Cause and Effect Essay on Divorce and Children

I. Introduction

Besides the Vatican City, the Philippines is the only country in the world that doesn’t permit divorce. Filipino married couples have previously filed petitions to legalize divorce due to their spouses’ infidelity, physical abuse, drug abuse, and other factors that lead them to consider an end to their marriage. The Philippine Senate has begun hearing proposals for the legalization of divorce. The Catholic Church has criticized divorce proposals.

According to the 1987 Philippine Constitution: Article XV, Section 2: “Marriage, as an inviolable social institution, is the foundation of the family and shall be protected by the State.” This is the reason why the Philippine Catholic Church condemns divorce as unconstitutional. CBCP also claims that the Philippine Constitution was recognized as the first proponent of pro-family values in the world. Back in February 2018, House Bill 7303 (“An Act Instituting Absolute Divorce and Dissolution of Marriage in the Philippines) was submitted to the upper house. The bill is a substitute for other house bills numbered 116, 1062, 2380, and 6027 related to the termination of marriages. Our stance is for divorce, but we will stress on its moral and ethical implications later on.

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Two published statements of the CBCP are used here for arguments against divorce. Fallacies detected from the statements’ arguments will be presented and restated in the following paragraphs. The ethical and moral aspects of the issue will be presented as well.

II. Fallacies from the statements

According to CBCP, if divorce as an “easy option” is legalized to end marriages, both marriages and families tend to dissolve more easily. Thus children from these families will “grow up disoriented and deprived of the care of both parents.” They have committed a slippery slope fallacy in their arguments contending that if divorce were to be legalized, families would break up more quickly, resulting in children growing up fuddled and stripped of their parents’ care in the future. CBCP has assumed that these consequences they provided are inevitable and to be traced back to the legalization of divorce. This leads to another fallacy of equating correlation to causation. While divorce correlates with harm and emotional instability in children, divorce itself does not cause these.

Another fallacy in the same statement of the CBCP is the fallacy of false cause. According to the statement, divorce causes the easier break-up of marriages and families. This is not the case because the failure of marriages and families results in divorce, not the other way around. Marital failures occur first, resulting in opting for divorce afterward. Examples of factors that cause marital failures are marital violence and physical abuse, not divorce. To restate the whole CBCP statement as less fallacious: “Marriages tend to dissolve more easily upon the introduction of divorce because the very idea of it causes couples to outright terminate their marriage instead of solving their marital problems. Children of divorced parents may experience confusion and feel out of place because they were used to having both parents. They will have difficulties in searching for a father or mother figure.”

According to the pastoral statement of CBCP, children benefit “psychologically, physically, and spiritually” even in problematic marriages. Intact marriages “lead to a better, compassionate, stable, and more dynamic society.” The statement has committed the fallacy of cherry-picking because of selectively confirming reasons for keeping difficult marriages together. Instances of marital abuse, physical abuse, and psychological abuse to children – which are also the reasons for the petitions to legalize divorce – are not considered in the statement. The whole statement cannot be restated into a less fallacious one but can be solved by acknowledging that problematic marriages can also harm the children because of the abuses – reasons that drive couples to divorce – mentioned above, and weighing whether the absences of parents outweigh these abuses.

III. Ethical and moral concerns

Since divorce includes concerns for the well-being of the married couple, their promises to each other, and their children, ethics can enter the discussion. What is good for the CBCP is the sanctity of marriage and its inviolability which are accordingly beneficial to both parents and children. The good that divorce wishes is the spouses’ choice to take a more stable life, in this case cutting from a destructive or loveless marriage, and the welfare of the children from cases of abuse or neglect.

There are ethical issues on both the legalization of divorce and the absence of divorce, examples respectively: a. The absence of a mother or father figure of a child, b. Continuous abuse within the household. However, this is how the situational aspect of divorce comes into view. Divorce is for irremediable, failed marriages. Denying divorce to the whole nation includes those who suffer from proximal harms such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. If one or both of them want to save their marriage, there is marriage counseling that can help them. If they do decide on divorce, marriage counseling beforehand must be suggested to them as it can provide information on the consequences or benefits of the divorce. Divorce is an option.

The question about the morality of divorce still stands. Is it morally permissible in certain situations only? Is it morally permissible altogether? Philosophers such as Justin McBrayer and lawyers such as E.S.P Haynes have written about divorce in relation to morality and ethics. In the following paragraphs, it must be noted that the words promise and marital vow mean the same.

McBrayer provides the situational morality of divorce. He defines “morally permissible” as having no moral obligations requiring one to act in a different way. For instance, divorce is morally permissible if the initiator keeps all their moral obligations. According to McBrayer, marriage produces moral obligations. These special moral obligations may establish requirements of action or forbid other actions. Promise-making, the generator of moral obligations, is a part of marriage. However, there are objections to this stating that marital promises don’t have the capacity to generate new moral obligations because these promises are promises from emotions, and that feelings and emotions are beyond one’s control. Therefore, it does not generate a new moral obligation. McBrayer rejects this idea and provides his reasons.

McBrayer rejects the claim about marital promises as merely emotional promises. He takes an example of a marital vow, examines it, and explains that its emotional aspect refers to itself as behavioral. For instance, A makes a promise to B. A has the correct feelings from the marital vow to B. However, what manifests in his behavior is that he sleeps with other individuals, is abusive to B, and neglects B. It cannot be said that A has fulfilled his vows and his promises. This in turn confirms that marital vows can generate new moral obligations.

McBrayer moves on to illegitimate promises. He says that not all vows and promises create moral obligations. Autonomy and willingness between informed people to exchange vows generate legitimate new moral obligations. If not, the vows are illegitimate. Examples McBrayer gave are coercion to marriage, arranged child marriage, and deception. A moral obligation is generated by marital promises if both partners are suitable informed agents.

In bilateral divorce, a mutually consented divorce, McBrayer differentiates marital promises before someone and promises to someone. Bilateral divorce is still morally permissible when promised before someone, a deity for example. It is because this someone is merely a witness, not a beneficiary of the promise. Bilateral divorce, according to McBrayer, is not always morally permissible, however. An example he gives is parents having moral obligations to each other and their children. There are promised obligations that do not accept harm unto children or get a divorce. McBrayer also criticizes Hollywood celebrities for marrying and divorcing in rapid succession. He says that though their divorces may be morally permissible, they hide a moral vice within themselves for casually making promises they don’t plan to keep in the first place.

McBrayer also speaks of divorce when one partner is unable to do what they promised to do. He says that divorce is morally permissible if one partner is “literally unable to keep the marital promise.” An example he gives is that A is having affairs. B, the spouse, is morally permissible to file for a divorce if A does not keep the promise of infidelity.

This goes to the morality of unilateral divorce, one-sided divorce as opposed to bilateral divorce, in other cases. An example McBrayer gives is a man wanting to divorce his wife. The reason is that his wife was diagnosed with a chronic degenerative disease. McBrayer says this ground for divorce is not morally permissible. Non-reciprocation and lack of happiness do not justify one’s grounds for unilateral divorce. Another example he gives is the promise of being sexually faithful to one’s partner “no matter what happens.” Often it is translated along the lines of conditionality: “I will be sexually faithful to you only if you are sexually faithful to me.” However, McBrayer stresses that the promise is not a promise through conditionality. The phrase “no matter what happens” invalidates the phrase of conditionality. So if A sleeps with other people and B starts to do the same after knowing that A does, B filing for a unilateral divorce on grounds of A’s infidelity is not morally permissible. But if the promise is conditional after all, then a divorce is morally permissible.

E.S.P. Haynes talks about t the various laws regarding divorce in different countries. Aspects such as custody and care for children are another issue even back in the 1910s when Haynes’ journal article was published. Laws have been considered ethical and moral concerns and have developed from there. Religions like the Catholic Church have contributed to marriage and family laws in countries such as Spain and Italy. Ethical and moral concerns about divorce do not only revolve around promise-making between spouses but also their impacts on children and families.

According to Michael W. Austin, philosophers have not talked about family in a wider sense historically, but contemporary philosophers have said much about the rights and obligations of parents in relation to their children. He says that many contemporary philosophers do not agree with the idea that children are the property of parents. Other philosophers take on parental rights based on biology. Others have taken on the view of social contracts. The autonomy of children is also part of the discourse. Issues in parental ethics such as the existence and the degree of parental rights, children’s rights, and stately interests are also issues within the field of Ethics. Even the weighing of benefits and consequences of divorce is problematic because the effects on the parents differ on the children. Austin remarks:

“While both the theoretical and practical aspects of the rights and obligations of parents are receiving increased attention, there remains much room for substantial work to be done on this important topic.”

Bibliography

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