Alimony, maintenance or spousal support is an obligation established by law in many countries that is based on the premise that both spouses have an absolute obligation to support each other during the marriage and beyond. In America, the majority of states allow for spouses to gain alimony post dissolution of marriage. This tends to be a payment towards one spouse calculated on the basis of fault and disparity in wages among others things.

• Are you sure that's true? What's your source?

I see alimony as one part of the problem that stems from the legal framework for marriage. Without alimony people might consider more heavily the decision to get married in a different way, the same way a higher earning spouse considers the decision to divorce differently now because its cheaper to keep him(er) as they say. I believe the purpose of law is to support certain notions of morality. I cite the absence of adultery as a crime in common law as wholly about morality that the law underwrites.

• I don't understand what this means. Under English law all extramarital intercourse was criminal, but the jurisdiction lay with the courts Christian. Enforcing public penance was a meaningful sanction in traditional face-to-face society. Perhaps I don't understand what morality you think the law did or didn't underwrite.

I have no crisis, my measures are not without criticism. I also fundamentally disagree with treating marriage as a means to acrue property and maybe that is the property. Without changes in the law I cannot test whether social benefit will come from. I might go so far as to say that marriage cannot succeed as a contract and a means to acrue property. A propertarian theory of marriage is at odds with a contractarian one. One grants equitable relief and one damages.

• Some of these sentences need rewriting. The meaning of the first isn't clear, while the second and the third appear unfinished. I don't understand what the last two mean: your distinctions between property and contract don't make sense to me, so perhaps a sentence or two of clarification would help. You can shorten by some fifty words elsewhere to get room for that degree of explanation.

• Not only. It is also, for example, a context for parental rights and obligations and a community acquiring property.

• You can't just "consider," which in the context means "assert," this: you have to show it, which is difficult. The stated purpose of punitive damages is the punishment of wrongdoing: the stated purpose of alimony is the redistribution of property.

• You can be as idealistic as you like, but surely you can't ask society as a whole to ignore significant social injustice in order to maintain idealism? If some spouses are confiscating property belonging to other spouses at the dissolution of marriage, we need to accept (1) that marriages do dissolve; and (2) that when they do, legal intervention to prevent misappropriation will be necessary.

• That didn't follow at all. In saying that "money is fungible" I mean with reference to the household economy: if a household gets a certain payment every month from a former spouse, whether that payment is labeled "alimony" or "child support" is likely to have no effect on how that money is spent. How you get from that point to this one is completely obscure.

Who Cares

• Michael, you're not trying very hard here. You're making a speech, but you're not engaging any real arguments. Let's take two:
  1. Children are often found in families. What is the relevance of this "settlement only" incantation to child support? Are you actually arguing that when someone wants to get out of a marriage, he or she has no obligation to support children left behind? If there's a continuing claim on income to support children, your theoretical distinctions between "during the marriage" and "after the marriage" are nonsense. Moreover, money is fungible, so whether you call the redistribution of income "alimony" or "child support" is a distinction without a difference.
  2. In dissolution of childless marriages, the most common reason for redistribution of future income is that the marriage has invested heavily in the earning power of one partner. It occasionally happens, for example, that a wife puts a husband through law school, working to provide a household income and sometimes paying the husband's tuition. Suppose the husband then departs shortly after graduation. Do you claim that it is unfair for the wife to have a share of the future professional income to which her efforts also contributed within the context of the marriage? If the husband waits to depart until he has accumulated substantial property through the use of his education, she will be entitled to half. Surely by getting out earlier he is not entitled by his own conduct to extinguish all her claims on that property despite the fact that her investment is just as fully made? She cannot be more easily dischargeable as a wife than she would be as a creditor, can she? The difference between child support and alimony in my eyes is that child support can be avoided if the spouse who would pay alimony takes custody of their children. There is an out. At present, the out to alimony is a pre-nuptial agreement which I disagree with.

• As you note, moreover, this is a default rule, subject to complete defeasance with nothing more than a pair of signatures. Why should the law presume that parties have given away important legal rights with respect to their own property unless they have been shown to waive with knowledge, on adequate information and without compulsion? Even if the State were merely neutral with respect to marriage, rather than favoring it extensively as it does in so many ways, why should it permit automatic waiver of significant property rights by mere implication in the act of getting married?

• I don't understand the origin of your antagonism to the rule here: if you have evidence that some crisis of unjust redistribution is at hand, you should have adduced it. Your arguments from fundamental morality are unconvincing for the two reasons I have given above and several more you can adduce for yourself; improving the paper along those lines means meeting the objections. Another route to a better argument might be to show what the problem is in some realist sense, by presenting some information about the world that would justify an approach less general than the one you advance in this draft.