Marital friendship, reproduction, and social contract marriag

Marriage always has been considered a human good. Historically, marriage has been linked to biological reproduction. If humans were a species that did not reproduce sexually and with a rational capacity to understand their actions, marriage would not exist. Humans reproduce in the context of a sexual friendship, for indeed human sexual activity takes place in social associations. Humans display a greater deal of courting behavior than do many other animals. This paper treats marriage in two distinct ways. The first way that marriage is treated is as a virtue that perfects the human activities of reproduction, sexual friendship, and the creation of a household. It will be argued that such an understanding of marriage is 'naturalistic' in that the goods that the virtue of marriage perfects are rooted in human nature and agency. Because marriage is a unique type of friendship, friendship itself being a type of virtue, marriage, understood in its naturalistic sense as a type of virtue, needs to be accounted for in a causal analysis, a methodology that is Aristotelian, as articulated in Aristotle's Physics. This is must be done because to perfect an activity, one must have a working knowledge of what the activity is. Thus, marriage as a human and activity and a human virtue in a naturalistic sense will be analyzed in terms of Aristotle's four causes. Another understanding of marriage is a view of marriage that is similar to a social contract theory, which is roughly, that marriage exists in order to suppress natural impulses that make human life on the whole painful. The naturalistic notion of marriage, conceptually, arises from human nature, and as a virtue, perfects human nature. The social contract theory of marriage, alternatively, understands marriage as arising from human customs in order to make human life less painful. As such, the terms and 'nature' of marriage are up to the contractors of the marriage. It will be argued in this paper that . It will here be argued that marital virtue understood as the perfection of human biological reproduction in the context of a social relationship between a man and a woman characterized by the virtue of perfect friendship is inconsistent with a social contract conception of marriage and requires a naturalistic conception of marital good.