I’ve just been listening to the Jeremy Vine show on radio 2 over lunch. They were discussing the love life of the actress Tilda Swinton and her two lovers. Normally, I wouldn’t write about celebrity gossip; I’ve no idea who Tilda Swinton is and I couldn’t care less about her sex life. However, at least one of the listeners’ reactions contained what might be a logical fallacy.
One listener phoned in and said that marriage was a Christian undertaking and that such an arrangement was doomed to failure.
A guest on the show spoke of her experiences as the other woman in a three way marriage. She accused the previous listener of being a Victorian moralist. Who was she to said how people should or should not behave? We’ve moved on and now everything goes. She then went on to talk about how much everyone had ended up being hurt by the affair. She said that we are all emotional beings and that when one considered human emotions behaving this way involved lots of risks.
Doesn’t she rather agree with the previous listener then? Whatever the aims of your morality and that of others may be (e.g. follow the doctrine of the Bible, try to maximise your own happiness, etc.), if you both agree that a type of behaviour is doomed in some way, you should accept and agree with the other person’s opinion. However flawed or mystical Christian morality may be, if your experience of an open marriage was painful, you shouldn’t get upset when a Christian tells you not to get involved in one.
Reversing Entropy 