Marriage and Morals is a 1929 book by the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell that questions the Victorian notions of morality regarding sex and marriage.

Russell argued that the laws and ideas about sex of his time were a potpourri from various sources, which were no longer valid with the advent of contraception, as the sexual acts are now separated from the conception. He argues that family is most important for the welfare of children, and as such, a man and a woman should be considered bound only after her first pregnancy.^[1]

Cultural Response

Marriage and Morals prompted vigorous protests and denunciations against Russell during his visit to the United States shortly after the book's publication.^[2] A decade later, the book cost him his professorial appointment at the City College of New York due to a court judgment that his opinions made him "morally unfit" to teach. A public outcry, initiated by the mother of a student who was ineligible for his course in mathematical logic, preceded the ruling. John Dewey and several other intellectuals protested his treatment at the time.^[3]

Today, Marriage and Morals is considered a classical precedent to the philosophy of polyamory.Template:Fact However, Russell himself, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, did not consider his writings on morality to be of a philosophical nature.

References