If two people can get along, and suitably provide for one another, and respectably raise children, and this is something they both want, even in the absence of some romantic unquantifiable maybe even perceivedly spiritual or magical attraction called love, why should this not be encouraged?
Just because it's not tangible, doesn't mean it doesn't matter. You can't just ignore people's feelings. Unquantifiable feelings are people's primary motivations for living. People work all day at shitty jobs just to save up money and time for their indulgences.
Encouraging people to enter loveless marriages is missing the whole point.
Having both a mom and dad is largely necessary to the healthy development of children, as both social and moralistic role models, where many undervalue the importance of this or think the function of family is purely financial or infrastructural support.
Very unlikely. Over the span of the US population, you might be able to see differences in welfare between children in nuclear families compared to other family structures, but by and large, the biggest deciding factor is economics. Single parent households don't struggle because little Johnny lacks a father figure. They struggle because they have half the income a nuclear family does.
They're poorer and have to make hard, shitty decisions about what they spend their limited finances on. And those decisions don't always favor health.
Look at how crippled the African American community is by their excess of children born outside of wedlock and financial stability.
The African American community is crippled by poverty.
Arranged marriages offer the opportunity for structurally stable households to form in the absence of romantic interest.
If the people participating in it are fine with this, what is to object to?
That's a big if.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
That actually isn't the case. People are generally more happy when they have less choices. I think that we should engage in division of labour such that the decisions one has to make are always limited to under 5 choices. This would be purely consensual (people would pay to have their choices reduced) and that way people would have less decision anxiety and still be able to make effective decisions.
I don't know, this article seems to be a lot of philosophizing and theory without much of substance to back it up.
They also define "choice" pretty narrowly. They seem to be discussing like, immediate choices that you could decide with a coin flip or by rolling a die. Like "where are we going to eat tonight?" Life choices are better represented as a tree, with lots of varying branches to take, ones that might lead to other choices down the road.
In my experience, people tend to arrange their life so they are exposed to the choices they want to make. They do this on their own, as mature adults, without some sort of bureaucratic life-planning service.
They do have services for planning life choices though. For autists.
It's not like there's an epidemic of depressed people who cry themselves to sleep, wondering about the road not taken. "What if I had only threw caution to the wind, bought a motorcycle, and went on adventures with my best friend throughout the American southwest... if only..."
