Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Polygamy: Why it's like divorce
Polygamy counts as one of those acts in the hierarchy of morals that has been reckoned at times to be a "necessary evil" -- not meaning, as McKinsey says, that God changes his mind about what is moral, but that what is moral may be superseded by what is moral on other grounds. To use the classic example, lying is wrong unless you have Jews in your cellar. Then lying becomes a moral imperative.Well, I tend to disagree that that would be lying, because that specific example is, I think, a loaded question of sorts. They don't have the right to know, so you don't have to tell them. At any rate, polygamy does seem to fall into this category, though I'm not sure how. Perhaps it's like the Eastern Orthodox "divorce" and those danged Jewish "bills of divorce" and stuff like that which I never understood.
