A contract marriage is just that: the basis of the marriage is a contract between two individuals to get what they want. The “contract marriage” is the reminder that sex is involved – otherwise we would be talking about a normal employment relationship or other business arrangement. In a contract marriage, the two people are together for the things they can get if they work together.
A compatibility marriage is based on two people not merely wanting to be together, but also being well-suited for one another, such as by having compatible lifestyles and values. In a compatibility marriage, the two people are together for each other.
“Marriage” in history has referred to a variety of different social, economic, and legal setups, most of which involved some sort of contract marriage. Indeed, the perversions of sexless marriage, and of unregulated sex outside the marriage (e.g. just not a replacement mistress), have been common occurrences. To make the point about the unviability of a contract marriage in a free society, here I will insist that a meaningful definition of a marriage as a policymaker, means that you are having a sort of frequent amount of sex, and only with the person to whom you are married, and that there is not some seriously short e.g. one year, term of marriage.
The first point is the matter of exchanging sex for other benefits. The commitment to deliver sex implies that you provide it whether you want to or not. That either is prostitution (the initial case of contract marriage), or rape (if and when the payment/benefits are not worth the pain etc. of sex). Consider the classical understanding of slavery: that you have the right to rape your slave. You do feed your slave and provide other benefits, but that does not change the fact that you are raping your slave. The practical issue with litigating the slave rape is that the slave has no power/rights in the legal system, so even if you ban murdering or maiming your slave, your master’s still going to make your life a living hell if you rat him out. As long as your slave is your slave, you never will know if any such relationship is genuine. You clearly can see that the matter of a contract marriage that cannot be annulled so easily, is essentially similar to slave rape, and the major difference could be the amount of compensation. That brings you back to the question: is it OK to maim someone if you pay them enough money? Is it OK to kill someone if you pay them enough blood money? All of these are excellent philosophical questions that you should understand – but the conclusion to them all is no; in order to distinguish slaves from freemen (and a free society must be composed of freemen), you cannot accept a large degree of physical assaults/damage to workers in a situation where it can be avoided (e.g. not war where someone has to die). As rape clearly is one of the worst physical assaults in the general case (e.g. where the woman is fertile, because you can kill her with pregnancy), in the general case we cannot justify this. The question then becomes to the extent to which you consider prostitution as a valid employment choice (as prostitutes, especially old ones, are not considered to get pregnant at a relevant rate, they all are assumed already to have contracted VD, etc.); but here we run into a sort of circular question. The original problem was that the woman didn’t find the contracted price to be worth prostituting herself over anymore, therefore now she is getting raped; but then the rape is being essentially accepted because she is a prostitute. Hence the woman now is a second-class citizen/you can do crimes to her that would not be accepted in an ordinary free market situation (that is, she is being treated worse than an a-la-carte streetwalker), and therefore has sold herself into slavery/second-class citizenship. Since we consider that selling oneself into slavery is not a feature of a free society/compatible with a free society, therefore we cannot permit the enforcement of this contract.
Instead of accepting that conclusion and leaving the matter, let us also consider that the contract could be enforced – and particularly, let us consider the matter of ensuring the fidelity of the marriage. We have a great deal of experience with attempting to ensure fidelity; amongst other considerations:
- One system to ensure this requires that you track the participants at all times, i.e. a technological police state
- Another system assigns a chaperone, so that you never are unescorted
- I’m not aware of an obvious way to assign the blame if one of the parties cheats and gives the other partner VD (e.g. is there a genetic screen or test that can tell you the duration of the infection and who would have infected whom)
That freedom that you have in a free society e.g. to associate with others without approval, gives you the freedom to cheat. If you do discover the cheating via VD, you have no way to tell who was responsible. A big police investigation would ensue, and the only way you’re going to trace it back is if the police can e.g. track the parties’ previous locations from many months back, recover text messages – which requires the implementation of the technological police state.
The final issue I want to consider is the economic viability and means to assess that you are getting what you paid for in the contract. Consider first for contrast: that you are infected with VD, and that the available prostitutes won’t get pregnant/will abort/not your problem. In this case, is there a strong reason to make a marriage contract vs. a la carte? The fundamental issues about VD and pregnancy, as well as jealousy (because there could have been an assumption about exclusivity), don’t apply in this case.
The reasons you make the marriage contract are because you are concerned about VD, pregnancy (for or against), and because you are or will be a jealous person. The VD on entry can be screened for to some extent (assuming the parties stay faithful); but neither the pregnancy nor (note that the cheating in the marriage already got discussed) the previous partners/body count can be. If you consider “my body my choice” or other reasoning (e.g. 100% custody and child support) that places the onus of the childbearing decision on the woman – stances typically associated with a free society/individual self-determination – then you don’t have the capability to enforce that part of the contract, either, and therefore you are not making a contract. As for previous partners/body count, unless you have the technological police state to go back and audit (or count in real time) the possible partners, you have no way to screen this and so you are not able to vouch/qualify anyone who presents and offers to make this contract with you.