2. What is a "public standard"?
3. How are public standards enforced?
4. Who are other people to say what sexual conduct is right for me?
5. What's so bad about the sexual conduct traditionally viewed with disfavor?
6. Why believe that looser sexual standards have the bad consequences you describe?
7. Why blame sex for all bad social trends of the past 30 years?
10. Doesn't the imposition of external rules destroy love, intimacy and individuality?
12. Why can't people with differing standards just live side by side?
13. How do you know that the particular standard you like is the one everyone should comply with?
16. Isn't traditional sexual morality oppressive and discriminatory against women?
19. Do you really believe people will ever go back to the old ways?
20. What is the relation of sexual morality to politics?
Sources and further readings on the web and
off.
Private conduct doesn't stay private. Among other things, private consensual sex gives rise to babies, family life, knife fights, betrayal, self-sacrificing devotion, and STDs. All these things are of concern to people other than those immediately involved, so public standards regarding the private conduct that leads to them can be a good thing if they help promote some and reduce others.
2. What is a "public standard"?
A reasonably coherent common understanding of what behavior is right and wrong. Examples include rules of politeness and everyday moral standards (honesty, trustworthiness and so on). Such standards aren't perfectly fixed and most often aren't legally enforceable, but in any society that is not in crisis they are definite enough to be used in judging conduct and firm enough to make it extremely awkward to flout them.
3. How are public standards enforced?
Any number of ways. Depending on circumstances and how serious the violation is, people may look the other way, make critical comments, refuse to cooperate, avoid dealings with violators, and so on. Informal enforcement by the people one relies on in daily life is most common; thus, sexual standards most often are primarily enforced by family members although attitudes of broader communities are important as well. In addition, people rightly expect the actions of public authorities to uphold accepted standards. How public authorities do that varies greatly depending on any number of things -- it's not the same for the standards of politeness and the standards that condemn murder, and it differs from one political regime to another depending on the degree of government involvement in various aspects of social life. As a result, what sexual conduct should be considered wrong and what acts should be legally penalized are different questions; to avoid issues of political theory that have no special connection with sex only the first is considered in this FAQ.
4. Who are other people to say what sexual conduct is right for me?
Who are other people to say what is polite, what honesty requires, what constitutes slander or harassment, or how much you should pay to support government operations? Views differ on all those things. Nonetheless, decisions must be made and some decisions must be made socially rather than individually. Sexuality is the root of procreation, the family and the rearing of children, and thus of the continued existence and well-being of society. Standards regarding sexuality are therefore fundamental rules for how we live together that can no more be viewed as a matter of individual choice than the standards of ordinary honesty or the rules of property. We need such standards to coordinate our conduct in important areas of life and let us know what we have a right to expect from each other.
5. What's so bad about the sexual conduct traditionally viewed with disfavor?
Social acceptance of such conduct transforms the setting in which men and women deal with each other in a way that radically weakens family life.
How men and women view sex affects the nature and stability of their relationships. It matters whether they view sex as something that essentially has to do with love, marriage and children or as a feature their bodies happen to have that they can do with as they will. To accept as legitimate traditionally proscribed conduct, such as adultery, fornication and homosexuality, is to deny that sex has a specific nature and the sexual tie between a man and a woman a unique value and seriousness. Such a denial creates a world in which men and women deal with each other with no preconceptions except that each wishes to find a pattern that satisfies whatever inclinations and impulses he may have. No one has a right to expect anything particular from anyone else, so trial, error and change are only to be expected. People's feelings may lead them to make private commitments to each other, but feelings change, and the commitments are unlikely to outlast them.
Governing sexual life purely by private impulses and purposes thus makes fidelity and trust far harder to achieve, and so tends to destroy both individual happiness and conditions favorable to the successful rearing of children, an absolute necessity for a tolerable society. Stable and functional unions between men and women for raising children are too important to leave to idiosyncrasy; public moral standards and attitudes must create a setting that fosters and protects them. Accordingly, a moral view that brings sexual relations into a publicly recognized order that supports such unions is a necessity.
6. Why believe that looser sexual standards have the bad consequences you describe?
For one thing, it's believable that people who think sex has to do with fidelity and having children will act differently in the ways suggested than people who think it has to do with doing what seems best to them at the moment. For another, experience indicates that looser standards indeed have those consequences. Trends regarding family structure and the well-being of children since the sexual revolution of the 1960s are very much in point.
To give a few numbers, in 1960 5.3% of all births in America were illegitimate; in 1993, 31%. For blacks the figures were 23% and 69%. Over the period 1960-1990 the marriage rate per 1000 unmarried women went from 73.5 to 54.2, the divorce rate from 9.2 to 20.9, and the proportion of couples cohabiting without marriage increased about sixfold. Not surprisingly, the proportion of children living with both parents plunged from 85% in 1970 to 69% in 1995, and the percentage living with their mother only grew from 11% to 23%.
At the same time the world became far worse for children. The percentage of children living in poverty in America grew by a third from 1970 to 1990, largely as a direct result of illegitimacy and divorce. The evidence for causality in the case of other problems such as juvenile delinquency and suicide is more inferential, but the far greater frequency of such problems among young people living with illegitimacy and divorce and the huge growth of such problems during the years in which family structure was loosening (and during which spending on education and social welfare increased enormously) are certainly suggestive. It is suggestive, for example, that three out of four teenage suicides occur in a household where a parent is absent and that 5 out of 6 adolescents caught up in the criminal justice system come from such households. Psychological studies of emotional and behavioral problems and anecdotal and impressionistic accounts confirm the conclusion that the family instability associated with looser sexual morals has been catastrophic for children.
Anecdote and impression are also suggestive regarding the relations between the sexes; along with the marriage and divorce rates they suggest those relations are far from what they should be and have been. It appears that men and women are different enough to have trouble establishing solid long-term relations if there are no settled expectations they can rely on, and they must instead base their relations solely on individual negotiations leading to deals that are likely to last only until one party changes his mind. The sexual revolution, disastrous for children, evidently hasn't made their elders happy either.
7. Why blame sex for all bad social trends of the past 30 years?
There's no need to say sex is the cause of everything; it's enough to say that changes in sexual attitudes are connected to unacceptably bad trends in a way that makes a reversion to more traditional attitudes necessary to reverse them.
People can argue forever about the causes of modern social problems. Nonetheless, it is plain that they are not caused by poverty, repression, insufficient formal education, unequal opportunity, or too few social programs. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why internationally they have grown so much during a period in which prosperity, formal education, and social programs and protections expanded so greatly. Each country has its own story, but the pattern is clear. From 1960 to 1990 throughout the West a decline in marriage rates was accompanied by a much sharper rise in divorce rates (which typically more than doubled) and illegitimacy (which typically rose 4-6 times). At the same time crime rates, welfare costs, and other indicia of social disorder, especially those relating to young people, increased dramatically; crime rates, for example, increased 6 to 7-fold in most Western European countries between 1955 and 1990, while social spending rose enough to cause very large budget deficits in spite of increased revenues and attempts to contain costs.
These changes apparently are historically unprecedented. English statistics, which are comprehensive and readily available, show an illegitimacy rate that did not deviate much from 5 percent between 1800 and 1960 but by the end of 1992 had shot up to more than 32 percent; the rise in the crime rate has been even steeper and similarly unprecedented. All this has occurred during a period marked on the whole by great advances in prosperity, social protections, and what is considered enlightenment.
It thus appears that family disorder has been closely connected to general social disorder. Both appear to be linked not to the material circumstances commonly blamed but to a decline in the degree to which people feel that family and similar personal ties are important, binding and trustworthy. Such connections are typically what bring people to be responsible and lead stable and orderly lives, and they are what give them something other than the state to fall back on in case of trouble. The decline can be attributed to a variety of causes, including general conditions of modern life that make people economically less dependent on each other. Economic and similar conditions may affect but do not determine culture, however; one of the main functions of moral institutions has always been to counteract bad effects nonmoral circumstances would otherwise have. Accordingly, we have a special need today for moral ideals and standards that promote close and durable connections among particular individuals. Traditional sexual morality and the ideals associated with it promote such connections because they foster the traditional family; it is hard to think of anything that could substitute for them.
An act can be wrong not only because of its specific consequences but also because of the consequences of general acceptance of acts of the same kind. For example, it would cause no demonstrable injury to anyone if I counterfeited enough money to live on, at least if the counterfeiting were skillful enough to avoid detection. It would nonetheless be wrong for me to do so because if everyone thought counterfeiting was OK the financial system would come to an end. A similar line of thought applies to acts that many people find tempting and if generally engaged in would destroy a generally beneficial system of sexual attitudes and customs. The question in both cases is what the world would be like if the moral system that the act expresses were universally accepted.
Such principles work well as a basis for morality in commerce and other settings in which typically people deal at arm's length, the matters at issue can be clearly defined in advance, and disputes can be satisfactorily dealt with by standards of contract and tort liability because money is an adequate remedy and fault and damages can be assessed by third parties.
Sex and having children aren't like that. You never know what you're getting into and it's hard for other people to know what's going on, whether it's consistent with the original understandings of the parties, or how to put things right when they've gone awry. Certain parties to the transactions -- children -- have no choice at all regarding their participation. Also, in commerce risky transactions can be left to specialists and there are well- developed ways of limiting risk. Not so in the case of marrying and having children, activities in which most people inevitably will engage and the major risks of which cannot be avoided without destroying the point of the relationship. The responsibilities of family life are pervasive and last a very long time, and people who enter into them are usually young and inexperienced and can't possibly know how they will feel throughout the long decades ahead. So if sexual standards are necessary, commercial principles aren't going to do the job because they presume circumstances which are usually not present.
10. Doesn't the imposition of external rules destroy love, intimacy and individuality?
Some rules might do that, others are necessary to make such things possible. Nothing is more featureless, loveless and impersonal than chaos.
A similar principle applies to other things. Pursuits as varied as economic life and poetry can be injured by too many rules; nonetheless, some objective rules (the rules of property and contract; standard commercial practices; the grammatical and other rules that constitute a language; conventions of versification) are needed for them to thrive. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: Are individuals stronger now than in the past? Have relations between the sexes improved in the past 40 years?
What's wrong with having both if both are helpful? The issue is whether social acceptance of concrete rules that people can rely on results in a greater number of successful relationships, not whether something else is also a good thing that contributes to the same goal.
12. Why can't people with differing standards just live side by side?
Sometimes they can, sometimes there are problems. For example, if one standard (e.g., avoidance of promiscuity, illegitimacy, and divorce) prevents costs then those who adhere to it won't want to pay the costs created by those who reject it. Some costs, like higher criminality rates among teenage sons of single mothers, are very hard to avoid when people live side by side. Others, like AIDS, can be avoided by turning your back on your dying neighbor, but that's not a solution everyone likes to live with.
In addition, moral standards are social as well as individual because they coordinate actions in ways that are necessary if certain goods are to be achieved. If a man thinks relations between men and women should follow a certain pattern, he's going to find it much harder to live that way if that's not the pattern the women he meets expect and think they can count on. He's going to find it much harder to maintain the pattern in his household if the people his family meet, the TV shows they watch, and his children's teachers tell them it's stupid. That's true whether the pattern is "men and women are equals", "personal choice should be respected", or "virginity before marriage is good".
People find it easiest to live with those who hold compatible views about things they feel are important, especially when the views have to do with right patterns of human relations. For example, those who think racial equality is important are often uncomfortable in the company of people who make racist jokes and who avoid contact with other races, to the extent that they would not want to live in a society in which such conduct was generally practiced and accepted. Those who think a certain pattern of dealing between the sexes is important have analogous feelings that are no less justified.
Questions regarding moral knowledge about anything are notoriously difficult, so the question has no specific connection with sex. A practical response is that a self-governing society must be based on a reasonably coherent common moral understanding, so a member of such a society can legitimately apply the accepted moral standards of his society to other members, in sexual matters as in others.
Sex is too fundamental, and its effects on our lives too complex and subtle, for us to be able to determine a workable sexual morality by reason alone. The best approach is therefore to model ourselves on others rather like ourselves whose way of life has been successful. That modelling normally takes place through the transmission of tradition. The presumptive standard for sexual morality is therefore to be found in the traditions of one's own society. Long-established standards may change over time, but the presumption is necessarily in their favor. That's especially true if the standards (e.g., disfavoring adultery, premarital sex and homosexuality) are broadly similar to those independently developed by other major civilized peoples and most differences (e.g., a lessened double standard and in particular proscription of polygamy) seem explicable on some acceptable ground.
The changes are well-accepted only in particular social circles. Although those social circles include our dominant elites, the debate continues in the society at large. So far it has been as one-sided as the debate on government intervention in the economy earlier in the century, and in part for a similar reason -- the changes, by promoting a transfer of power from local, informal and traditional institutions to formal and centralized ones, favor the interests of those in a position to dominate the discussion. While those favoring the changes have on the whole had their way, as in the case of government intervention in the economy the visible results of their success have made their position far harder to defend.
People are fond of saying so. On the other hand, the bond between mother and child is assuredly universal. As to that between man and woman, Mencius says that "a man and woman living together is the most important of human relations" (Bk. v, p. A, 2); Genesis says "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother; and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh" (2:24); the Iliad is the story of a war fought to undo an adulterous elopement and the Odyssey that of a man's struggle to return to his wife and son, a son's search for his father, and a woman's loyalty to her husband; and the Ramayana is the romance of Rama and Sita, husband and wife. Each is a fundamental text for its civilization, and examples could be multiplied. So the view that there is something special and basic about the group consisting of a man and a woman with their children, about fidelity and trust within that group, and about the social conventions and standards that support those things doesn't seem to be a recent invention for a temporary purpose.
16. Isn't traditional sexual morality oppressive and discriminatory against women?
The claim that traditional sexual morality discriminates against women, if true, makes it hard to understand why they have always been its most vigorous proponents and why its weakening and the consequent growth of illegitimacy and marital instability have so extensively feminized poverty. On the face of it, the "one man/one woman" rule is most burdensome to socially and materially successful men who like variety and are in a position to get what they want, rather than to women, who are less likely than men to view sex as a consumer good.
The fact of the matter is that the decline of traditional sexual morals has led to vastly increased victimization of women and children. The pattern is clear and pervasive. Married women living with their husbands are the least likely of all women to be victims of violence. Much "teen-age sex" is in fact statutory rape of young girls by adult men. Since child sexual abuse is typically a crime of stepfathers and mothers' boyfriends, fatherlessness greatly increases the risk of it. The great majority of child abuse cases involve children living in a household without one or both biological parents. Nor are the effects of disorderly sexual lives limited to a single household or generation -- boys who grow up without fathers are far more likely to engage in violent behavior than those who grow up in two-parent homes.
More generally, all social institutions that deal with fundamental matters seem oppressive to people who have come to think they shouldn't have to comply with them. The economic system requires us on pain of poverty to get up and go to work every day, sacrificing the best hours of our lives to the requirements of other people. The legal system demands that we deny our own nature by restraining our impulses, while the political system can require us to sacrifice our very lives in its defense. Since we are social animals, the normal response to these necessities is to bring children up to accept the demands that must be met, to view meeting them as part of what it is to be a good person, and to show only limited tolerance toward those who refuse to comply with them.
What about those for whom any system of things doesn't work? What about large and muscular people with vehement appetites, minimal intelligence, and violent tempers who find the restraints imposed by modern criminal law unbearable and would have been happier as Vikings? What about people with an intense psychological need for uniformity, stability and discipline who find that for them the multicultural capitalist consumer society doesn't work? Such people don't write books that get favorable reviews in mainstream publications, but they do exist and suffer. No system pleases everyone; the point is to have a system that works tolerably well as a general thing. Once such a system exists it may be possible to find piecemeal ways of handling irregularities, but it's absurd to put such things at the center of attention.
As in the case of any moral clash, we can try to persuade each other. Differing attitudes toward sex have to do with differing understandings of what the world and human nature are like. Those can and do change, and changes often have an enormous influence on conduct. If persuasion doesn't work then accommodations may be possible, but to the extent the clash relates to things that are fundamental to social life the alternatives may become social separation or overriding your views or mine by force.
An example of accommodation between necessary public standards and the difficulties some people have complying with them is maintaining the standards when violations become an issue but not prying too vigorously into things people keep out of sight. Social separation, to the extent people think it called for (some people might not want to live with the social consequences of high illegitimacy and divorce rates or the medical consequences of promiscuity, while others might not want to live with what they view as puritanical morality), could be realized within a loose federal system that permits states and localities to act in accordance with their own moral standards and eliminates cross- community transfer payments, such as public education, social security and welfare, that have the effect of forcing one lifestyle to subsidize another. Current examples of the final possibility, the overriding of views by force, include public school curricula that oppose traditional moral views (the compulsion lies in compulsory tax support and compulsory attendance laws) and laws against discrimination on the basis of marital status or sexual orientation.
19. Do you really believe people will ever go back to the old ways?
We shall see. What people find natural depends on the social institutions among which they grow up, and social institutions are very flexible over time and tend to evolve to provide what's needed. If sexual freedom causes serious enough problems in individual and social life it won't last. How the necessary restraints will be inculcated and reinforced under circumstances of instantaneous and open worldwide communication is of course an interesting question. Presumably the great flexibility of modern social networks will be adequate to the task if it has to be done; people are very inventive in configuring their dealings with each other to do what is needed. Some initial steps are obvious, such as doing away with the social standards that have grown up in favor of unrestricted sexual liberty (e.g., certain antidiscrimination rules and the prejudice against criticizing people in such matters). Possibly the ease under modern circumstances of voluntary self-segregation by lifestyle and the difficulty in fluid modern economies of maintaining state responsibility for individual welfare will also play a role. If people can no longer depend on the state for education and support in misfortune and old age then family ties and the sexual ideals and standards that support them will grow in importance.
20. What is the relation of sexual morality to politics?
Too complicated to treat exhaustively. With respect to current ideological debates, social acceptance of complete sexual freedom is most consistent with a standard left-wing outlook that attempts to achieve equality by substituting reliance on the state for reliance on ties to particular persons as the anchor for people's lives. Crucial difficulties with that approach are that reliance on the state over time becomes insupportably expensive, and that the weakening of interpersonal relations has bad cultural consequences. Intelligent leftists should therefore consider modifying their philosophy to mitigate its troublesome consequences, in particular by recognizing the central position that any free society must give to social and moral institutions that promote durable ties among particular individuals.
Certain libertarians (in particular, many pop libertarians active on the net) also tend to favor social acceptance of sexual freedom because they believe that markets are a sufficient basis for all aspects of people's lives. Other libertarians disagree because they recognize that commercial relationships are not adequate to all needs; for example, small children are unable to take care of themselves by participating in the market, and commercial insurance can't cover all personal misfortunes because doing so would be the equivalent of establishing a comprehensive welfare system with all the inefficiencies and moral risks that would entail. Thus, intelligent libertarians recognize that reduction in state activity requires a network of strong and reliable interpersonal relationships for which no source is apparent other than family life supported by definite standards of sexual conduct.
Elshtain, "The Family in Trouble", National Forum, Winter 1995, p. 25.
Heidenson and Farrell, eds., Crime in Europe (Routledge, 1991).
Himmelfarb, "A De-moralized Society", The Public Interest, Fall 1994, p. 57.
Hsu, Statutory Rape: The Dirty Secret Behind Teen Sex Numbers. Family Research Council.
Stephens, "The Global Crime Wave", The Futurist, July-August 1994, p. 22.
Statistical Abstract of the United States. Includes some international statistics.
I didn't draw any statistics from Maggie Gallagher's The Abolition of Marriage (Regnery, 1996), but the book is highly relevant to the issues discussed in this FAQ and should be read. Another good review of the current situation is "The End of Courtship" by Leon Kass, in the Winter, 1997 issue of The Public Interest.