The recent and thought-provoking Slate Star Codex sequence on cultural evolution has led me to think about traditional sexual ethics, and the fact that it is literally impossible to do them in the modern day.
There are three large changes that have occurred in the past few hundred years, which affect sexual ethics. The first and most obvious is the invention of birth control, which permits people to separate (penis-in-vagina) sex and babies.
It is easy to overstate the importance of birth control. Many effective methods of birth control, such as homosexuality and outercourse, were known since the Paleolithic. The Oneida Community reportedly had a typical use pregnancy rate of 0.5%, more effective than modern birth control pills, with male continence; this is a method known since Biblical times. (Of course, the Oneida Community may have had particularly motivated users, and widespread use may have been less effective.)
Nevertheless, giving people more birth control methods with fewer side effects and no chance of not using them in the heat of the moment likely changes many things about sexual ethics.
Second, children are now a net financial drain on their families. In the developed world, children are always a financial cost for 18 years, and often for longer than twenty; they rarely pay their parents back. However, historically and in the developing world, children often began making a financial contribution as young as seven. It is difficult to estimate how many children are/were involved in child labor and how large their contributions to the household were. However, even today, in large families, teenagers who are not sent to school can often pay for themselves through chores and taking care of younger siblings; there is no reason to believe this was not true in the past. (I am interested in more detailed data and am happy to edit this section with more.)
Finally, and most importantly, child mortality.
Our World In Data provides some interesting graphics about child mortality in the past two hundred years. In summary: in 1800, while there is little data, the best estimates suggest that about 40% of children died before age five. In 2019, in rich countries, less than one percent of children die before age five.
Forty percent is a lot of children. Consider a fairly ordinary traditional Catholic family of five children: in 1800, they would only have had three. A family of ten would, in 1800, only have six children. Even the Duggars’ nineteen children would only have been eleven.
But high child mortality rates affect more than family size. That forty percent isn’t evenly distributed among families; some may bury seventy percent of their children, perhaps because of a series of epidemics or a bad crop year. If all you care about is one of your children surviving to take care of you in your old age, and the mortality rate is less than one percent, you have one child. However, if the mortality rate is forty percent and unevenly distributed, you may have to have many more than two kids to have a chance one of them survives to adulthood.
(The evidence is suggestive that decreasing child mortality tends to decrease fertility, in part for this reason.)
What this means is that practicing truly traditional sexual ethics is literally impossible.
You could stop using birth control, and people do. (Catholics use natural family planning, but natural family planning is itself a fairly recent invention. You could, fortunately, do extended breastfeeding for a break in between pregnancies.) In theory, it is required that you educate your children. In practice, you can homestead in a state that doesn’t check up on homeschoolers much and put your children to work farming or watching their younger siblings as soon as they’re able. It wouldn’t be doing right by your kids– it turns out some knowledge of writing and math and history and science is useful for being alive in the 21st century– but you could do it.
But child mortality is a bitch. “Not using birth control” is unpopular, and “educationally neglect your children in order to live on a homestead” is unpopular, but “forty percent of your children die” is more unpopular than either of those. There exist some religions that don’t use modern medicine, but you’re never going to get particularly widespread uptake.
But even if you are a Christian Scientist homeschooler who doesn’t use birth control, you’re still not going to get to the environment that traditional sexual ethics evolved for. Many of that forty percent died in epidemics, and most of the diseases they died of have been eradicated in the United States due to vaccines. You are never, ever going to have three of your children die of smallpox in a single month.
These changes are generally agreed upon to be good things among both sexual liberals and sexual conservatives. No one wants forty percent of their children to die. Child labor is generally unpopular. While some social conservatives disapprove of birth control, most social conservatives do not.
But it means that you can’t make the argument “the sexual ethics of 1800 are good because they are traditional and worked for hundreds of years.” Our situation is very very different from the situation in 1800. Children are financial drains instead of investments; children are almost certainly not going to die; it is possible to separate PIV from reproduction with a good deal of reliability.
This is not, of course, to say that the traditional sexual ethics of 1800 are incorrect for modern humans. It may well be that we would all be happiest if divorce and sodomy were illegal, no one used birth control, having sex before marriage if you’re a woman made you a fallen woman, and men are technically not supposed to have sex outside marriage but in practice seeing a prostitute is a common vice among urbanites. But this proposition– in the current situation– has at best a few decades of track record. It cannot take advantage of the argument from tradition, any more than can the proposition that we would all be happiest if gay marriage were legal, divorce were unstigmatized, many people were poly, and birth control is the default.
We knocked over the Chesterton’s Fence, because Chesterton’s Fence was driven through the heart of millions of children and subjected them to a horrible painful death. Now we have to figure out sexual ethics in a fencefree world. Chesterton’s Fence does not apply.
Thing of Things 
The child mortality numbers reminded me of something I barely noticed in an Anthony Trollope novel (published in the 1860s) I read a while back. When asked how many children they had, the characters routinely appended “living” to their answer. “How many children do you?” “Three living.”
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Oneida was also using an old technique in a very unusual setting (a large group marriage). Young men new to male continence / the pull-out method were paired with older women to reduce the chance of pregnancy.
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That’s true. I left it out on the grounds that it was a tangent and if anything would strengthen my argument. If you wanted to control the number of children, polygamy/serial monogamy would work better than monogamy. Since Oneida-style group marriage was not widely adopted, this suggests birth control was less important than other factors.
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This is a decent rebuttal for extremely traditional Christian beliefs, which ban all non-reproductive sex, that very few Christians actually believe in, including most very conservative Christians.
If you merely allow contraception within marriage, then you can still have something that is very close to the old norms and the rebuttal falls apart.
Furthermore, the rebuttal also seems like a weak man, because it is made to seem like the only goal for traditional norms was to ensure sufficient children in an age of high child mortality. This ignores that the norms had many other goals besides this. For example, one the main goals is to make the father contribute/provide. This is done by at least these things:
– making it clearer who is the father by mandating monogamy and virginity until marriage, to reduce the chance that a providing man will invest in the children of another man
– aggressively identifying a father when there is a pregnancy and forcing that person in a provider role, if possible
– making it the woman’s duty to have sex with the man so he has a reward for providing
– banning having sex with others while married, to prevent the woman getting pregnant by another man or the man from impregnating another woman, both of which reduce the chance that the man will provide (sufficiently) for his wife and children
There is an American ethnic group where there is a severe issue with getting the man to provide, although all parts of modern Western society seem to have this issue much more than in the past.
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The issue with (Chesterton) fences is that they can have multiple goals. You can’t just declare them fully obsolete when you figure out that one of their goals is no longer relevant.
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I think the point is that the Chesterton’s Fence is more than obsolete, because continuing the traditional practice would have significantly different (and presumably undesirable) consequences now. Before, if you had 10 children, you’d end up with 6 who’d survive, who’d making a financial contribution. If you do that now, you’ll have 10 surviving children, and they’d be a financial drain.
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@blacktrance
I understand the point, but I disagree. Having many kids in an age of good health care can largely be prevented with birth control (and without abortion), which even the overwhelming majority of Catholics have figured out, despite the Catholic church being against it. Banning birth control is merely a part of the fence. I don’t see why it can’t be give up, while keeping the rest, because that is what many conservatives are already doing in the first place.
I also disagree with the idea that children were some major financial benefit. Historic evidence is extremely strong that children were largely a drain*, aside from them being caretakers for the elderly. It’s the latter that changed, at least for part of society, not so much the former.
* Given ‘baby farms,’ the ubiquity of <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-infanticide-run-deep-and-begin-with-poverty"infanticide as family planning in history, many descriptions I’ve read where child labor typically provided only enough income to offset the costs of the child itself and the very practice of waiting to have children until there was a provider.
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Aapje, because it can’t work. You can’t have one without the other. Increased access to and use of birth control leads to the world of “children are too expensive to have, so we won’t have any”. Conservatives who gave in on this are simply trailing the field; back in 1930 the Anglican Lambeth Conference decided to relax its ban on birth control for married couples. Everyone knew that this wouldn’t lead to any kind of slippery slope; people would only use it to space out the pregnancies of their four kids and stop after having six and absolutely positively it wouldn’t be used by single people not married to have sex without the risk of getting pregnant.
Well. How’s that worked out? How many ‘traditional families of four’ are there? How many ‘only married couples who already have kids use birth control’ in our modern society?
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blacktrance, I’d be more convinced if the idea wasn’t “having ONE kid is an intolerable financial drain”. I read a lot of online boasting about how we’re richer and better off in every way today, how even our poor have access to things that would have been the province only of kings in the past.
And yet having a child at the wrong time is presented as practically the worst thing that can happen to a woman. It will kill your chances of having a life! You will be sentenced to crushing poverty! You will never ever have a career! Abortion is pushed as “this is the painfully necessary solution to this terrible problem”. The grounds for it were extended out from “the mother will literally die from being pregnant” to “the threat to the life of the mother, where ‘threat’ means ‘may not go to college’ or ‘may be hampered in her career by having to take a year out to have a baby'”.
We’ve put structures in place to prevent the outcomes of the old folksongs and ballads where the seduced and abandoned woman with the illegitimate baby is outcast, has to wander the streets, and the child/she/she and her child starve to death. Yet somehow “a couple, both with decent jobs and not liable to be flung onto the streets, can’t afford to have a baby so if the birth control fails they need abortion”.
You solve that riddle for me, because I have no fucking clue how people much wealthier as individuals than my parents were as a couple are saying they can’t even have one baby as a couple where my family managed to have four.
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@Deiseach
No, birth control directly leads to: this kid really has to count.
There may be an indirect mechanism that feeds this with money: fewer children because fewer die -> women get bored -> women want to work -> dual incomes & more assortative mating by skills -> more money available to win the ‘best kid’ competition.
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Deiseach:
Part of it is opportunity cost. The more you can buy with your wages, the more you give up by taking a year off. So, for example, if you have a six-figure job, leaving it is expensive, and getting back on the career track later may not be trivial.
Another part is changing norms around having children. Being child-free is a more salient and socially acceptable choice now, so the costs of having children can now be seen as a large and optional expense, rather than just part of life.
A third part is that if you plan to pay for your children’s education, that has genuinely gotten more expensive.
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It’s almost like traditional sexual morality was not purely a manifestation of patriarchy. Like maybe in large part it was simply a set of folkways that allowed human beings to muddle through circumstances that were so tragic that nowadays we can barely imagine or remember how bad they were.
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There still is a large patriarchal component though. For example, “no sex outside of marriage” is a reasonable solution for ensuring paternity without the proper tech, and establishing paternity is super important in a society where inheritance is primarily done via paternity, but that sill leaves the question of why then it’s paternity rather than maternity that matters (and why biological rather than legal relationships matter more).
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The mother tends to be fairly obvious, given the big belly and difficult birth, which are common signs.
You are confusing biological differences between men and women with the patriarchy.
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Plough-farming* and the selfish gene, respectively?
*Prioritising both upper body strength and ownership of capital in the form of land, compared to the hoe-farming traditionally found outside Eurasia
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I wouldn’t deny that there’s often a patriarchal component — though it depends on the time and place we’re talking about. I would argue that the patriarchal component tends to be exaggerated.
But I don’t agree that an emphasis on paternity is an example of patriarchy. It’s not that establishing paternity is super important relative to maternity. Establishing maternity would also be important, if it needed to be established. But it doesn’t for obvious biological reasons. When a baby is born, it’s not like it’s not clear who the mother is.
There’s more than one reason why societies want to keep track of who the parents are of children. It matters for names, for inheritance, for status. But I think fundamentally it matters because it establishes a duty of care for the child. If paternity is not well established, men will not contribute nearly as much to the raising of children. I think that is the primary reason most societies place so much emphasis on establishing who the father is of each child.
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Aapje: If the goal is to make the father provide for each child, full stop, nothing else matters, then yes, those things make a lot of sense. However:
The child can be provided for without the father’s involvement. Indeed, that is the purpose of the social programs often called “welfare”. Also “child support”. Current implementation of these programs doesn’t particularly ensure children are supported or faring well, and often enables abusive people to continue abusing the child and the other parent, but it’s possible for the State of Washington to write a check to Anna every month for the care and feeding of her daughter Cathy, and then send an invoice to Cathy’s father Bob for the balance.
Bob in the above scenario does not need to be bribed with sex from Anna in order to provide for Cathy. If neither his own sense of ethics nor pressure from his community will make sure he provides for Cathy, the State of Washington is entirely capable of ensuring there are legal consequences if he does not. This is, incidentally, a lot better for Anna in that it avoids all possibility of requiring her to submit to marital rape. (Or any of the other ugly things that can happen when the only way to ensure one’s child gets fed is to remain in contact with one’s abuser. Some of the ugly things include harms done to the child, by the way, which is contrary to the goal of ensuring the child’s welfare.) And if Bob still does not come through with the money, well, the State of Washington has already paid Anna, so Bob being a deadbeat is not going to mean Cathy goes hungry.
Societally mandated monogamy has never prevented people from breaking promises of sexual fidelity and I don’t expect it ever will.
Also? Your blatantly racist remark is noted.
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Ironically, a very good case can be made that welfare is increasingly incongruent with modern reality and works much better in a traditionalist society. Note that many, especially left- and right-libertarians, have been looking at UBI to replace welfare.
Welfare as a solution for single parents is fundamentally problematic, because it keeps women out of the workforce, reducing their capability to earn, while the ever decreasing number of kids makes the period where women need this help shorter. So the damage to women’s prospects is not that much lessened, because a decade or so of being out of the work-force is sufficient to severely harm one’s work prospects, but the benefits for single mothers will end long before the person is eligible for old age benefits.
In the olden days, where female welfare was primarily for widows and a few divorced women, it tended to be much more temporary. In the modern days, it increasingly seems to be a trap.
Of course, people like you dream of increasing welfare a lot, but until we reach post-scarcity communism, this seems unrealistic. A sufficient number of people need to earn this wealth in the first place, which requires decent incentives.
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Single motherhood in itself seems to have negative effects as well, probably in part due to the lack of a present male role model and such.
No, the money is instead involuntarily taken from his paycheck without compensation. This is ‘fair,’ because expecting someone to provide for others with money without getting benefit from this is wholesome and just, even if this money has to be earned in dangerous and unpleasant ways, while expecting people to provide for others with sex is dirty and abusive, even if there is a big benefit in return. Some traditionalism still remains, it seems.
Of course, fairness is not necessarily very relevant for how society functions, but incentives are. Men are currently heavily pressured into a provider role with certain implicit promises (resulting in men making greater work sacrifices that generate greater pay, which progressives tend to misrepresent as discrimination of women). An increasing number of men seem to be concluding that it no longer pays keep up their end of the bargain or not as much, as benefits for men are chipped away at most sides much faster than they gain new benefits.
You ignore that with a stronger welfare net and less relationship stability, Cathy is less incentivized to seek out fathers with money and is more likely to seek out men with other qualities. So modern Bob is going to have less income on average than traditionalist Jack.
You ignore that Bob is unlikely to stay single, but is likely going to seek out a new partner, who wants to be provided for, wants to have children, etc; making it more likely that he will have to spread his wealth over many women & children.
You ignore the facts:
“Approximately two-thirds (69.3 percent) of custodial parents who were due child support received some payments from noncustodial parents, while only 43.5 percent reported receiving the full amount of child support due.”
Of course, the people who are much more likely to get less or no child support are exactly those that you accuse me of being sexist against, even though you ignore how much worse your preferred policies are for black Americans and the lower class in general!
It’s interesting that you do this, because I merely pointed out objective fact, as reported by the alt-right paper: Washington Post. I would argue that the dismissal of displeasing facts as racist, sexist, etc; is actually why progressives keep failing at many of their goals.
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Well, yes, if increasing one’s household income past a certain point means one’s household loses welfare benefits, when the certain point is set low enough that one cannot actually provide for one’s household on that money (never mind save money against an emergency), then yes, people will choose to remain on welfare benefits. The problem here isn’t welfare.
And if Bob never does pay anybody any money for Cathy’s care and feeding, or for the care and feeding of anyone else he’s supposed to be providing for, but Cathy and them are still cared for and fed? Can’t honestly say I care. Bob shouldn’t be shirking his obligations, of course, but it is more important that someone makes sure Cathy is never hungry than that Bob makes sure Cathy isn’t hungry. Also if Bob isn’t actually legally related to Cathy, the fact he provided half her DNA notwithstanding, well, someone still needs to make sure Cathy is never hungry.
Libertarians of any description are in favor of such a massive governmental program as Universal Basic Income? I’m confused.
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@lexeigynaix
Yes, ‘someone’ needs to pay for this. Quite a few progressives think that way: this spending is important, so society needs to pay for it, somehow. Yet people tend to disagree on what spending is the most important, a lot of people get upset over (what they see) as bad spending, etc.
You tend to see a equilibrium/oscillation around a certain point: the fancier that welfare gets, the more it is abused and the more that abuse rankles, the more people without welfare have worse lives than those with it, etc, so you get a backlash. You get onerous bureaucracy to reduce abuse. Etc.
Any realistic policy in an era where we still need to coerce people into unpleasant labor to make society work, needs to deal with the fact that welfare is never going to be truly nice. We can’t afford to make it nicer than that unpleasant labor, unless we start doing forced labor.
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Preventing starvation is actually relatively trivial. Supplying housing is less trivial, but doable if you have low enough standards for acceptable housing.
However, the amount of wealth transfer from men to women within relationships is huge compared to this and make women’s lives much nicer than just not starving and not living in the streets. Men make these sacrifices because they expect something in return, just like women make sacrifices in relationships because they also expect things in return.
You recognize that incentives are important to prevent welfare from becoming a trap, but incentives are important in general. Most people don’t like to sacrifice for employers without getting enough back. Most people don’t like to sacrifice for the government without getting enough back. Most people don’t like to sacrifice for a partner without getting enough back.
You can only push things out of kilter so far, before they fall apart. The naive-progressive model of “is nice, society must pay,” can’t work above a certain level.
Not all are in favor, but both left- and right-libertarians are much more in favor than those of other political persuasions.
Right-libertarians want to make it very lean, though, being equal or smaller than the government spending it would replace. Left-libertarians want to make it bigger and are more likely to want to add it to welfare programs, rather than replace them.
PS. Note that even if Cathy and little Timmy don’t starve, studies still show that outcomes for little Timmy is worse than if raised by two parents.
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‘Little Timmy’ wasn’t originally part of the story. You’re confusing Cathy (the child) with Anna (the mother).
That does make for icky reading in some parts.
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Note that putting some pressure on married people to be reasonably sexually available for their partner by default* may be beneficial for women too.
AFAIK, surveys have found that it is fairly common for women who engage in sex to please their partner, to get into it during sex. Furthermore, a common belief and intervention by sexologists and partner therapists seems to be that increasing the amount of sex is typically beneficial for a relationship & that partners should if necessary schedule sex and follow through at that time, even if they are not particularly aroused.
However, pressure to have more sex and/or be more receptive to the sexual needs of the partner can be expected to be more helpful for men to achieve their needs/desires than for women.
Also, arguing the benefits for women should not be necessary for men’s needs and desires to be taken seriously. Feminists commonly argue that men should do more household chores without any stated concern for benefits for men. In that case, female needs/desires are supposed to be sufficient. Why not the same for men?
* With exceptions for special cases, of course, although men and women have more options that just to use their genitals to pleasure their partner, so issues on that front are not necessarily a sufficient excuse to not do what one can.
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“Choosing to have more sex with one’s spouse because one wants to improve the relationship, even if one is not necessarily in the mood for sex” and “being required to submit to marital rape in order to avoid taking the risk that one’s child will go hungry” are…different things.
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Aapje, rape apologia is not welcome here. In the future, when you comment on this subject, either take significantly more care to avoid it or expect to be banned.
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@Ozy
It’s not rape to have sex with consent, but without (initial) horniness on the part of one of the partners. It’s also not forced labor if I clean the dishes to make my partner happy, even when I don’t enjoy doing so.
Nowhere have I argued that people should force their partner into having sex or cleaning the dishes.
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@alexeigynaix
You are strawmanning. The topic of discussion is mothers having an income substantially above the bare necessities of life, paid for in large part by men who work more than necessary for their own needs and who sacrifice much of that surplus to provide mothers with a much better life.
A popular feminist approach is to argue/imply that women have needs, while men have entitlements, so the latter don’t matter. Aside from the moral problems with that approach, it ignores incentives. At a certain point, when sacrifice for others doesn’t result in a decent quid-pro-quo, people tend to stop sacrificing.
Communism showed that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is incompatible with human nature on the whole. Human altruism is limited and for good reason (because it it wasn’t, bad actors could abuse others).
You can misrepresent what I say, just like I could go around calling feminist demands that men do more in the household ‘forced labor.’ However, such extremely bad faith makes debate impossible.
You can either debate what I actually suggest or use extremist rhetoric to try to rile the crowd (and Ozy) against me. Your choice.
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The topic of discussion is wait what now?
Yes, if you define “people” to exclude “anyone in a sufficiently low income household”, no people need welfare, and few child support. That…that doesn’t tell us anything except who you think is worth talking about, and I was definitely thinking about people who do not, in fact, earn a living wage for a one-adult household, who head households of two or three. When I said Anna, Bob, and Cathy? I was thinking of specific people. There are a lot of people out there like my friend whose name isn’t Anna.
I do agree on one thing. Someone shows this much bad faith? Discussing anything with them is impossible.
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“traditional sexual ethics evolved in a situation very unlike the present” is not the same thing as “traditional sexual ethics are impossible”. For example, having 2/5 of your children die isn’t seen as positive under any ethical system.
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I’m the eldest of four children. I come from a country background. My parents had me helping out with chores such as minding my younger siblings and other minor household tasks. Yet somehow I managed to scrape together some of that there readin’ and ritin’. Imagine that! Possible to have book larnin’ and contributiuon to the family at the same time! However can traditional families be non-abusive, how oh how is this possible, no it must all be a fairy-tale!
And this is emotive codswallop. Is the “horrible painful death” the idea of child mortality? Then this is yet more proof that the compassion of modern liberals isn’t compassion, it’s sentimentality that easily turns to cruelty. It’s the same line of thinking as “Animal suffering is bad; wild animals suffer a lot; to end suffering we should kill all the wild animals so that those now alive never suffer again and no new creatures are born into suffering”. That is not valuing all lives equally, that is ‘it gives me uncomfortable feelings to think of sad things so I’ll kill anything that inconveniences me’.
This accusation of yours could equally be turned against you by somebody writing in the future; how could you be so heartless and irresponsible as to bring a child into a world where there was a chance that disease, accident, or bad genetics could harm them? A world where death was still unconquered? Horrible, horrible!
Yeah, it’s very easy to end suffering by preventing those who might suffer from being born. Yet would anyone seriously suggest that the solution to ending pogroms and murderous anti-Semitism is to sterilise all Jews so that no more Jewish children could be born? No more new Jewish babies = no more Jews to suffer! Simple!
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@Deisach
Imagine I was planning on having 3 kids in the future. I consider getting a new, better paying job in order to support them better. However, this new job has different hours than my old one, so it would change what time my wife and I have sex.
By normal logic I am being prudent and compassionate towards my future children. By your logic I am not. Since I will be having sex at different times, the odds are that different sperm cells will hit different eggs. Even if I still have 3 children, they won’t be the same individuals. So by taking a new job to support my kids, I am not helping any individual kids. I am instead erasing 3 poor kids from existence and replacing them with 3 wealthy ones.
Yet it still seems like I am making a compassionate and prudent decision. This is because compassion for future people is not the same as compassion for present people. Because of the butterfly effect, even the smallest change will result in all future children being born with totally different identities, and also probably change the total number born as well. So it doesn’t make sense to act compassionate towards individual kids. Instead we try to make things better in general.
Trying to encode human moral intuitions and folk ethics about this subject is difficult. But my crude approximation of them is that we should act to reduce total suffering and increase total well-being, and that having fewer children with greater amounts of well-being per child is better than having a larger amount of children with lesser well-being, even if the total amount of well-being in both groups is the same. Some people have argued for total utilitarianism, which jettisons the second premise, I reject this, but also think it’s a moot point because I think both systems give the same answer if we are using Hare’s 2 level utilitarianism.
Under this logic, Ozy’s statement makes perfect sense. Better to have a smaller number of children who live long happy lives than a mix of those kinds of children, plus other children who suffer and die after living brief lives.
Again, you can’t make an argument that this is perverse because it is erasing those children rather than helping them, because all actions erase children. For instance, if we followed your logic we could argue that banning abortion is bad because it isn’t helping any fetuses become children. Since a huge policy change like that would have a lot of ripple effects, it wouldn’t actually save any fetuses from being aborted. Instead it would erase them from existence and replace them with different children who are not aborted.
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You’ll pardon me, Ghatanathoah, if I say that’s one of the stupidest arguments I’ve ever heard rationalists use. Of course those kids will be different to any potential maybe kids if you had sex on Tuesday instead of Wednesday! And your carefully planned kids will be different if you had sex an hour earlier or later. You are different from the child your parents might have had; are you lamenting the sibling you replaced? I don’t think you go around sighing “Alas for the child whose birth I prevented!”
Are you going out with an AK-47 and killing three already existing poor children? No? Then unless you want me to seriously believe the multiverse notion, this is like saying “Because I had the cheesecake for dessert, that slice of black forest gateau didn’t get eaten”. Yes, and?
What such arguments as you advance only convince me the more, the more I read them from people, that the true reason is immature selfishness. Nobody argues “But if I save up for the more expensive gadget I want, then that cheaper gadget I don’t buy will be erased from existence”, because they want the more expensive toy and don’t want to be argued into buying something with less features.
Becoming a parent means becoming a responsible adult who has to put other people first. It means growing up, and there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to grow up. They want to spend their money and time on themselves having fun. But they don’t want to make that bald statement because they don’t like to think of themselves as greedy, so they invent specious clap-trap about “erasing” non-existent beings.
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Aside from the whole “child mortality” thing, the Amish do a pretty good approximation of this. (Amish schools end at eighth grade.)
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Huh. I guess if yiu randomly remove half of the adult males in a community, fathers can’t be relied upon to provide for their families. Isn’t that interesting?
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It’s not a natural disaster that happens to African American men, though. Crime rates are much higher, as is evident from intra-racial violence.
In this paper (with older data, but this doesn’t get much better over time), you can see in table 2 (page 46) that the black native-born are imprisoned three times more often than black migrants. So if racism is the cause, it is a weird kind of racism that doesn’t care that much about skin color.
Also, if you look at unmarried births by race, you see a major rise for blacks beginning in the 60s. What happened in the 60s? The sexual revolution. What did not happen in the 60s? A huge increase in the incarceration rates of blacks. That started late in the 70s and really got bad in the 80s. There is no visible effect on the unmarried births graph of this huge increase. If the two were strongly correlated, you’d expect a spike in the 80’s.
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Note that I believe that incarceration rates are higher for men and black men due to discrimination, but not at all to an extent that explains the gap.
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Economic repression plays a role as well, both in directly making it harder for black parents in general to support a child reliably and in pushing black men into criminality. Incarceration rates are heavily mediated by differential policing, which (whether based on racism or on genuine circumstances or some combination rooted in historical redlining) further serves to undermine the reliability of black fathers. Keep this going for two or three generations, as it has been in the US, and you start undermining community norms of paternal responsibility, creating a feedback loop that keeps the resulting problems in place even in the absence of deliberate personal racism.
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Again, the problem with that narrative is that it doesn’t fit with the observed order of things. Single motherhood started increasing before black incarceration skyrocketed and the latter didn’t cause a spike.
Also note that in the case of policing, we can expect the police to react to increased crime by specific groups, so causality is at least in part the opposite of your claim, with increased crime by some groups causing differential policing.
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…Aapje, look up the statistics on how many rapes get reported to police, how many of those result in convictions, what the demographic breakdown is on alleged rapists vs convicted rapists vs people falsely accused of rape, and how the convicted rapists’ sentences correlate with their demographics. And then consider the possibility that “increased crime by a specific group” only gets increased police response if the police (a known racist institution, also misogynist and ableist and anti-poor) want it that way, and also the possibility that you are being screamingly racist yourself.
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That seems pointless. Again, the statistics show that single parenthood among black people was rising rapidly before the incarceration rates of black people greatly increased. Single parenthood actually leveled off as the rates truly soared.
You claimed that high incarceration rates are the cause of high single parenthood among black Americans, but there seems to be better evidence against this correlation, than in favor. Even if the cause of the huge spike in incarceration is entirely discrimination, that wouldn’t provide any evidence for a correlation.
There is also the possibility that you are racist against white people and refuse to consider the possibility that it is not merely white (male) culture that has problematic elements, but black culture as well.
High crime rates of black Americans was already noted by WEB Du Bois in the 19th century and he notes a case where disfranchisement and riots happened in response to the influx of black fugitives. This is a understandable* mechanism: racism in response to a dislike of behaviors of an ethnic group.
Ultimately, progressives tend to be utterly inconsistent how they look at black people and (white) men. Both are over-represented in prison and most crime measures, including those which are policing-independent. Yet the very same evidence against both tends to be interpreted differently, with men blamed for having bad culture (‘toxic masculinity’), while the same is not typically done for black men.
I don’t do this and supposedly, interpreting the same evidence the same, not playing favorites for one group, makes me racist.
* Which is a different word than ‘justifiable.’
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I’m really not sure that this is adequately describing traditional sexual morality. What it really seems to be doing is describing traditional sexual morality as described by some forms of Christianity. Other forms of traditional sexual morality were either very different, like the ones in non-Abrahamic cultures, or close but with key differences. Jewish sexual morality recognized that marital rape was thing that really existed two thousand years before the West did. There are parts of the Talmud that can sound very modern with its’ emphasis on consent from the woman in these matters.
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These conversations also tend to be very dualistic, imagining that the was one true form of traditional sexual morality and one true form of modern sexual morality. The one true forms always correspond with what the writer of the post hates the most and loves the most. Reality is much more messy. Like I pointed out above, there were many traditional forms of sexual morality that could be very different from Christian sexual morality or similar but not the same. Likewise, there are people who don’t adhere to traditional sexual morality but feel that the modern sex positive version of sexual morality isn’t right either.
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I’d also note that nearly all sexual ethos systems seem to demand complete loyalty from everybody even if they have nothing but hatred and contempt from the designated out group. For traditional Christian sexual ethics it was anybody deemed a deviant in someway from sexually promiscuous women to LGBT people. For modern sexual ethics its cis-gender heterosexual guys who are having a rough time at it even though they didn’t exactly flourish under the traditional sexual ethics system either.
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Also, every system seems to designate one gender as the one that overwhelmingly gets the burden of preventing sexual abuses. In traditionalism, it’s the woman. In the feminist model, it’s the man.
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I know “don’t blame the victims of abuse for the existence of abuse” is a controversial statement, but it really shouldn’t be.
It’s also a gender-neutral statement. Just saying.
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@alexeigynaix
You are presenting this as if everything is clear cut. You have a bad person, twirling his/her mustache, seeking to victimize defenseless prey. Yet in reality, there is a lot of grey area & people can turn themselves into perpetrators (for example, by drinking) or greatly increase their chance of being victimized (for example, by drinking or communicating poorly – verbally or physically).
Furthermore, you have situations with bad outcomes for the people and/or society, where no perpetrator can be blamed or where the victim also has culpability.
If you actually want to address the full spectrum of sexual behavior with bad outcomes somewhat effectively, you need a lot more intelligent approach than just “don’t victim blame,” which we still do, anyway.
These are some examples of how feminist policies and reactions seem to work out in practice, in the main:
– Man and woman drink, lower their boundaries, have sex. Woman regrets it afterwards and can’t remember consenting -> man is a rapist, should face consequences
– Man and woman drink, lower their boundaries, have sex. Man regrets it afterwards and can’t remember consenting -> shouldn’t have gotten drunk, you fake victim
– Woman complains about abuse by a specific man -> any criticism of the complaint or defense of the man by the man himself or others is called victim blaming (#BelieveHer)
– Man complains about abuse by a specific woman -> this guy is harassing this woman, she can’t be guilty because she disagrees with what happened and we will believe her claims, also #YesAllMen
– Some people want to address women’s problems, including abuse at the hands of men, at college/work/non-profits/etc -> sure, let’s do training and otherwise address the issue
– Some people want to address men’s problems, including abuse at the hands of women, at college/work/non-profits/etc -> filthy MRAs, your demands are fake and you actually want to discuss how to rape women, get lost
It seems to me that feminists are on the whole fighting to blame men for as much of the grey area and even part of the black/white area with male victims, as possible. Of course, just with (very) traditional sexual norms, this is not explicitly acknowledged.
In the (very) traditional norms, women got a lot of bad faith and men were not assumed to have agency. The woman dresses very sexy -> she asked for it and he couldn’t help himself.
In the new norms, women are assumed to lack agency. She can’t be expected to explicitly tell a man what she (doesn’t) want, apparently; isn’t responsible for the effects of drinking on her behavior, etc.
I see no serious attempt at gender equality, just a shift to hold men overwhelmingly responsible for preventing bad outcomes; a responsibility that was mostly allocated to women in traditional norms.
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I’m convinced, at least if we define “truly traditional sexual ethics” to mean “having PIV sex regularly once married, without birth control.” (I’m neither enough of a historian or an ethicist to say that definition’s the best possible one, but I also don’t have any reason to doubt it.)
I guess that leaves the question of whether individual couples might be better off if they practiced a more traditional version of sexual ethics than we practice today, or whether groups would be better off if they encouraged a more traditional version.
——
Since this is in part in response to SSC’s piece on Chesterton fences, I guess the point is that even if we can’t keep the whole fence, you can never be sure that the spar you’re throwing out isn’t the important one. (Or conversely, that it isn’t inflicting a lot of suffering for no good reason).
Depending on how frequent we think this problem is, it might argue for more experimentation and intra-group heterogeneity on ethical questions. We can come back in 20 years and see whether the polygamists or the quiverfulls or somebody else has the happiest families, as long as we create spaces for them all to exist. (But again, if there’s not much risk that Ozy or Aapje is wrong, then we should just do it their way to avoid suffering).
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“I guess that leaves the question of whether individual couples might be better off if they practiced a more traditional version of sexual ethics than we practice today, or whether groups would be better off if they encouraged a more traditional version.”
The rule of thumb for traditional practices is that they accept a certain amount of collateral damage on the micro scale in exchange for a largely functional, self-propagating apparatus on the macro scale. There were always unhappy marriages and the predominant ethos of intersexual dynamics – abstinence on both sides, monogamous commitment, a guarantee of parental providership under the threat of legal penalty and social ostracization – was never set in stone. There were always outliers based on heterogeneity within the social domain in question, the higher classes enjoyed greater flexibility in when and how they could circumvent the norms, etc. But for the most part traditions persist because they are the most reliable norms that promote and protect the general health of a society in lieu of attractive alternatives.
TL;DR It’s not really a fair postulation. Ideally individual couples would be best off if they discerned all the beneficial principles addressing their specific context, but pragmatically they would be better off following a traditional set of norms that purportedly tackled the general concerns of a couple.
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@jossedley
You are forgetting about the children. High divorce rates seem to be at their expense more than anything.
Anyway, an issue with allowing experimentation and intra-group heterogeneity is that many norms are only viable when a community and/or the law enforce it. It’s extremely difficult to create a truly separate culture and there are probably only some stable configurations.
The Amish managed it, but they coerce people into staying in the community very strongly.
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Ozy, any analysis of the changing sexual landscape is incomplete if it neglects the fourth pillar: urbanization and its acceptance as the default social environment for people during their prime fertility years. Most of its influence manifests as a type of soft power that turns the traditional incentive structure for sex upside down and exacerbates the externalities stemming the other 3 factors you listed.
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There are a few religious groups – the Amish and some other Christians, some Orthodox Jews, some Muslims – that practice “Traditional Sexual Ethics In The Modern Day” and have many children per family. So no, it is certainly not “literally impossible”. Especially if they live among themselves, with reduced contact with the outside modern society. The outcome will be that these groups will grow numerically and as percents when the rest of the population shrinks with sub replacement fertility – the gradual replacement of the moderns by the traditionalists, to paraphrase your blog title.
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