There is a line of argument inspired by John Stuart Mill according to which consenting adults should be free to do as they please, provided that no one is being harmed. After all, so the argument goes, what a person does in the privacy of her or his own home is no one’s damn business. While I certainly feel the intuitive pull of this line of thought, I am afraid that things are not quite as simple as Mill’s defenders make it ought to be. In fact, one problem with Mill’s line of thought is precisely what inspired me to write my forthcoming book The Family and the Political Self, namely that in advancing this people generally ignores the reality that children are an extremely important part of society. If society consisted only of fully matured adults, then all sorts of things that might be permissible that would be abhorrent in the face of the reality that children do exist.
It was not so long ago that people understood that it was not just parents and teacher who modeled behavior for children, but adults in general. No doubt the very idea of respect for adults is rooted in the idea that adults generally model behavior for children. Why, time was when it was even possible for a stranger to correct a child. I shall always remember an event that took place in a shopping mall in the city of Haifa (Israel). A bunch of kids started becoming rowdy, and an elderly lady (who was passing by) did not hesitate to approach them to ask them to quite down. Oh, did I mention that I am talking about several black kids and an elderly white lady? Can you imagine that happening in America? But I digress.
Now, if we take seriously the fact that children exist in society, then there are some limits on what even consenting adults should do. I shall advance what I take to be a decisive example involving marriage but without arguing against gay marriages.
Imagine someone thinking that any two consenting adults should be free to marry one another is acceptable practice. From this it follows that parents should be permitted to marry their children once their children are of the appropriate age. So, for instance, a 50 year-old father could marry his 25 year-old daughter or son. One argument against this in the case of the father-daughter marriage pertains to the issue of biological defects in their children. But, of course, that issue is non-existent if it is a father-son marriage. So why not, given that they are both consisting adults? Well, the answer is tied to the psychological well-being of children.
Given the nature of the parent-child relationship (and setting aside the issue of abuse itself), nothing can be more inimical to the flourishing of that relationship, and so to the psychological well-being of the children, than the children having to grow up with the thought that they might one day be seen as the object of their parents sexual desire. Children should never have to wonder whether they were born so that they may be one day the object of their parents sexual desire.
You see if it is allowed that any two consenting adults can marry, then presumably there would be nothing wrong with advertisements regarding such matters and public announcements of such marriages. If I am right, then the problem is not with unrelated consenting adults Jack and John or Lisa and Mary or even Paul and Sue taking their wedding vows and having pictures of the ceremony placed in the Sunday paper. Rather, we have a formidable problem when it is the photographs of marriages between parent and adult children that appear in the Sunday paper, and when there are commercials that suggests, or claim outright that, “Your child may be that special someone for you”. In this latter case, it does not matter at all that both parties to the marriage are unmistakably adults.
Just imagine the uncertainty that this would create in a child—to say nothing of that haunting question “Mom, Dad: Would you ever want to marry me?” Touches and hugs from parents that used to be unmistakably expressions of affection would often enough turn out to be fraught with ambivalence because the child is not sure as to the nature of the hug from her or his parents. Then there would be the issue of how children, especially teenagers, would have to dress before their parents. Nowadays, the typical male teenager, say, takes it for granted that if he rolls out of bed and shows up at the breakfast table in his boxer shorts, neither of his parents will lust after him. And surely that is the way it should be. Allow for the marriage between parents and children who are consenting adults, and one that destroys the tranquility of the parent-child relationship.
Let me mention here that the practice of parents marrying their adult children is not at all analogous to children being protected from inappropriate images either on the television or the internet or elsewhere. When the sanctity of the parent-child relationship is in place, I believe that it is possible for parents to protect their children from alls sorts of woes in society. The very problem with parents marrying their adult children is that undermines that sanctity which, in turn, makes it the case that parents are less able to play the protective role in the lives of their children as they (the parents) should play.
If I have argued soundly in this essay, then there are some thing things that consenting adults should not be allowed to do because the practice would rupture the sanctity of the parent-child relationship and would, therefore, be inimical to the psychological well-being of children. Of course, these remarks assume that the well-being of children is one that every society should take seriously. Should it be necessary to make the case for that, as well? I should hope not.
Behold the virtue of self-command: It is the wisdom to see that some things are wrong, not so much because they harm the participants, but because they would make life psychologically intolerable for the most innocent of all human beings, namely children, and the wherewithal to refrain from such behavior unfailingly and nost willingly. Alas, our own individual harm or the lack thereof is not the measure of all things.
Many people suppose that any talk about restrictions with regard to marriage is surreptitiously an attempt to preclude gay marriages. We have seen that this is not so. I have not said a word against gay marriages.
