Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Andrew Koppelman, "More Intuition Than Argument"
Northwestern law prof Andy Koppelman reviews, in the new issue of Commonweal, the book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, by Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert P. George. The book is the basis of an amicus curiae brief that Robert George et al. have submitted to SCOTUS in the two "gay marriage" cases being argued before SCOTUS this week. Read Andy's review and see whether you agree with his evaluation of the book, which ends with this:
"That claim’s most fundamental difficulty is the short distance from premise to conclusion. The union of the married heterosexual couple is uniquely good because...well, because the union of the married heterosexual couple is uniquely good. This raw intuition comes decorated with a complex theoretical apparatus, but that apparatus does no work. It’s like one of those old trick math problems, which at first glance seems to require complex computations:
7 + 8,398.14 × B ÷ √55 - 8,398.14 × √55 ÷ B = ?
Look again, and it’s clear that all the complexity cancels itself out, and that you end up right back where you began.
The publication of What Is Marriage? is a public service. It advances understanding of a perspective that many (though fewer and fewer) Americans share, but it is unlikely to persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree with its claims. It is a lucid window into a disappearing worldview."
The entire review is here.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2013/03/andrew-koppelman-more-intuition-than-argument.html
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for this post.
Koppelman provides no argument against the book's central claims, nor does he answer the question about what marriage is.
But these are not the main failing of the review. Even worse, the review is incoherent, since it draws its most important conclusion from a premise it claimed was meaningless. That passage is as follows: "The most attractive alternative to their view is that marriage is not “essentially” anything. It is a contingent cultural formation, which doubtless would never have arisen if humans did not reproduce sexually, but which nonetheless has no essence."
I thank Koppelman for successfully arguing against himself.