Monogamy vs. Integrity

I have no complaints against monogamy. It works for us. And those times in my youth that I've tried to do things differently, it didn't work, sometimes anticlimactically but sometimes disastrously.

This post isn't actually about monogamy. It's about intelligent semantics. But my intelligent-semantics point seems to come up most often and most starkly when talking about monogamy. I'm not sure why.

I've had several friends struggle with the issue of monogamy over the years. Most of the struggles happen among men, but there have been a couple of women, too.

One guy was in therapy and the current topic was commitment. His therapist asked him what value he wanted to stand for. My friend answered, "Integrity."

(I wasn't there, obviously. I'm trusting his account.)

The therapist was excited and started talking about working toward monogamous commitment. My friend said, "No, I didn't say monogamy. I didn't even say honesty. I said integrity. I don't want to be a hypocrite!"

The therapist said, No no no, and pulled out a dictionary to show him that integrity meant what he the therapist said it meant.

I have several different problems with this response. The most minor problem is that if you look it up here, the word means precisely the opposite of hypocrisy, just as my friend indicated.

More serious is the logical mistake. Imagine you ask me which girl at the party I'm most attracted to. I point and say "Alison," and you say, "No, her name is Judith. That one across the room is Alison." It doesn't matter which one of us is correct about the names, it would make absolutely no sense for you to conclude that what I want is to pursue the woman who you think is named Alison. Clearly I'd want to pursue the woman whose name I think is Alison.

If I were confronted that way by the therapist, I'd say "Fine, you want to think integrity means that someone sticks to your preferred moral code? Then I must not have meant integrity. I must have meant whatever word means the opposite of hypocrisy. That's the value I want to stand for."

Monogamy is not the opposite of hypocrisy. They're on logically orthogonal axes.

The logical mistake is also a therapeutic mistake. If I'm your therapist, I want you to take ownership of your values and decisions, not feel trapped into them by silly word games. What you meant is what matters, not what I thought you meant, and certainly not what I want you to have meant.

So I object to the move the shrink made (a) definitionally, (b) logically, (c) therapeutically, and finally (d) semantically: semantic distinctions are important!

(I've even heard it claimed that an increase in intelligence means an increase in the useful distinctions one can perceive or deduce and apply.)

Conflation lowers intelligence.

Distinctions increase it.

A dictionary is a reference on current usage, but current usage is not the be-all-and-end-all of meaning. Equally -- no, more -- important is that meaningful distinctions are maintained and communicated. It should surprise no one if current popular usage is full of confusions and conflations. Next time someone grabs a dictionary in the middle of an argument and acts like it's the last word on the subject, you may now officially dismiss this person as an idiot.

Good semantics is smart.

Bad semantics is dumb.

No matter what the shrink's dictionary might have said, good distinctions need words to represent them. Monogamy is a perfectly good word with a more-or-less clear meaning. We don't need integrity to be a synonym. The opposite of monogamy is not cheating. The opposite of monogamy is polygamy, polyamory, promiscuity ... take your pick. It's only cheating if you violate the values you yourself hold or have agreed to.

If you'd like to get into the possibility that someone should hold certain values, that's a completely separate argument.