Comments on: Feminism and The Moral Animal

By: phil

phil — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 08:25:21 +0000

Hmmm…

zephoria I guess you have a point… celebate monks have been invading cities for generations now. It is time to put an end to this madness.

By: zephoria

zephoria — Fri, 02 May 2003 23:28:05 +0000

Having been the product of those divorce situations, i’m very fully aware of how that support *completely* breaks down. Legal rights are getting better, but in most cases divorce makes men richer and women poorer while depriving the children of economic support and an available father, while simultaneously making it impossible for the mother to be as present.

There is no doubt that the system is not currently optimizing towards genetic evolution, but that doesn’t mean that the imbred habits for evolution do not affect contemporary social culture. Social change and social values do not eliminate embedded desires for sex and children or our tendencies towards jealousy and violence.

There is no doubt that i’m taking 200 pages of an argument and skimming over it to suggest what i’m thinking about.. call it reductionist if you like. All the same, there is a distinct inverse corrolation between access to healthy sexual interactions and violence in men (just as there is a direct corrolation between marriage and health, which is why health insurance is cheaper when you are married). The military knows how to utilize this to its advantage and i suspect that this will make China and interesting powerhouse in the next decade or so.

By: Ben Chun

Ben Chun — Fri, 02 May 2003 21:24:42 +0000

The one weakness I see in this line of reasoning is that in serial monogamy, men are often obligated to support their former wives (alimony) and any children from that marriage (child support). So I wouldn’t call that the worst of all possible worlds. But none of this is really about survival anymore… the thing that people always seem to forget when discussing social evolution is that there is no selection pressure anymore (at least, not in developed nations). It’s an analogy, and it’s important not to get tangled up in mixing the reasoning of one system (genetic evolution) with another (social change).

I also find this to be a bit reductionist… poor men having lack of access to women results in violence? There are so many conceptual leaps being made there that it feels like frogger. Reflecting on my own personal experiences, it seems like there are a lot more emotional (socially or biologically based) questions about polygamy or polyamory than answers to be found in looking at social effects…