Liberty to decide what you want is good and because pre-nuptial agreements can be considered rational decisions

A marriage is a contract, any marriage has certain terms that apply when the contract is defunct. They’re saying that there should only be one set of conditions of how marriage is dissolved that is determined by the State. What we want to establish in this point is the value of individual liberty and why the State should respect decisions of individuals to engage in pre-nuptial agreements. We also want to write some more extensive rebuttal on the nature of decision making under the influence of love and about the uncertainty of the future, to further justify the validity of pre-nuptial agreements. First of all a fundamental question, why the State cannot control your life? We can all agree that one of the important responsibilities of the State is to maximize the ability of people to fulfill their personhood. What distinguishes people from for animals is the ability to reason and make their own decisions based on their own methods of thinking. Any state must preserve the ability of it's citizens to engage in rational thought that makes a person a person. Actions based on that rational thought should be recognized by extension, because what would be the point of living your life and thinking if you're not allowed to make decisions in your personal life based on your own ideas about what is right for you. We think that individuals should have the right to enter into long-term contracts (pre-nups) which have a potential harms (circumstances change) in their pursuit of a good life. From the very first points of the proposition's case we see that they're trying to defend the idea that people who are in love don't make rational decisions. In particular they do not consider the possibility of that love ending when entering into pre-nups and are blind toward the future. Through this they try to justify the motion of not considering pre-nuptial agreements in courts. We have four points in rebuttal to that idea: 1. The point that couples who are entering into pre-nups do not consider the possibility of divorce, may hold if everyone were entering pre-nups, but that isn't the case. Most people stay with the State based system. Pre-nups are only entered into by couples who make an active decision to leave the State based system, who decide that the State system isn't right for them, and we would argue that this represents a significant selection effect. A couple who has already decided that one divorce system is not right for them is clearly not a couple that is incapable of considering divorce. 2. Love may mean that the decision isn't a perfectly considered, objectively rational view, but so what-- people fall in love and get married based on impulse to a large extent anyway. There are lots of decisions that have confounding factors. People tend not to think they'll get sick, we still let them decide whether to get health insurance or not. Optimism doesn't mean you take away an individuals decision making freedom because they might make imperfect choices, and to do so is patronizing for any State. People should be allowed to make imperfect decisions in a free society. 3. Even if impulse is present, decisions are made with constant advisement from legal professionals who actively question their decisions, these aren't things the individuals write up themselves on sheets of paper. 4. Finally, most of what goes into a pre-nup has nothing to do with divorce per se. Most of a pre-nup determines the responsibilities within a marriage, what each partner needs to do to remain without fault should a marriage be terminated. This section only requires the couple to have a considered view of what they think a marriage should be. Given that they are getting married, we think that this is something they should have. Even the sections that deal with divorce don't require an individual to think that they will be divorced. It simply requires an individual to decide what they believe would be fair under this hypothetical scenario. People have shown themselves capable of declaring decisions under hypothetical scenarios, no matter how unlikely they believe these scenarios to be, so we don't think the effect of love, which only impacts the person's assessment of the probability of divorce, would impair their ability to decide what they think would be fair under that hypothetical scenario. Furthermore, we think that all sorts of dangerous and absurd conclusions can be drawn if we consider people to be irrational when they're getting married. If people are irrational about the terms in the pre-nup, then surely it must follow that they irrational about what they want from their marriage and how the decisions they make during marriage. Should the State then have the right to decide how people should behave within marriages? Love is often an irrational impulse, that means that they are irrational about whom they chose as their partner. Does that then mean that the State should decide what sort of partner people should be with? That is clearly an absurd scenario and the fact that it is absurd to most people shows how much people value individual liberty and decision making, even if that entails risk. The second argument that we want to consider in more depth here is the argument of ''future blindness''. The proposition claims that the fact that decisions made in the past may become detrimental to individuals in the future, because of changing circumstances should be a basis for not considering those past decisions in court. If they really believe this then they wouldn't approve of marriage. When you marry someone you sign a contract that you may later regret. Future blindness is a necessary evil for every marriage. Society accepts that there exists a pretty good correlation between who you are now and who you are in the future and the sense of individual continuity. Otherwise there would be no basis for punishing crimes. They raise the problem of mutual consent, the fact that you cannot change your decision without agreeing with the other party first. But we think that responsibility is a good thing. People are held accountable for their past decisions in society, there's nothing wrong with that. Also, just because one individual in the marriage changes their views, shouldn't mean that the other party shouldn't be protected. The liberty of one person to exit a pre-nup shouldn't come at the cost of another person. Either way the problem of mutual consent falls when we look at the alternative-- the State imposing the terms of divorce on you. In that scenario you have no consent at all, you are entrapped into what the State thinks is right for you. In the point ''The State imposed system is not objectively right for everybody'', we show that the proposition has not proved to us that the State is objectively right. We think they'll have a difficulty proving it, because it is natural that all people are different, desire different things and that one-system-for-all, especially in such personal matters as marriage, simply will leave many people unhappy. Individuals have the right to enter into long-term contracts which have risks in the pursuit of good. Future risk acceptance is the fundamental freedom of human activity. We think that by proposition's argument people shouldn't be able to invest (because they might not receive returns on their investments) and shouldn't be able to vote (because your opinions might change before your elected politician enters into office and you no longer support them, or because he himself might change in that time period). A plethora of equally absurd examples can be brought if you follow the proposition's logic. In conclusion this argument was written to defend the validity of pre-nuptial agreements and the right of people to make such agreements. To do this we have given arguments against proposition's claim that pre-nups are irrational (but also pointed out that this idea can be reduced ad absurdum-- if pre-nups are irrational then chosing your partner in marriage is also irrational. Does that mean that the ''analytic and objective'' state should determine whom you marry?) and against their claim that future blindness is a fundamental harm in the case of pre-nups.