Some thoughts on morality and sexual freedom Reading this interesting article and Razib's excellent "Blank Slate" review (below) put me in the mood to post on morality. There are many atheists who believe that the notion of "good" is meaningless because there is no "absolute" good. I used to be one of them, but within the past decade or so I've come to a more nuanced view, motivated largely by evolutionary psychology considerations. I now believe that morality is foundationally biochemical, and that the non-existence of "absolute good" does not preclude the existence of a human or relative "good". From one of my earlier posts:

Do I think that morals and ethics exist in some absolute sense, as if we could measure 15 units of "good" as we can 15 kilograms? No. But "morals and ethics" are a useful shorthand for "societal conventions that are to some degree universal and have their roots in biology and game theory". In that sense, as a pragmatist, it's foolish to insist that moral or ethical considerations should never come into play when formulating policy or dealing with people. The cultural and biological apparatus of religiously inspired morality is a way to allow positive-sum communities to emerge and succeed. A biological propensity for religious belief probably encouraged people to stick to laws even when other people weren't watching.[1] In ancient times this likely meant that religiously predisposed communities were at an advantage vs. non-religiously predisposed communities because the latter were less likely to obey laws and rules without enforcement. At some point in the last thousand years or so, strong religious belief became a disadvantage in that it hampered scientific progress, and the pendulum swung back towards secular societies more rapidly than natural selection has accomodated. [2] In other words, morality is a real thing that is best described in terms of the contract structure of positive sum games. One need not believe in superstition to believe that this structure is useful for civilization. [1] Other things contributed to this as well; for example, the feeling of guilt (independent of one's belief in god) is likely a way of chemically enforcing contracts. [2] Galileo and Darwin are not the only examples; fundamentalists generally oppose the onslaught of technology.

Point in a nutshell: those atheists who reject the notion of a universal morality are much like those feminists and creationists who reject the unpleasant truth that the practice of rape is - at least in part - evolutionarily adaptive. All three groups reject truth supported by science [1] for ideological reasons. Now, there's another issue that I've been thinking about that's related to the notion of universal morality. The question is: Is unfettered sexual liberty for everyone (particularly females) on net a good or bad thing for society? Libertarians and conservatives - before you flame me in the comments section, let's dispassionately consider the pros and cons of the sexual revolution. Downsides first, because they've been trumpeted more loudly: Downsides

• The breakdown of traditional restrictions on sexuality contributes to the collapse of the extended family. This occurs because divorce rates rise, ever-been-married rates fall, first-marriage ages rise, fewer children are born per family, and relatives are more geographically, ethnically, and economically dispersed. While some of these trends are aided and abetted by the rise of affordable long distance travel and communication, they would be unlikely to be as prevalent in a society which subscribed to entirely traditional sexual mores.
• The collapse of the extended family contributes to social pathologies: children born out of wedlock, welfare mothers, single mothers. Those who make poor sexual decisions are often seen as sympathy objects by the rest of society, and showered with governmental largesse. In this case, individualism leads (paradoxically) to large-scale collectivism enforced by the state. Contrast this with the small-scale collectivism of the nuclear or extended family - which is largely motivated by genetic relatedness.
• The social pathologies listed above have economic consequences: in addition to welfare, we see higher delinquency rates for children of broken marriages, costs associated with the state acting in loco parentis , etc. Generally speaking, there's more state spending per-head for fatherless families, and the point is that social mores are not independent of economic consequences .
• Sexual liberty contributes to the breakdown of traditional gender roles , leading to stupidities like reduced requirements for female firefighters, police officers, and military personnel.

Now, before we move to the pros, a key point must be kept in mind. Social conservatives like to harken back to a quasi-fictional time when "men were men and women were women". But the fact is that the restraint of the Victorian era or the 1950's was historically anomalous. If you look at the sorts of things humans are programmed for, you will begin to see that we have been randy creatures for the vast majority of our evolutionary history. Men have always liked porn. Women have always been open to the option of adultery. But the societies between the hunter-gatherer era and the advent of the printing press had one thing in common: they were generally unlikely to afford sexual liberty. In other words, they restrained these individually beneficial urges for the good of the small-scale genetically related collective. It's my opinion that the advent of mass communication broke the information logjam crucial to preserving these premodern sexual mores. Before the dawn of the printing press (and the television and the internet), your average Joe might have thought his wholly natural desires to be deviant because they were at odds with the philosophy of restraint promulgated by the community. But once this average male starts to realize that other people are also interested in (say) nekkid pictures, he starts to understand that much societal prudishness is a sham erected for the benefits of the collective. Once we know what other people are really thinking, we reassess the "naturalness" of sexual desire. Ok. Now the upsides: Upsides

• Sexual freedom is beneficial from an individual's perspective. You aren't forced to sleep with whoever you want, but you can if you want to (and if you can find a willing partner!) In other words - it is not coercive.
• The sexual revolution didn't just mean sexual freedom - it also meant that women entered the workforce in large numbers. That put our economy on a permanent wartime footing, and is one of the major factors in our tremendous industrial output.
• A tremendous portion of consumer spending focuses on goods related directly or indirectly to the pursuit of sex. Examples: makeup, hair gel, gym membership, clothes, alcohol, etc. All of these purchases are intended to make oneself more attractive to the opposite sex, and it's clear that sexual liberty promotes this sort of spending.
• The serious pathologies associated with the sexual revolutions mostly transpire in low IQ circles. While divorce is an issue, the severe problems (welfare moms, high crime, etc.) mentioned are essentially nonexistent.

My opinion? Well, since you asked... I'm a materialist, so religious considerations do not enter into my calculations. Less crime/welfare moms/gender spats is ok, but not at the price of returning women to the bedroom/kitchen, damaging the economy and reducing the availability of free sex. As I said above, the negative issues associated with sexual liberty take two forms: welfare mothers & PC denial of gender roles. Let's consider these in turn: Re: Welfare Mothers Why should I have to foot the bill of less sex because the low IQ can't handle it? Let them do what they want in their communities, so long as the resulting mess can be contained. I am my brother's keeper, but I am not my genetically-unrelated co-citizen's keeper. I'm willing to pay the higher taxes to contain the resulting crime, because freedom is worth a lot to me. In fact, I'd wager it's worth a lot to most young adults if the question was posed as "$x or loss of sexual freedom". I think an alternative preferable to a totally impractical return of "one-size-fits-all" morality is "targeted" morality, such as economic incentives to prevent crack babies. This is the position for which Shockley was vilified, but it's not at all coercive. Low IQ people are free to make choices that cost society (albeit dumb ones) when it comes to having unprotected sex, so why can't they make the choice to undergo voluntary sterilization? While targeted morality is currently infeasible as state policy (due largely to axiom-of-equality/PC considerations), I think that the coming revolution in molecular genetics will make it much more palatable. In any case, it's no more fanciful than the social conservatives' fantasy of a return to traditional morality. I prefer targeted morality to "one size fits all" because the former is a scalpel while the latter is a hammer. Re: Gender Roles & PC I think that gender PC will crumble as soon as the (far stronger) race PC crumbles, which will happen when the axiom of equality is conclusively disproven. Now, would sex relations be better if women had a more traditional role? This is the position of Fred on Everything, but the point is certainly arguable - there's something to be said for women as independent actors, and relationships based more on mutual affection rather than the simple economic/sexual reciprocal parasitism that characterizes many traditional relationships. Ok. So that's my opinion, but I may be missing something. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments box, as long as they don't involve condemning me to hell... [1] Namely game theory and some neuroscience. Eventually of course we will express these things in terms of molecular genetics and biochemistry alone, and that day is not far off. Godless clarifies: I may have been a bit unclear in describing the connection between evolution, morality, and game theory. The point is that these positive sum games are played for survival and reproduction , not for utility per se . "Happiness" only matters from the Darwinian standpoint inasmuch as it contributes to the twin imperatives of survival and reproduction. [2] The quantity being optimized is not an arbitrary function of preference (economic utility), but a reasonably fundamental function of behavior (genetic fitness). Of course, different environments will result in different selection pressures - meaning that those moral codes that promote the group's survival in a given environment will stick around for the next generation, while others will fail. Though the gap between (say) a human's morality and that of an ant is far larger than the difference between the mores of two average humans, we do observe that behavioral standards vary by ethnic group even within humans. Michael Levin discusses this in his book when considering the behavioral differences between Mongoloids, Negroids, and Caucasoids, and Philippe Rushton has proposed a theory to explain the origin of these differences. I'm not sure whether I buy Rushton's theory - it's a bit ad hoc in my opinion - but it only serves to explain the cause of behavioral variation. The fact of behavioral variation is another thing entirely - it's already pretty well established, and acknowledged even by "anti-racists" like Leonard Jeffries though they of course disagree on the cause! Long time readers know my predilections - it's my professional opinion that genetics will be seen as preeminent in determining behavior when when we reduce behavior to biochemistry and correlate biochemistry with the genetic information provided by the hapmap. In other words, because genetics partially determines behavior, and behavior partially determines fitness, we should not be surprised to see different genetically coded behaviors among groups that faced unequal selection pressures. [2] As an example, witness this article referenced by duende in the comments box below. The unhappiness many childless women feel is likely to be at least partly genetic in origin.