Friendship and Marriage

This chapter asks whether marriage is of distinctive value as compared to (other forms of) friendship. It begins by reviewing the case against marriage, and at the proposal that society would do better if it abolished marriage and rather promoted wider forms of friendship. In response to problems that can be raised about marriage, the chapter argues that marriage should be reformed rather than abolished. The key argument presented for this conclusion, which is termed the Equality Argument, claims that marriage can have distinctive value insofar as it represents a form – perhaps the most basic form – of “living together as equals.”