Marriage Is Communal Consent

Short post today.

All that is needed to make illicit sex moral in this day and age is to confirm both participants’ consent. 

This seems to be the gold standard in sexual ethics. However, a single sexual relation affects more than simply those who physically partake in it, in particular it affects the families of those associated with the participants, both those related by marriage and those related by blood.

If a man has premarital sex:

·      He takes away from the experience of the man she will get married to

If a woman has premarital sex:

·      Male members of her family will be angry

·      Threatens stability of household before she gets married and after she gets married and this negatively affects her kids and her own future prospects.

Take for example, the man who is cheated on, the father and brother of the girlfriend, the man who eventually gets married to a woman who had previous sexual encounters (premarital sex is rumored to lower the success of her marriage); all of them are negatively affected by extramarital sex simply because they care about it. Women are also affected too. If extramarital sex is allowed and widespread, why would any man ever marry a woman? Actually, many men in the West are choosing to forgo marriage! Furthermore, a woman’s reputation with men is far more fragile than a man’s reputation with women. This is the unfortunate reality of things.

If a sexual relation impacts the society as well as the individuals...

Could marriage then be, from this perspective, simply communal consent?

With the rise of individualism, many have forgot this perspective.

If sex without participant’s consent is rape, what is sex without communal consent? If the punishment for sex without individual consent is capital punishment (at least here in Saudi Arabia), what is the punishment for sex without communal consent?

I am obsessed with making religiously inspired laws reasonable in a secular light. Although this is unnecessary for the religious, it is still fun to ponder about regardless.