Are there utilitarian arguments showing a society with only loving heterosexual marriages achieves greater utility than all other alternatives?

Question

Option 1: A hypothetical society where only loving heterosexual marriages exist.

Option 2: Any other society that deviates from the hypothetical ideal set forth by Option 1, by including, for example, homosexuality, polyamory, infidelity, sex outside of marriage, pornography, OnlyFans, bestiality, and various fetishes.

Assuming a Utilitarian meta-ethical framework, has anyone published arguments defending the position that the (supposedly) "ideal" society represented by Option 1 produces greater net utility (i.e., more overall happiness and less suffering) than any other (more realistic) society better described by Option 2 (thus implying that we as a society should aim for that purported ideal)?

Similarly, have rebuttals to such arguments been published?

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Clarification:

As worded, the comparison of options (1) and (2) might come across in an unseemly way. I can see that, but I wasn't sure about my feelings in this case, and per the OP writer's comments in this chat room, I don't think that they're trying to manipulate readers into thinking, "Oh, so I guess utilitarianism actually supports a repressive sexual ethos!" For example, they say:

How do you objectively measure the "value" of something in the absence of religious presuppositions? You talk about the "value" of marriage compared to OnlyFans. First of all, I fail to see how the two concepts are mutually exclusive. I'm pretty sure there must be married couples out there who either consume or offer services on OnlyFans, which would falsify the false dichotomy. Secondly, again, how do you objectively assign moral value to things? Who decides what's the optimal evaluation metric? What moral framework are you proposing? Utilitarianism? What's the utility function?

If there is a sense of some sort of "bristling" in the way the OP is written, it's not the angry tension of a religious maniac, it's the frustration of a wide-read Internet user debating people who have an exaggerated sense of the power of language.

[P.S. this "clarification" section is meant temporarily, to facilitate reopening the question.]

Answer 1

Assuming a utilitarian framework, no one has published arguments defending that option (1) (a society of consisting only of loving hetereosexual couples) produces greater "net utility" than other societies such as the one referred to by option (2). Similarly, no one has published direct arguments, using a utilitarian framework, defending that option (2) generates greater net utility.

From a utilitarian point of view, the question whether option (1) or option (2) is a more ideal society is not a philosophical question. It's not a question that can be answered just by conceptual analysis or by a priori reasoning. Assuming a utilitarian point of view, the question is essentially an empirical question: Which kind of society generates the most happiness assuming the same population count in each society?

However, that last question is not trivial. Despite the fact that utilitarianism tries to frame it as an empirical question, it may not give a sufficienty determinate sense to it. Two of the main problems in utilitarianism are (1) how to measure happiness (utility) and (2) how to compare the happiness of one individual against the happiness or lack of happiness of another individual.

As to problem (1): Should we look at overall averages? Average over indiduals and over time? Try to define a measure for a kind of total sum amount? (How are happiness and suffering summed?) Which unit of measure is appropriate (which is actually measurable and which is most suitable for the purpose of deriving action plans or norms)? Can a certain amount of suffering be justified if followed by (more) happiness later?

Problem (1) may not be completely intractable. We do in fact use several measures to gauge something vague like 'overall happiness'. None of them perfect, but each of them showing some aspect that doesn't seem totally irrelevant. (Poll people and ask them how happy they are. GDP. GDP per capita. Suicide rate. Life expectancy. General health. Access to health care. Social mobility. Crime rate. In relation to sexual mores: Divorce rates.) Can we use those kind of empirical measures as basis of action plans or to advocate certain policies? Well, in fact we use them all the time - that's what rational, data-based political decision making and government is all about.

From a theoretical standpoint, however, these measures may seem ad hoc. We don't have a unified, quantitative empirical theory of happiness that can be applied to society at large. It also seems rather unlikely that this could be developed any time soon. (There are non-quantitative mathematical and empirical theories that could be used as alternative, such as certain forms of game theory, so this doesn't need to be a death blow to any form of consequentialism.)

As to problem (2): This is essentially the question whether the lack of happiness (or the suffering) of one individual can be compensated by the increased happiness of another individual. It's also a problem in a single individual's life: Is it justified (rational) for me to make myself suffer now in order to be happy (or happier) later? Is it ok (rational) to indulge in pleasure now if I will suffer greatly for that later?

Problem (1) and (2) cannot be totally separated: How would we compare the happiness of two unequally sized populations? If "total sum of happiness" makes sense, then a very large population where everyone just scrapes by may have a greater total sum of happiness than a very small population where everyone lives a carefree life. (See: Parfitt's The Repugnant Conclusion)

Utilitarianism may not have a completely satisfactory answer or solution to problem (2). On the other hand, this is a general problem in many other ethical systems and meta-ethical theories as well. Problem (2) is a problem we also actually have to deal with sometimes, in conflict situations, in particular in dire scenarios that only have bad options. In that case, the Vulcan motto of "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" may be the only morally justified recourse.

Now, if we set the utilitarian framework aside, and want to get a sense of how happy a hypothetical society consisting mostly of hetereosexual couples would be, compared to a society closer to our own where are all kinds of sexual relations exist - how could we sensibly do so? We cannot really, since the first society is merely hypothetical, but we could still point at some actual sociological data and try to extrapolate from that.

(Btw the phrasing of the original question is highly tendentious since it speaks of "loving couples" in option (1) and doesn't mention this for option (2). In fact, in option (2) it explicitly also mentions morally 'bad' behavior such as infidelity. However, if we assume happy, loving couples in the one case, it's only fair to assume happy relationships or encounters in the other case - and then there is no problem. By assumption, both options are then equally 'good'.)

If we limit the comparison to an option (1) heterosexual marriages only and option (2) both heterosexual and same-sex marriages, then it seems sensible to compare the 'overall happiness' (ignoring any moral framework or moral conclusions) based on divorce rates in our actual societies. Based on the actual data, we could then ask everyone to either extrapolate and/or to draw their own conclusions.

The wiki entry about Divorce-rates of same-sex couples gives some interesting comparative data points. The rates vary per country, and are sometimes significantly different for gay or lesbian couples; in the US, in so far as data is available, it seems that there is no significant rate difference between same-sex and hetero couples.

If we accept this as sufficient evidence -- that there is no difference in the overall amount of happiness of same-sex versus straight couples --, then the question which society is 'better' can only be answered based on other criteria - measures of happiness that refer to other aspects of our lives. For instance, the happiness that derives from living in a pluralist society, or the happiness that is based on seeing that same-sex couples have the same civil rights as straight couples (property rights, rights of visitation in hospitals, marriage rights, adoption rights). Or the happiness that derives from the fact that gay sex is no longer punishable by chemical castration -- as Alan Turing had to suffer in the 1950's and which may have contributed to his suicide.

Answer 2

An interesting anecdote. Years and years ago, in an effort to understand the new phenomenon of the religious right, I read Jarry Falwell's Listen America. In one chapter, Jerry argued, based on sociological studies, for the improved well being of both adults and children in stable marriages. Neither "loving" nor "heterosexual" were part of the cited sociology, nor any prohibitions on either cheating or divorce.

I considered the cited sociological evidenced to be fairly persuasive, and that it supported that government policy should work to make it easier to get married, and easier to stay married, to the benefit of both the partners and their offspring. This was an interesting convergence of both the Bismark conservative agenda of public policy to strengthen social institutions, and of the liberal technocrat policy of using science to do social engineering.

I also noted that the evidence and its implications strongly supported that gay marriage should be approved ASAP, along with gay adoption. This was in the early 1980s, and gay adoption, and gays not being persecuted in the workplace, were very live questions, while gay marriage was decades away.

Old Jerry probably would have been appalled at my conclusions from his book!

Answer 3

Per a Google search, there appear to be no thought experiments, current in any peer-reviewed literature (and not clearly in any other literature), which try out your comparison. From Jeremy Bentham onward, utilitarianism has been affiliated more with allowances for (2) than enforcement of (1). There was, before Bentham, a school/movement of so-called "Anglican utilitarians" who thought that principles of utility could be justified theistically, but how much this opened a back-door to Biblical invocations, I don't know (and then which invocations? I would presume those from whichever version of the Bible (the KJV?) that the Anglican communion used then).

Absent an in-print target, I can't offer in-print rebuttals directly. But one might consider the problem of "utility monsters" in this connection. For a society to exhibit a greater net happiness when it is oppressing huge numbers of its citizens to try to enforce a sexual ethos that criminalizes everything under your option #2, would require that the segment of society experiencing happiness (because they're not being oppressed) also enjoys the suffering of the oppressed so as to be a collective of utility monsters. Perhaps there's nothing that a totally abstract form of a utility principle could say to gainsay that result; or, I don't know what the response to the problem of utility monsters is generally.