Brake's Arguments Against Marriage

In talking about stratification of genders and sexism, Okin proposes that the Rawlsian conception of justice is the first contemporary theory to consider family as playing “…a fundamental role in the stages in which [our] conception of justice is acquired.” (Okin 228). Thus, in order to have a just society, we must have a just family. Feminist writer Card proposes that marriage, the institution that forms the basis for the traditional family structure, is “…itself is an evil, to the extent that it facilitates the infliction and cover-up of reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm to those unlucky enough to find themselves trapped…” (Card 208). Card sees marriage as an institution which is oppressive of freedom and restrictive of choice, thus
An alternative, Brake proposes, is minimal marriage. The theoretical framework for Brake’s minimal marriage is the promotion of caring relationships. In practice, this would be implemented as a selective distribution of the benefits that should be associated with a caring-relationship. If we cannot promise to love someone eternally, maybe we can promise to act and behave in certain ways (Brake 196). Brake gives examples of such promises: sexual-exclusivity, caretaking or even acting amorously toward one another (Brake 196-197). Specifically, Brake specifies that promises that conflict with certain moral requirements such as self-respect cannot be the subject of promises (Brake 197), nor can eternal love be. What further specific promises can or cannot be made would require an empirical discussion of specific cases, which is beyond the purpose of this philosophical work. Thus, issues such as promising healthcare will not be discussed in this paper, but it will be assumed that this is an economic good that can be promised.
In summary, minimal marriage, as proposed by Brake, supposes that couples (and thus women) will have more liberty to “…consider marital obligations carefully, articulate them precisely, and agree on them explicitly.” (Brake 198), allowing for the promotion of caring relationships while minimizing
Ironically, Card was simply wrong: the legalization of homosexual marriage has become a federal mandate (save certain particularities). The possibility cannot thus be discarded that our society is capable of destructuring marriage as a fundamental institution in our society. In this context, it would seem that Card’s plan to work towards equality of benefit distribution and abolition of the harmful institution of marriage could very well be fit by Brake’s proposal. How extreme this change should be is something that is hard cannot be predicted on philosophical grounds, because as has been shown in this paper, the benefits and harms of regulation can be argued either way.
What is clear however is that our society needs to adopt a minimal marriage model, and eventually destroy the current stigma surrounding the unmarried (Card 204). As Card explains: legal regulation of marriage in Europe is a relatively recent matter of the past few centuries (Chauncey qtd. in Card 204). If we have been able to change our social comprehension of marriage once, by separating it from religious ties, and once again more recently by defining it as sex-independent, we can and should do it once more, by adopting a minimal marriage