The Free Thinker

The Double Standard and the Golden Rule Case for Free Love

In the exchange with Nato, MS, and Joyless Moralist in the comments of a recent post, I find myself reminded of why I feel impelled to insist on regarding gender roles as asymmetric, or as a critic might, tendentiously but not unreasonably, put it, on holding a "double standard" vis-a-vis men and women in sexual matters. It is not merely that I think that there is a basis for this double standard in human nature and in ethics (though I do). It is that the prohibition of premarital sex, which I think is correct, seems to me untenable unless combined with this kind of double standard.

The essence of the problem can be shown if we try to apply to sexual morality the Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." At the risk of sounding flippant, but in fact the deduction is strictly logical if we accept symmetry between the genders, this implies: "if you wish a girl would try to seduce you, try to seduce her." Other ethical rules-- don't tell lies, be just and merciful, etc.-- are generally extensions of the Golden Rule: I don't want others to lie to me, or treat me unfairly, or cruelly, so I shouldn't do it to others. But if they are not careful, the churches can formulate their sexual rules in ways that make them seem directly contrary to it.

By the time I was 24, I had long felt a sense of bad faith about the proposition, in which I presumptively believed as a churchgoer and as a member of the family I was born into, that premarital sex was wrong. I don't think I was particularly weak-willed then. When there was a conflict between a principle and a passion, the principle generally won out. As an example of this, I didn't drink alcohol for four years after leaving the Mormon church, for the sole purpose of proving-- not even to anyone in particular, but as if to some abstract "impartial spectator"-- that my motive for leaving the Mormon church was that I believed it to be false, and not just because I wanted to be able to drink. This was in college, and I was constantly in environments where drinking was normal and expected. I didn't have any moral qualms about drinking (in moderation of course) but regarded it as innocent and enjoyable. Yet I abstained for four years, long after it was clear I'd made the point to the satisfaction of any hypothetical observer, postponing the transition to what I had always regarded as a more rational and healthy practice until an opportunity came to break the obsolete taboo in circumstances where social pressure was completely absent. If I had had a firm belief that premarital sex was wrong, I would have acted accordingly.

But the rule seemed arbitrary, senseless, unnatural, opposed to life. I had heard arguments for the proposition from the Mormons but they seemed not only unpersuasive but even insincere. For example, Mormons would wax eloquent about the satisfaction of "saving yourself" for your spouse, of how rewarding it is for one's wedding night to be one's first time. This is, strictly speaking, an appeal to self-interest: you will enjoy your wedding night more if it's your first time. It might be persuasive to women, and in fact, I think this does come near to expressing the heart of the matter when it comes to why women should be virgins at marriage, but for a man it is absurdly feeble. It is not in a man's nature to be convinced by this argument. The relative value it places on things is wrong. But the crucial point is that it is an appeal to self-interest, and that robs it of its moral force.

At best, this argument is an appeal to do something good for an unknown, perhaps non-existent person: one's future spouse. To make it compelling in those terms, one has to insist that the value that one's future spouse will place on one's virginity at marriage is extremely high. For a woman, again, this argument has some force. It is in a man's nature to value virginity highly and to feel intense jealousy of the past sexual partners of a woman he loves. Some men successfully suppress this feeling but it is a factor a woman should take into account ex ante. No doubt there are some women, too, who highly value the virginity of their husbands; but there are others, on the other hand, who value sexual experience. More subtly, I don't think the idea of being valued for his virginity at marriage by a woman can appeal to a man, even one who for whatever reason intends to be a virgin at marriage. Such an attitude belittles him, compromises his masculine independence. A man feels, as I think a woman might not, that a future spouse for whom his virginity would be a deal-breaker is a future spouse he can do without. Anyway, no woman who wants a virgin husband is obliged to marry him. And if he risks narrowing his selection, that is again a non-moral appeal to self-interest.

It seemed to me then, and I suppose I still suspect that it is the case, that many or most Mormons and other religious people were rationalizing a tenet that they actually held dogmatically on the basis of revelation. Also, I suspected (and still suspect) that in some cases it was a sour-grapes story to hide their envy for people who had sexual opportunities they had sacrificed or could never have had. But my principles forbade me-- they still do, though now I might qualify it somewhat-- to accept tenets held dogmatically on the basis of revelation. For once one relinquishes reason and admits the principle of authority, there are a thousand authorities clamoring to be submitted to; and unless one is to accept one's creed by the accident of birth, which as a statistical matter most people do but which can't be justified epistemically, one has no grounds to choose between them. To have accepted the prohibition of premarital sex on the basis of authority would have been the act of the woodcutter who cuts off the branch that he was sitting on; for it was only on the basis of a moral commitment to reason that I could justify having left the Mormon church.

Mormons endorse a degree of role differentiation between the genders that makes many liberal, secular people uncomfortable. Yet when it comes to inculcating sexual scruples in the young, Mormons are, I think, quite free from double standards. If I had to guess, I suspect the same is true of Protestants and most other Christians today, although of course Mormons are especially militant and efficient in their program of indoctrinating the young. Mormons do not treat promiscuous girls as having debased themselves while regarding promiscuous boys with indulgence. They insist on the absolute prohibition of premarital sex and apply it equally to boys and girls. As a result, I largely missed, or at least inadequately appreciated, the reason that the Golden Rule case for free love fails, which is that what a man wants to do will have a very different significance for her than it does for him, whether she knows it or not.

So by the time I was 24, I found myself increasingly unable to believe the proposition that premarital sex was wrong (except to some extent, and in most cases, by means of some makeshift arguments of a highly romantic character which, in retrospect, I find incomprehensible). Of course, not believing in it, I could have abided by it anyway, and might well have done so. I had two strong reasons to do so. The first was my family, with whom a premarital sexual relationship might cause a rift. The second was Christianity. I was a churchgoer, though not baptized into any particular denomination (other than Mormonism). The commonly-heard arguments that Jesus didn't really say much about sex and that the early Christians' acceptance of traditional sexual taboos might have reflected mere culture and the state of technology (no contraceptives) seemed like less of a travesty to me then that they do now, but still, I didn't believe them. It seemed to me that if I were to have an unmarried sexual relationship it would my churchgoing and avowal of Christianity would be marred by an element of hypocrisy. I valued Christianity more than sexual freedom. If it had just been a question of denying myself certain pleasures which were possibly innocent, that would have been easy-- like my four years' abstinence from alcohol, with my comically inadequate motive.

But the difference from alcohol was this: in abstaining from sex, I was hurting not only myself but others, or so it seemed at the time. Some girls were disappointed, two at least were perplexed, saddened, and humiliated by my refusal. The sexual scruples I adhered to without believing in seemed not merely to sacrifice pleasures but to make me heartless and cruel towards those to him I felt tenderness and wanted to satisfy.

Now suppose, for the sake of argument, we accept the double standard. We accept that a man may, if anything, distinguish himself by conquests, liaisons, and intrigues, but that a woman who succumbs is a "fallen" woman, a "lost" woman, a slut, that she debases herself, and makes any man who marries her a fool. In that case the Golden Rule case for free love vanishes like smoke. The symmetry of "I'd like her to seduce me, so I should seduce her" becomes invalid. Instead, the question is: "Would I like to be ruined, lost, fallen, disgraced, degraded? If not, I shouldn't ruin and disgrace her." Just because a woman is willing doesn't change anything. She may be misguided or weak enough to be ready to ruin herself, but one still ought not to be her accomplice in self-destruction, just as one should not give a drink to a drunkard or a pistol to a suicide. The prohibition of premarital sex becomes, on these assumptions, quite rational.

Of course all that is rather harsh, perhaps even un-Christian, recalling that Jesus forgave the woman taken in adultery. Better to say that an unchaste woman can and ought to be forgiven, but that the loss is real; that it is a woman's nature-- a woman's nature, please note; it is important not to make this gender-neutral, which signals to a man to look for the same thing in his own nature, and he will not find it and will therefore disbelieve your whole argument-- for sexual desire to lead to fulfillment only in marriage and childrearing; that a young woman may not know this about herself (how could she, except by hearsay, not having lived through it?) and that she may mistakenly believe that a casual, "free love" relationship will give her satisfaction, but that despite her consent you will still (or at least, that you are very likely to) wound her in the end by taking advantage of her error; and that a young woman who pretends to desire only free love may even know already that marriage and childrearing are what she wants, but feel compelled to hide this from a man for fear of scaring him away, or even-- sadder still-- admire a man so much that she would not presume to ask for them, though she is fully within her rights to demand these things in return for offering herself to him. To this it must be added that there are women who are really willing to engage in no-strings-attached sex, and whom a man, by using her, will not wrong any more than a thief wrongs another thief when they collaborate in a crime. And we should be careful in judging such women or generalizing about them; they are individuals, they often have virtues, they vary in their interests and tastes, and so on... and yet a certain shallowness, a certain emptiness, a certain cruelty is inescapably attached to the path they have chosen. The simple fact of the imbalance in the desire for commitment between men and women gives those women who are willing to do without it a large selection and therefore a high degree of power. And power corrupts. At the same time, sexual desire detached from its natural goal of marriage and family becomes a function of mere whim, caprice, fancy. If a man is not a candidate for husband, what is he?  He may be a "toy boy," a source of momentary delight for some trivial reason, a good workout or a good joke or a good party, soon put down. Emotions will come into play, yet without justice or logic to them, since the shared plans that could give them logic is absent. Why, after all, should a current lover's yearning for her count more than the yearning of the next man, whom she hasn't tried yet? If we do not want to revive the scornful condemnation that the words "fallen woman" carry, let us remember the phrase's connotation of danger. A man might become obsessed with such a woman, might be driven to suicide for her sake, he might waste years of his life in pursuit of such women, generally in vain but disappointing even when occasionally successful. Most importantly-- and here the Golden Rule comes in again-- he will waste energies on them which could be put to a thousand better uses. Better, for one's own safety and that of others, to stay out of that rat race. Look for the signs of such women, and walk away.

I don't mean to say that the double standard is the only reason to avoid premarital sex. From a higher point of view, the greatest happiness comes from union with God, and this is available to all of us, even to all of us all the time, but only inasmuch as we are pure in heart. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." A sexual indiscretion darkens our eyes to the glorious innocent pleasures with which God surrounds us: a sunrise, the song of a bird, the branches of trees swaying against the sky, a blade of grass, the smile of a friend, the sunlight of an October day. The purer one's heart is, the more one rejoices in all these simple things, the more one sees God in them. A sexual affair, the suspense that leads up to it, the memories it leaves behind, what toil and tedium they all are, how they burden the mind, heart, soul, how they obscure better things, so much better things! However, this argument would be opaque to most people most of the time. The double standard argument is stronger, more elemental. It is based on attitudes, norms, judgments, values that bubble up naturally generation after generation, for they are rooted in instinct. Teenagers coin slang that expresses it more aptly than any learned explanation could. A Christian should try to soften its hard edges, should comfort those whom it teaches men to scorn; but it is legitimate, it is fundamental, it has wisdom in it, it must be given its due. To be too enlightened to acknowledge it is to cut oneself off from the gritty realism that is needed to exorcise the Golden Rule case for free love.

Polygyny and the Meta-Ethics of "Flourishing"

How should one evaluate the ethics of polygyny (men having more than one wife) from the perspective of an Aristotelian, a Kantian, and a utilitarian ethos?

Kantian.  There are two reasons that a Kantian might regard polygyny as immoral.  First, if we restrict our attention on men as moral agents, it is largely and in most cases inconsistent to will that "Marry multiple women," be a universal maxim, because there aren't enough women for all men to marry more than one.  Strictly speaking, this is not universally true.  If population growth rates are fast enough and men marry much younger women, universal polygyny could be possible.  Also, in the wake of large wars male populations are sometimes sufficiently depleted that the remaining men could practice generalized polygyny.  Still, where populations are stable and/or spouses are roughly the same age, and where there have been no demography-altering calamities, if some men have two wives, others will have to go without. 

Second, if we extend our attention to women as moral agents, a universal maxim to "Marry multiple people," making marriage exclusive on neither side, would clearly destroy the character of marriage altogether.  However, to apply the same sexual morality to men and women is not unproblematic.  Men have a biological reason to desire exclusive devotion from their mates that does not apply to women, namely that unless their mates are faithful, men will not know the paternity of any children they bear.  More generally, women may have different sexual needs and desires than men do, such that ethical maxims appropriate for men could not be validly cross-applied.  "Don't initiate romances; let the initiative come from the other side" might be a tenable, perhaps even wise maxim for women, but would hardly produce good results if practiced by both sexes, while "In situations of danger to yourself and your mate, value the other's safety above your own to the extent of sacrificing your life if necessary," might be a correct maxim for men, but would create oddities if applied to both sexes alike.  I think the false application of universalizability to sex is one reason why the case for free love can seem so overwhelming to logical young males: since promiscuous sex appeals to the untrained masculine nature, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," combined with an assumption of gender equality, seems to be a formula for free love.  But this overemphasizes the body at the expense of the mind.  If marriage is to be a connection of minds as well as of bodies, it does make sense to demand that maxims about marriage be universalizable to women as well as men, and to condemn polygyny on the grounds that polygynous husbands don't want their wives to practice polyandry, too.

Utilitarian.  Presumably, as a rule, a man gets more (marginal) pleasure from his first wife than his second, and less still from his third.  If so, to distribute women equally among men, in pairs of one husband, one wife, would yield more happiness to men than polygynous arrangements in which some men get several wives, others none.  Polygyny can fuel social conflict, as some men are left frustrated and with "nothing to lose."  Also, although the torments of jealousy suffered by women in polygynous arrangements may (at least "selfish gene" logic gives reason to think so) be less than those suffered by lovers of unfaithful women, the tug-of-war of wives for the attentions of one husband are surely painful.  The Chinese film Raise the Red Lantern poignantly portrays the rivalries among the wives of a polygynous Chinese gentleman.  So there are, it seems, pretty strong reasons to presume that monogamy serves the "greatest good of the greatest number."  A survey of the world's monogamous and polygynous societies suggests that the former are more peaceful, dynamic and creative, as well as a possible reason: when men can have multiple wives, men's efforts may be devoted to competing for a scarce resource, what is called a "zero-sum game," whereas if they are strictly limited to one, sexual competition is greatly reduced, and competitive energies are directed more into positive-sum games like commerce, art, and scholarship.

Aristotelian.  I don't know, but I expect Aristotle disapproved of polygyny, which was not practiced in Greece, as this article observes:

To a modern western audience, the fact that ancient Greeks and Romans were not supposed to be married to more than one person at any given time, nor even to cohabit with others alongside legal spouses, must seem perfectly ‘normal’. This may explain why this practice has received hardly any attention from historians of the classical world. Yet from a global, cross-cultural perspective, there is nothing ‘normal’ or unremarkable about this. Instead, until very recently, polygynous arrangements of marriage or cohabitation were the norm in world history, and strict monogamy remained an exception. Barely one in six of the 1,195 societies surveyed in the largest anthropological dataset have been classified as ‘monogamous’, while polygyny was frequently considered the preferred choice even if it failed to be common in practice (Gray (1998) 89-90, with Clark (1998)). Smaller samples of better documented societies convey a similar picture, and while ‘monogamy’ is observed in a small proportion of all cases (16-20% in samples of 348 and 862 systems: Murdock (1967); Burton et al. (1996)), due to their failure to distinguish between rare instances of polygamy and its formal prohibition these surveys tend to overestimate the actual incidence of strictly monogamous rules. In fact, although the nature of the evidence does not allow us to rule out the existence of strictly monogamous systems prior to the first millennium BCE, the earliest unequivocal documentation originates from the archaic Greek and early Roman periods. Thus, even though Greeks and Romans need not have been the first cultures to prescribe monogamy, these are the earliest securely attested cases and, moreover, established a paradigm for subsequent periods that eventually attained global dominance. In this sense, Greco-Roman monogamy may well be the single most important phenomenon of ancient history that has remained widely unrecognized. What is more, the global positive correlation between patricentric kinship systems and polygyny (Burton et al. (1996) 93-4) renders the emergence of prescriptive monogamy in the patricentric societies of Greece and Rome even more remarkable.

However, I doubt whether an Aristotelian meta-ethics really lends itself to the rejection of polygyny.  Aristotle's measure of ethics was the realization of a man's telos, which was conceived as parallel to the "flourishing" of biological organisms.  Clearly, for a male of any species to "flourish" in the biological sense involves polygyny.  The reasoning of Darwin, or Dawkins, makes this especially clear, but the fact that polygyny for the wealthy and successful of human societies has been the general practice is evidence enough.  Thus King David and the prophet Muhammad were polygynous, as is Osama bin Laden; the Bible treats King David's polygyny unproblematically as evidence of his success and glory.  Even today, the polygynous impulse is not dead among the successful.  US presidents can't be polygamous by law but many of them-- Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton-- have been in practice.  If we see a picture of a Hollywood star with a beautiful woman on each arm, it's a symbol of success.  I once saw a crude wrestling type sport in which the contestants each came with a girl, and the victor in each match appropriated his opponent's girl, so that the winner ended up with four of them clustered around him.

I'm sure Aristotelian ethicists can find ways to argue that polygyny is not ("really") the height of human flourishing, and I'd probably agree, in a way, with the arguments they would make.  And yet it seems clear to me that the real reasons polygyny is wrong are the Kantian and utilitarian ones, namely, that to practice polygyny is inegalitarian and causes unhappiness in others.  Of course, I would also agree that man does not flourish, in the most important sense, by being polygynous: his soul does not flourish.  But that is because the flourishing of a man's soul depends on his doing what is right, and Kant and the utilitarians can tell us why polygyny is not right, and therefore, why it is harmful to the soul.  "Natural man," so to speak, flourishes by being polygynous; but man is not only a natural, but also a supernatural being.  Supernatural man flourishes better when monogamous or celibate; polygyny is a burden to him; but this is only an illustration of the more general point that the flourishing of supernatural man has hardly anything to do with the flourishing of natural man and is often opposed to it.  Man's soul may attain its utmost health just as his body is being ripped aparts by lions in the arena.

Gay rights vs. religious liberties (NPR) (hat tip: Rod Dreher)

As gay couples in California head to the courthouse starting Monday to get legally married, there are signs of a coming storm. Two titanic legal principles are crashing on the steps of the church, synagogue and mosque: equal treatment for same-sex couples on the one hand, and the freedom to exercise religious beliefs on the other.

As states have legalized same-sex partnerships, the rights of gay couples have consistently trumped the rights of religious groups. Marc Stern, general counsel for the American Jewish Congress, says that does not mean that a pastor can be sued for preaching against same-sex marriage. But, he says, that may be just about the only religious activity that will be protected.

"What if a church offers marriage counseling? Will they be able to say 'No, we're not going to help gay couples get along because it violates our religious principles to do so? What about summer camps? Will they be able to insist that gay couples not serve as staff because they're a bad example?" Stern asks.

Stern says if the early cases are any guide, the outlook is grim for religious groups.

A few cases: Yeshiva University was ordered to allow same-sex couples in its married dormitory. A Christian school has been sued for expelling two allegedly lesbian students. Catholic Charities abandoned its adoption service in Massachusetts after it was told to place children with same-sex couples.

The same happened with a private company operating in California.
A psychologist in Mississippi who refused to counsel a lesbian couple lost her case, and legal experts believe that a doctor who refused to provide IVF services to a lesbian woman is about to lose his pending case before the California Supreme Court.

And then there's the case of a wedding photographer in Albuquerque, N.M.
On January 28, 2008, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission heard the case of Vanessa Willock v. Elane Photography.

Willock, in the midst of planning her wedding to her girlfriend, sent the photography company an e-mail request to shoot the commitment ceremony. Elaine Huguenin, who owns the company with her husband, replied: "We do not photograph same-sex weddings. But thanks for checking out our site! Have a great day!"

Willock filed a complaint, and at the hearing she explained how she felt.
"A variety of emotions," she said, holding back tears. "There was a shock and anger and fear. ... We were planning a very happy day for us, and we're being met with hatred. That's how it felt."

I guess a possible bright side of this is that it could lead to a form of sorting: straight, married people who want to be able to practice their religion will have reason to move to states where the law recognizes the traditional meaning of marriage.  Religious refugees have played a hugely disproportionate role in the advance of civilization.  Cases in point: (a) saving Western civilization in the monasteries after the fall of Rome, (b) founding America.

Gender: A Modest Proposal, and a Moral Question

I've had some conversations with people lately that have got me thinking: It's pretty hard for young people to get a start in life these days.  It seems to me that it has to do with the nature of production in today's economy.  Machinery has greatly reduced the need for human muscle power, and information technology has greatly reduced the need for jobs that have a routine intellectual aspect.  Technological change has hollowed out certain sections of the labor force-- first agriculture, then to some extent manufacturing, and now maybe clerical work and middle management.  That doesn't mean there are no jobs, but it seems to me that the jobs that are left more than ever involve a high degree of... well, it's hard to say what exactly.  Human capital?  Yes, but not just human capital in the sense of education or specific skills, and it's hard to say in what the human capital really consists.  Social capital?  Yes, and that's even less well understood.  It consists partly in "making a name" for yourself: you not only have to be good, but you have to be known to be good, and while that was always true I suppose, the types of things you have to be known to be good at are subtler than in the past.  In the industrial era, labor was commoditized: any warm body could do routine factory tasks, and supervision was easy, too.  Now the opposite seems to be happening: labor is become more impalpable and abstract, and more difficult to cover by contract.

Which brings me back to where I started: it's difficult for young people to get a start in life.  It's hard for them to understand the nature of the economy, first of all, and then working one's way into the right social networks, picking up not just the knowledge but the value systems, making the right impressions, simply takes time, probably years.  A Bachelor's degree, even from a good school, might leave you working at Starbucks; I hear again and again that you need a Master's these days.  That typically involves going into a lot of debt, at a time when you have only the dimmest idea what the job markets are like on the other end.  Your earnings trajectory will be unpredictable; career advancement may require unpaid work, internships and whatnot, as well as school of course.  Your availability can't necessarily be restricted to 40 hours a week.  Of course, this is the career path to relatively prestigious jobs, where incomes are a large multiple of the bare necessities.  You don't need those jobs just to get by, unless you have a lot of student loans.  But you might need them to support a family.

So, what about family, and marriage?  Here there is a difference between men and women.  Men can afford to wait to marry more than women can.  Biologically, men remain potent much longer than women remain fertile.  Presumably because of this (albeit by subconscious channels) men tend to be attracted to younger women, women to somewhat older men.  Of course these tastes are also culturally conditioned, but they have a sound biological basis.  If it's necessary to get a Bachelor's and a Master's and do internships etc. before one can really get established in a solid career, a man might be in his late 20s or early 30s.  That age doesn't narrow his marriage prospects much.  For a woman, however-- I'm no gynecologist, but see here, or here-- pregnancy becomes more difficult and riskier after 35.  So if women want to do Bachelor's and Master's and then get married and have two or three kids the timing starts to become a little tight.

So here's my modest proposal.  A shrewd response to the evolution of production and career trajectories might be stronger gender role differentiation.  Men could take their time, getting advanced degrees and trying adventurous, experimental internships and jobs, gradually developing skills and networks and interests, making their names, getting established, and start thinking about marriage around 30 to 35.  Women could think about marriage and children much earlier, say 20 to 25.  The implicit price of their time would be relatively low when they were engaged in the very important but often tedious and certainly not especially skill-intensive tasks of caring for young babies.  Women would generally not get advanced degrees before marriage and childbirth, but they might pursue them later, probably in a more casual and intermittent fashion, to the extent that babysitting pools and day cares and other arrangements could free up some of their time.  By their 40s and 50s, with teenage children or as empty-nesters, women could pursue careers more aggressively, working full-time etc., and would still have two or three decades to fulfill career dreams, if they were so inclined, before retirement at 65 or 75.

Since the 1960s or so, there has been a tendency to be more egalitarian in gender roles, and within marriage specifically.  My modest proposal would reverse this trend as far as marriages are concerned.  With a ten-year difference in life experience between husbands and wives, there could certainly be courtesy and mutual respect between spouses, but hardly equality.  One might even say that the inequality was in the women's favor, just as, if a 30-year-old manages to win a place on a Board of Directors whose other members are over 50, his youth, if anything, makes him rather more impressive than his colleagues.  But as husbands would have far more experience and knowledge of the world than their wives, marital relations would presumably not be quite on an equal footing.

Now, I am being partly facetious here.  I am suggesting that there is an economic case for a change in social norms along these lines, but it may turn out, on closer examination, not to be a strong one.  And it's quite possible that marital partners would simply not enjoy such a marriage: a 23-year-old girl, for example, might simply not be attracted to 32-year-old guys.  But put that to one side.  Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the proposed change in social norms would make it easier for young people to get a start in life, reduce their anxieties and financial difficulties, give rise to more stable and fertile marriages, and help men and women both to have more satisfying careers over the life-cycle.

Here's my question: Would it somehow be morally wrong to promote stronger gender role differentiation, if it were economically efficient to do so?  I have a feeling that my modest proposal would be horrifying to feminists, not so much because of any objection to my practical arguments, but precisely for moral reasons.  It would seem unjust.  Is this objection valid, or not?  If so, why?  What is the broader meta-ethics in which it could be best understood?

"Man of My Dreams"

One of the things that irritates me about women is that so many of them are looking for "the man of my dreams."  Of course, perhaps not quite so often, men look for "the woman (or girl) of my dreams."

I generally find it a relief to wake up from a dream.  The trouble with a dream is that it derives from the resources that are already within my own mind: ideas, memories, hopes and fears.  I live within forms conjured from within the thought-realm.  Events in a dream depend in weird, inappropriate ways on my own thoughts: thus, if in a dream I am walking through a corridor, and I entertain a fear that a snake will drop down from the ceiling, it probably will drop down from the ceiliing, just because I thought it.  The dream-world derives from my own sub-conscious, which is not independent of my conscious.  The dream-world may-- like my own thoughts-- be subject to other influences, too, such as those of devils and angels which are said to be able to influence the mind directly.  It is a world in which the will is more helpless because it lacks a framework of reliable rules within which to work.  But, more than that, it is an impoverished world.  As long as we can always wake up and come back to the real world, where reality has a blessed other-ness and where the laws of nature operate, providing security and a rock for the will to build its plans upon, brief sojourns in dream-land-- including sleep-dreams and daydreams-- are not always unpleasant.  But to be trapped forever in that impoverished world, at the mercy of the wild currents of the thought-realm, where the will's vast but vague powers are not well-defined enough for it to be in rational control-- that is an intimation of sheol or Hades, the land of the strengthless dead which the Greeks and Hebrews believed was the destiny of all men after death.

In the same way, the last thing I want is "the woman of my dreams."  I want a girl with her own nature, with the other-ness of reality, not a mere derivative of my own fancies.  And I don't want to try to live up to the arbitrary conceptions of the romantic that the kind of woman who wants "the man of her dreams" derives from who-knows-where.  That is a particularly horrific kind of slavery, in which the master gives not rational rules or useful tasks, but demands the satisfaction of weird whims.

Not that romance, or even romanticism, is a bad thing in its place.  When a scene or a phrase is striking, symbolic, apt, when it somehow reverberates in the imagination with a peculiar beauty, when it seems to be an intimation of something beyond the mundane, enjoy it!  But don't demand it or attempt to manufacture it: that is a trap.  I am an advocate of rational marriage: agree on the rules and the roles, set out to achieve goals, and honor one's commitments; emotions are secondary.  And the rules/roles/goals should not be decided by the couple themselves, because negotiating the optimal marriage contract is much too difficult a task for any random two people who decide they're in love, and because the clash of interests that negotiation must bring to the surface destroys the feeling of love which makes a marriage harmonious and a source of joy.  No, the rules/roles/goals of a marriage should be determined by tradition, so that all the couple has to do is agree to an arrangement that they, and all their family and friends, understand.  And then follow through.

Wedding

My sister got married last Saturday. She was breathtakingly beautiful kneeling before the altar, the most beautiful that I've ever seen her. There was a feeling of transfiguration, as if a miracle was taking place. Afterwards we had a reception by the water, with friends gathered from years back and from all around the country. It was joyous beyond words.

The priest's homily expounded the conservative Catholic view of marriage. What the Catholics have to say on marriage always seems to me shallow somehow. And yet it has the merit of being true as far as it goes. The 20th century was full of writers-- Faulkner, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, to name a few-- who were able to penetrate the psychology of sexuality more and to say more interesting, more profound things. And popular music is full of a sort of sexual philosophy, broad and varied yet having some recurrent themes, which is far more persuasive to the part of the brain that thinks about sex, and next to which John Paul II's teachings on sex seem like a pale shadow.  And yet when writers and singers go beyond, or step outside, the Catholic position, they generally end up in half-mad, unworkable positions, suitable to narrative but not to life.

If mankind's understanding of math were like its understanding of sex, there would be one mathematician who would repeat over and over again, "1+1=2," while all the rest would be people like the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, combining nifty new insights with bizarre taboos and mystical fantasies.

Virtue Ethics and the Rawlsian Case of Traditional Sexual Morality

Joyless Moralist, in the debate about sexual morality triggered by the post "What's Wrong With Virginity?", goes the extra mile with a lucid exposition of virtue ethics and the alternatives:

I tend to group things according to the different varieties of moral philosophy that are familiar to me... Very crudely, the approaches I know could be grouped based on the way they answer this question: what sorts of things can rationally be the object of human desire? Religious folk like myself tend to go for the "thick human nature" solutions: God made people with a specific telos (ultimately to know and love him, but a variety of other interpersonal relationships come into the picture as we move along) and we should live in ways that further that end. When we don't, we'll be unhappy as well as immoral. "Thick human nature" views tend to suppose that you can explain a lot about morality and the good life merely by looking at what kind of thing a human creature is, and deducing from that what sort of lifestyle will turn him into the most excellent version of what God made him to be. (If you're thinking of Aristotle's function argument here, you're thinking along the right lines.) In an important sense, then, morality is the pursuit of human excellence.