Question In many Western countries divorce laws have requirements that force the party with the greater income to continue in paid work and pay alimony to allow the other party to maintain the style of living to which they "have become accustomed during the marriage," or with similar wording. However, I am having a hard time reconciling this with some of the replies to question #1796, which referred to the obligation to have sex during marriage. Most people would certainly agree that one is not obliged to have sex with a partner, or an ex-partner after a relationship has broken up. The arguments there focused on people having an "inalienable right to one's body", but surely this same argument could be used against forcing people to do work they don't want to do? More specifically, how is forcing person A to work against their will to provide financial support for person B ethically different from obliging person A to have sex against their will to provide sexual satisfaction for person B?

Accepted:
March 22, 2008

Comments

There are lots of complex issues here (as in the previous question r#1796 referred to).

In response to the earlier question, I focued on rights and obligations because those were the terms in which the question was asked. Prof. Soble emphasized there that many other moral considerations are relevant in intimate human relations, e.g., what would be virtuous, nice, religiously required, what one should do out of a sense of duty, justice, or reciprocity, etc. I was not answering a question about what would be virtuous or just, but what is obligatory. I took obligations to be closely tied to rights. So I was not asserting that there are no other moral considerations in matters of sex as he seemed to read me, but only that there are some important rights and obligations that are relevant to whether one has an obligation to have sex in marriage.

But it is difficult to articulate what rights and obligations there are, and this current question rightly demands clarification. First, we might want to look at the analogy between (allegedly) obligatory sex and obligatory work. it seems to me that "the right to one's body" is best thought of as a cluster of rights. One of these rights is concerned with the body's physical integrity. Torture, assault, medical testing without informed consent, rape, all plausibly violate one's rights to a kind of physical integrity; but this isn't simple, for in cases of fatal epidemics, it is permissible, I think, to coerce me to be immunized or quarantined if I carry the deady disease and am likely to infect others. Some would argue that such a right to bodily integrity is basic; others would ground it in more basic moral considerations (self-ownership perhaps, autonomy, etc).

Depending on how one understands this right to bodily integrity, it may be possible to draw a line between sex and work. Forcing someone to work (not in a chain gang, but through threat of fines, say) isn't a violation of the body in a way that the torture, rape, etc. are. So it seems that unwanted sex is more a violation of bodily integrity than unwanted work; a lot will depend on a consideration of particular cases, though. If the underlying moral value is autonomy, however, then it might be that coerced work does violate the self in a way comparable to coerced sex or torture. One potential difference even here, though, is that in coerced sex and torture one is typically not acting autonomously, but in work, even work one is forced to perform, one is autonomous (?!). So even those who take autonomy to the basic moral good may have reason to distinguish the cases.

But second, we might want to ask what sorts of rights are relevant to work and the property which accrues from work. Here again, I'm inclined to say that there is a cluster of relevant rights. Some have argued that ownership rights include a right to "use, abuse, exclude, alienate, benefit" (Josh Cohen). To say that I own my labor is to say that I have a right to control it (use, abuse, exclude, alienate) and benefit from it. There are also degrees of benefit, so to fully own my labor might be to have the full set of control rights, plus the right to maximal benefit from my labor. But it isn't clear that one has full ownership in one's labor. For example, those who believe that one cannot sell oneself into slavery restrict the set of control rights; those who believe in taxation restrict the benefit rights.

There seem to be a variety of rationales for alimony laws, but the question posed seems to be concerned with whether it is legitimate to "force people to do work they don't want to do". If individuals continue to work in the jobs they had while married and are simply "taxed" some percentage for alimony, this would seem to require only a limitation on maximal benefit, for which there is only a weak case anyway (or so I think, not being a Libertarian). But this doesn't seem to be the scenario envisioned. Rather, the case under consideration seems to be one in which the wealthier party wants to live a simpler life and is prevented from doing so because of the need to cover alimony. I do think this would potentially be problematic (depending on the details of the case), because of the control rights that come with ownership of one's labor. But it is also my understanding that this is exactly the sort of thing that is negotiated in an ongoing way in divorce court.

What the question suggests, however, is that there may be a better way to think about rights to one's body in terms of a cluster of ownership rights like the rights to one's labor and one's property. But then I think the case of obligatory sex and obligatory work may compromise different elements of the cluster, so may have different moral implications.

For more on ownership rights, see Josh Cohen's lectures on Nozick/Libertarianism through MIT's Open Courseware:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Political-Science/17-01JSpring-2006/LectureNotes/index.htm