The Parable of the Long Spoons is an Advocacy for Polyamory and Polygamy

It's the end of the long weekend. It's warm, it's autumn, the garden is full of flowers and I'm in a positive mood. I'm ready to praise and see the good.Alas, this debate and my opponents arguments loom like a cloud on the sunny blue of my awareness. They are confused. They make no sense. They are even - and this word seems so out of place in this lovely world - annoying.I'll try to be brief.The parable and sexPeople at a table sharing food. According to Pro's interpretation in Round 2, the people are people, the food is sex.But then, in the final round, he argued that people are food. He says that "to be consistent [with the idea of monogamy] people would only eat the potatoes on the table, and would ignore the ham, steak, lobster, etc, or would have to give up potatoes to eat the other foods."Are the people of the parable now pimps and the food the sex workers? Is the parable advocating that we "serve" each other a range of people to have sex with from a table of plenty?Of course it is suggesting nothing of the kind. Pro's interpretations are contradictory and ridiculous.Pregnancy and Childbirth The parable is urging us to help each other to sex. We cannot help ourselves. Pro interprets this as the parable advocating for procreative sex. He argues that the "heaven" of sex can only be experienced through childbirth and raising offspring.As I have pointed out many, many times in this debate, if it comes to childbirth and raising children, it doesn't make any difference how many men a woman has sex with, assuming that they are all fertile. It's the same as in the parable - it doesn't matter how many people feed you with a spoon. One person could feed you everything, or you could get a spoonful from each person at the table. You still get to eat all you want. There is no information in the parable to distinguish monogamy from polyandry and polygamy. Raising ChildrenThe parable does speak to the idea of raising children, I think. The parable urges us to help others, and children are others and so we should help them. This I agree with.What does this have to do with multiple sex partners? Absolutely nothing.Pro has put forward a theory about multiple sex partners making us care for children the more. According to Pro, the more women share sex partners, the more likely they are to help each other with the cooking and babysit.Also, he seems to be arguing that the more women a man impregnates, the more eager he will be to spend time with not only his own children, but unrelated children who happen live with his various lovers.Pro provides no proof for any of this, of course.More importantly, in terms of the resolution, there is no connection between the parable and these unconventional sexual set-ups. The parable urges us to take care of children - yes - but it is silent on the issue of how many men we should get to father them.Shared housingIn his final round, Pro claims that the parable is urging him to father ten children with ten different women. To reduce his travelling time between households, he proposes that he should live in the same house with those ten women and their offspring.Of course, each of those women has other lovers who have fathered other children, and so those lovers would need to live in the same house too, and those lovers' lovers and all their offspring and so on.Eventually, the whole world would live in the same house. The house would have to be big enough to house billions of people, and so travelling from one end of the house to the other would be like crossing half the globe.Travel between houses would be replaced by travel within the house, and there would be no gains in efficiency.In any case, the parable doesn't speak to this at all. The parable does not specify if the people at the table break into pairs or groups of three or a larger network to help each other. Monogamy is totally consistent with the parable.Economies of scale and relativesHumans tend to share food and chores in kinship groups, who don't have sex with each other. Pro has accepted this as true.However, he argues that men who have sex with lots of women will take on the fathering role of children they are unrelated to. And that women who have sex with lots of men will take on the mothering role of unrelated children. He argues that sexual intimacy will make this so.I don't think so. I think a mother of ten children who is also having a lot of sex with ten different men will have no time to do anything else except change nappies, buy lubricant, make sandwiches and sleep. I suggest that the men who visit each child once a fortnight will not waste time bonding with the other, random children, but will spend that precious evening ruffling their own child's hair, bouncing a ball, and asking about school, before pushing off.If economies of scale occur, they will be mediated by relatedness. Pro has ignored this law of nature.SummaryThe parable is silent about polgamy and polyandry. It certainly does not advocate for them,