once children are in the equation there is something for the harm principle to bite on. But as regards those who have no intention of having children, one might assume that a liberal ought to say nothing. The proper liberal attitude, it might be said, is one of neutrality. The state ought not to dictate how people are to live, whether they should marry, whether they should aspire to find a life partner, as long as the effects of their decisions do not harm others. � An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy’s Virtues of Altruism conference at Royal Holloway, University of London. I would like to thank those who made useful criticisms of it there, particularly David Miller and Bob Brecher. I have also benefited from discussion with colleagues at Sheffield, in particular Kathryn Wilkinson, Robert Stern and Vince East, and from the comments of the editors and referees of this journal. Res Publica 9: 285–301, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 286 CHRISTOPHER BENNETT In this paper I argue that this assumption about the liberal position is mistaken. Of course, the state ought not to compel people into marriage, but there are grounds for thinking that the liberal state is justified in engaging in more subtle forms of support for the institution. For instance, the state might afford a special legal status to married couples (as it does at present) reinforcing that with forms of financial assistance such as tax breaks. I do not go into any of the details of such support: my main point here is that the liberal state is justified in giving support to the two-person conjugal relationship over other sorts of intimate relationship. I argue that the pro-marriage position does not have to conflict with the liberal view that insists on the priority of individual choice. For if we look at the preconditions of individual choice, we find that the relation- ship of conjugal love is of great importance in maintaining an individual’s ability to frame, revise and pursue their conception of the good. By the phrase ‘conjugal love’ I mean to capture that type of enduring, close and to some extent exclusive reciprocal relationship between two adults, based on mutual affection and esteem, which – ideally speaking – underlies marriage (though it can equally well exist in the absence of the formal marriage bond). I claim that one does not have to believe in anything more than the value of individual autonomy in order to think that the relationship of conjugal love is morally important and ought to be supported by the state. Some might be sceptical about this idea. Surely, a critic might say, marriage is responsible for cutting down one’s freedom rather than increasing it. Once one has responsibilities, not just for oneself, but for another as well, one’s freedom to do as one likes is dramatically curtailed – so, for example, goes the stereotypical story about why men are unwilling to ‘commit’. But this criticism rests on too simple a view of freedom. The notion of autonomy that I have in mind cannot be measured simply by the sheer numbers of options that are formally available to you. Also important is one’s ability to avail oneself of these options. Autonomy has to do not simply with the external aspect of freedom, but with internal factors as well. A person may be (externally) free to a very high extent, but lonely and lacking in self-respect. As a result they may lose their sense of the value of their own projects and their own enjoyments. The thought pursued in this paper is that a sense of one’s own worth (self-respect) is a necessary condition of valuing one’s projects and therefore of making use of freedom. A person who lacks this can become psychologically unable to avail themselves of the options open to them. On my view, then, autonomy (the ability to frame, revise and rationally pursue a conception of the good) LIBERALISM, AUTONOMY AND CONJUGAL LOVE 287 is a precondition of the value of freedom (having a large number of options open). In order to argue that the liberal should support the institution of marriage, two things would have to be shown. First, that conjugal love is a form of relationship that is more beneficial in terms of promoting autonomy than its rivals; and second, that getting married itself protects and promotes conjugal love. More argument than I provide here is neces- sary for the second point – for instance, I would have to discount the possibility that the institution of marriage actually corrupts and hastens the end of conjugal love. For if that were true, the state ought to support not marriage, but rather some different way of promoting conjugal love. But I will assume that it is plausible that, because the legal entanglement of two people’s affairs that is involved in marriage makes break-up such a complicated option, participants have strong reason to work at their rela- tionship. The institution of marriage is thus more likely than not to prevent the breakdown of relationships, and thus to sustain the goods of conjugal love.1 This is a purely instrumental argument for the existence of marriage as a legal arrangement: it says that marriage is instrumentally valuable in promoting and preserving conjugal love because it makes breaking up harder to do. I invoke this argument here as a plausible consideration but do not seek to defend it in any detail. Another proviso concerns the status of the claims made here. What I offer is a normative account of friendship and conjugal love. This means that my defence of liberal support for marriage is somewhat qualified: it says that there are circumstances in which liberal support for marriage is justified. Hence my claim is not that the state should defend marriage as such, but rather that it should defend marriage because and insofar as it promotes conjugal love (which in turn preserves and promotes autonomy). Thus the account offered here might in fact be used to criticise (at least some) present-day marriage arrangements rather than confirming them. My position need not be in disagreement, therefore, with some aspects of feminist critiques of marriage. What I would wish to say, however, is that a critique of present-day marriage requires some view of how human relations ought to be to back it up: it has to rest on an account of a better alternative. And when we look for better alternatives, we find that there are good reasons for sticking to the model of the two-person relation- 1 I am not denying, of course, that the complexity of divorce proceedings can lock people into unhappy relationships that they cannot or will not improve, thus preventing them from starting afresh rather than encouraging them to work at their relationship. But my argument has to claim only that on balance marriage is more instrumentally useful than harmful in promoting conjugal love. 288 CHRISTOPHER BENNETT ship rather than abandoning it for something more collectivist. (Though nothing I say here implies that marriage must be between two persons of the opposite sex: indeed my argument, if it works, provides good grounds for state-recognised gay and lesbian marriage.) The question, then, is how relationships of conjugal love can, ideally speaking, contribute to autonomy. My answer will have a lot to do with how friendship contributes to autonomy. To begin with I would like to develop a thesis about what I will call intimate friendship. Conjugal love differs from intimate friendship in the extent of its exclusivity. But intimate friendship is not itself promiscuous. It is what we might hope to have with a close circle of people. We will begin with a Hegelian insight about how such friendships can contribute to the autonomy of their participants. RECOGNITION IN INTIMATE FRIENDSHIP For the Hegelian tradition, one of the crucial goods that we get from social relationships is recognition. When another person recognises you, they regard you as having a certain sort of importance, and they respond appropriately to you in the light of it. Furthermore, the way in which they recognise you conditions your own view of yourself. Being valued by another can, under favourable conditions, lead to your valuing yourself. Arguments about recognition, then, are arguments about what John Rawls has called the ‘social bases of self-respect’.2 Intimate relationships, the Hegelian thinks, provide a particular sort of recognition: through them one is recognised as the particular individual one is. They provide a social context in which the traits that make us unique, distinct from all others, can be given due recognition. This is different from the environment of work organisation or state in which what is valued might be our particular talents, or our universal identity as a citizen. Now this is not to say that our fellow citizens cannot recognise us as being particular individuals as well as being fellow citizens. Even in an impersonal context where we meet as two citizens we should recognise each other as having a life, a perspective, an individuality of our own, 2 See for instance: ‘[i]t is clearly rational for men to secure their self-respect. A sense of their own worth is necessary if they are to pursue their conception of the good with zest and to delight in its fulfilment. Self-respect is not so much a part of any rational plan of life as the sense that one’s plan is worth carrying out. Now our self-respect normally depends upon the respect of others. Unless we feel that our endeavours are honoured by them it is difficult if not impossible for us to maintain the conviction that our ends are worth advancing.’ – John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 178. LIBERALISM, AUTONOMY AND CONJUGAL LOVE 289 rather than just a universal shared identity. However, in these more imper- sonal contexts, one might think that it is the universal and shared identity of citizen that is important rather than particularity: we recognise the person as having a life, an individuality of their own, in the sense of formally having the capacity for such a thing, but we do not actually grant recog- nition to the content of that life. It is this recognising, valuing, sharing of the content of the other’s life that is special to intimate relationships. In intimate friendship, as in conjugal love, we share – to some extent – the content of our lives with other people. We can imagine a continuum between the fully impersonal and the fully intimate relationship, where the crucial varying factor is the degree to which the content of one’s life is shared with other people. This is to say that, when you are in a (well-ordered) intimate relation- ship, another person takes you to be important as the particular person you are (likes, loves, cares for you as that person) and thinks that the things that make you that individual – those things that make up the content of your particular life – are important in themselves. They value the things that make you the particular person you are. This means that such a person values a certain detailed knowledge of you, and acts on the basis of that knowledge to care for you. The attitude that is demanded by this sort of intimate relationship is not one that we can expect everyone to take up. Thus we should not expect our colleagues at work or our fellow citizens to value these details about us. But it is a form of recognition that we properly seek in the intimate sphere. Hegel’s insight is that through the fact that another person values these details about us, we come to value them ourselves. The fullest account of the points that interest us here is contained in his discussion of love, not in the Philosophy of Right,3 but in a later set of lectures.4 There he says that in love ‘I gain myself in another person.’ Now this is a motto that could stand for the whole idea of recognition. We become ourselves through the image that we see reflected in the eyes of others, and in the context of struc- tured interactions with others. There are different types of recognition, and Hegel recognises that we find or develop different aspects of ourselves in a wide range of contexts rather than in the context of a single relationship: ultimately we need the three distinct forms of recognition that come from family, civil society and state. Love therefore represents a particular form of recognition. Hegel goes on: 3 Though see G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. §§161–9. 4 1824/5 lectures (Griesheim transcript), quoted in Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (London: University of California Press, 1997), 212. 290 CHRISTOPHER BENNETT In [my beloved] I have the intuition, the consciousness, that I count for something, in her I have worth and validity. But it is not only I who counts, she also counts for me. This means that each person has in the other the consciousness of the other and of the self, this unity.5 Hegel takes himself here to be talking about conjugal love, but something like this could be said about intimate and reciprocal forms of love and friendship more generally. Through friendship and love we gain a sense of our own importance, and the importance of our choices and projects. I shall argue that such recognition is essential to our autonomous functioning. Essential to autonomy, the thesis goes, is a form of caring based on detailed attention to the way one’s life is going. Now one thing missing from this sketch so far is an important proviso. We cannot get the required recognition from just anyone. Detailed atten- tion from someone with whom I have no wish to engage in such a relationship gives me, not a sense of my own importance, but rather a sense of being violated, being stalked, being a person whose subjectivity is not fully their own. Undesired attention is disempowering rather than empowering. Rather, for the detailed attention of another person to be a source of recognition, that person has to be someone we like and want to be involved with in such an intimate way. This suggests an important kind of reciprocity to friendship. In order for us to gain a sense of our own importance from it, the person who gives us this sense must be someone we take to be important as well. This reading of Hegel suggests the following view. A deep human need is that aspects of our lives such as our personal history, our present projects, our character, be accepted, affirmed, granted importance by others (or by an other). When this need is not met, it can be difficult to maintain our sense of the importance of what we are doing. Thus autonomy can be compromised. One role for intimate human groupings based on mutual affection is that they allow their members to satisfy this need through a mutual, detailed, altruism. THE DETAIL OF OUR LIVES I shall briefly defend this view through a consideration of some of the problems that we tend to face at some point in our lives. I shall call these problems part of the detail of our lives. By this I mean that they are part of the way our lives look when seen close up, as we ourselves (the ones who are leading them) see them. These range from the rela- tively everyday to some which are larger and more “metaphysical”. I take 5 Hegel, quoted in Williams, ibid. LIBERALISM, AUTONOMY AND CONJUGAL LOVE 291 it that, though these problems are often tremendously important to each individual, and although each individual experiences them, they are not (usually) important in any public sense. They are private problems of each individual. I shall suggest that we do need to discuss these problems with others; but that this cannot be done in a public way. Thus we need an intimate grouping. For, as the preceding discussion indicates, it is in intimate relationships that we can properly expect others to value the detail of our lives. One of the most obvious ways in which our autonomy can be under- mined without intimate friends is connected with our need for reassurance about our own value. Unless we are supremely self-confident or, what might be a variety of the same thing, deadeningly thick-skinned, we need reassurance in all sorts of ways. No one goes through life without exper- iencing bruising disagreement or disapproval, and when it concerns some fundamental aspect of oneself – rejection in love is one example – a ques- tion arises almost inescapably about the validity of the criticism and of what remains in the light of it. In the face of a bruising encounter with a student who disagrees passionately about the low mark you have given her, for instance, you may end up questioning not just your marking standards, but your character. Are you too harsh, inflexible, lacking in compassion? Are you negligent in marking, failing to see what was of value in the student’s essay? Or are you simply dealing out justice in accordance with your academic role? Regardless of your eventual perception of the justice of the student’s criticism, I suggest, it will be helpful to you to have a confidante from whom reassurance about your own worth can be sought. For if you decide that the student is wrong and that your mark was justified, you may still seek a second opinion that is not just a professional opinion. For instance, you may still want reassurance about the way you dealt with the student, and the personal qualities that you displayed in a situation which can hardly have left you feeling good about yourself, even if you think that what you did was justified. And if, on the other hand, you think that you were wrong in what you did, and that your treatment of her essay revealed some failing in you, the question will be raised for you of what, given this failing, there is still of value in you. Assuming that there can be an affirmative answer to this question, the best way to assure yourself of it is simply through contact with people who know you well enough to know your failings but still think that you are worth being friends with. Without such contact, the possibility arises that the insecurity about your own worth cannot be expunged and will feed into an insecurity about the worth of your projects or your deserving happiness, etc. Given the overwhelming likeli- 292 CHRISTOPHER BENNETT hood of facing such proble