Opinion of Polyamory

[The Mikado]

I'd like to observe that "consenting adults" isn't actually a complete moral argument, appealing as it is to us denizens of "I'm okay, you're okay, all we need out of life is to Be True To Ourselves" post-modernity. Substantially it's the same as "it's my First Amendment right" or "it's a free country". All it means is that what you're doing isn't a felony.

My mother had a great deal of help raising me--from relatives, friends, my godparents, social workers, and so forth--but I still suffered a great deal from not having the stability and conceptual felicity of two clear-cut parental figures. Please don't armchair diagnose what the problems with other people's childhoods were.

This is a valid point which deserves its own thread to discuss. "It shouldn't be illegal" is not at all the same thing as saying "I approve of this," and I feel that contemporary discourse tends to ignore the middle ground between those two statements.

One issue I feel this way about is gambling, for instance. I strongly disapprove of gambling. I also don't want to criminalize it.

[Waterfall]

Acceptable, and I have yet to see a good argument against it.

Polyamory, if you scale it up, will trend heavily toward polygyny. This is an immutable fact of how humans are wired.

The inevitable result is a society in which there are few available women and lots of unlucky single men competing over those women. This situation is going to be much more dysfunctional, for several reasons:

1. Men often compete for women through things like violence and ostentatious displays (rather than by, say, seeing who can cure the most diseases or something)
2. The energy and resources used to compete for women could have been better spent doing something productive
3. This extra competition lowers trust


Additionally, the reduced attention children will get from their fathers will take a toll on long-term development. Plus, the size and quality of the gene pool will be reduced.