While I’m delurking in regards to Thom Brooks, I must recommend his very helpful publishing guide to all my fellow philosophy grad students. I was inspired by this guide to write a book review and journal article, both of which were published. I recommend any unpublished PhD student dowload the guide from SSRN and follow up on what it says.

1. You should introduce and defend the distinction between polygamy and polyamory at the beginning of your discussion. Right now the paper reads as a bait-and-switch. You spend a lot of time denouncing polygamy, during which I was thinking “but all these things could be easily corrected” — e.g. there’s no reason why multiple-partner marriages need be limited only to opposite-sex relationships. Then suddenly you propose just the reforms I was thinking of, but present them as if they’re an entirely distinct institution called “polyamory.” It’s as if I wrote a paper that went on and on about how the draft is unacceptable because only men are drafted, then at the end said “oh, but *conscription* is OK because conscription would be applied to everyone.”

2. You don’t wrestle explicitly enough with the clash between religious and gender equality capabilities in your discussion of polygamy, even though your introduction uses that clash as the motivation for the paper. You mostly just say “polygamy violates gender equality, ergo it’s not OK” — with little consideration of the alleged harm to religious capabilities.