This thesis is a work of applied moral and political philosophy which analyses the moral value of marriage and argues for a restructuring of the legal institution of marriage in accordance with principles of justice. The first section contains exegesis and criticism of Kant's and Hegel's accounts of marriage. Kant's focus is on the contractual exchange of rights, Hegel's on the nature of the relationship between the spouses. In the second section, I consider Kantian, Hegelian, and eudaimonistic accounts of the moral value of marriage and conclude that moral value is found in the relationship between the spouses, not in the rights established through the marriage contract. In order to defend the position that loving relationships have moral value, I elucidate what moral value love for a particular other has within a universalist ethics. While I argue that marriage has no moral value which is not to be found in such relationships, I defend a Hegelian account which locates social value in the institution of marriage precisely because it promotes such relationships. In the final section, I argue that the principle of liberal neutrality requires that the principle of freedom of contract should apply to marriage. While I defend the institution of marriage against certain feminist criticisms, I also argue that justice requires that the state recognize same-sex and polygamous unions as marriages. Freedom of contract may be limited under certain conditions in the interest of gender equality; I argue for an interpretation of Rawls' principle of equal opportunity which entails that liberalism is committed to addressing gender inequality even at the expense of freedom of contract.

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published_or_final_version / Comparative Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

[Truncated abstract] The 1974 Indonesian Marriage Law required all divorces to be ratified by courts and vested household leadership with husbands. This thesis examines the impact of this law upon the negotiation of divorce, and its implications for the constitution of state and social power. I argue that the New Order state used this law to attempt to control gender relations and reinforce political legitimacy, but that women and men resisted this project in a variety of ways. Divorce may entail the contestation of state ideological prescriptions on gender. It also reveals gender relations operating independently of the state. As such, it is a particularly fruitful site for an analysis of the location and constitution of state and social power. In order to analyse the complex relationship between marriage, divorce, and power, I have adopted several original strategies. I expand the definition of property to encompass

Choices pertaining to education, marriage and migration generally have profound impacts on individuals' lives. This dissertation focuses on the role of incentives in decisions involving education, interracial marriage and migration. To this end, Chapter 2 initiates a new line of research that investigates the role of self-employed parents on their children's post-graduation plans and college success. Chapter 2 reveals that self-employed parents affect their offspring's college success even after accounting for possible ability bias and controlling for various individual characteristics. While Chapter 2 focuses on the role of parental occupation on students' incentives to succeed in college, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 investigate intricate relationships among education, interracial marriage, the anti-miscegenation laws, and migration in the U.S. Chapter 3 introduces a study that links previous literatures on the migration of blacks in the U.S. during the Great Migration with anti-miscegenation laws and interracial marriage. Chapter 3 concludes that anti-miscegenation laws in individuals' states of birth affected the sorting of inter- and intraracially married black males into destination states differentially. Chapter 4 contributes to the previous literature on the determinants of black-white marriages by focusing on the impact of geographical variation of the distributions of black and white education and individual education on interracial marriage. / text

For over forty years, at the turn of this century, the white settlers of Southern Rhodesia devoted considerable energy to the discussion and the regulation of inter-racial sexual relations. The settlers' worries about maintaining their position in power were expressed, in part, in the periodic outbreaks of 'black peril' hysteria, a term which well-captures white fears about the threat that African men were thought to represent to white women. Although voluntary sexual encounters between white women and black men were prohibited from 1903 onwards, no such prohibition existed for white men in their relations with black women. The white women made several attempts to have legislation passed prohibiting such liasons, and failed largely because in doing so they were perceived to be challenging the authority of the white men. The regulation of interracial sexual intercourse thus served to reinforce the white male domination of Rhodesian society.

Commentaries on the medieval notion of the "conjugal debt" have often emphasized its reciprocal nature, but its inequality becomes apparent when re-embedded into its theological, medical, and legal contexts. By tracing the theology that accompanied 1 Cor 7:3-4 through selected theologians, I will demonstrate that Paul's words did not function in equivalent ways for both spouses. By examining medieval medical understandings of human physiology, I will ask what it means to 'have authority over a body' when the bodies themselves are not equal. Finally, by demonstrating ways in which consent and coercion blurred together in twelfth-century legal debates, I will ask how meaningful it is to grant spouses equal rights to sex when their marriage may have been coerced. The topic will serve as a broader meditation on what it means to 'have authority over a body' and to conceive of marital sexuality as a system of debt.