What would it take to eliminate abortion?

In my last post, I wrote about the political aspects of the Supreme Court's 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, particularly in light of the possibility that the current Court might end up overturning it when they decide Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization later this year. But there's another aspect of the abortion debate that I would like to consider. There are strong political forces in this country that say it is their goal to eliminate abortion. But what would it take to do that? Is it even possible?

Naturally it's possible to pass laws against abortion, and to define penalties for those who break the laws. That's the easy part. But surely everybody knows that merely passing laws won't actually eliminate abortions—they'll just happen illegally. In the same way that illegalizing drugs just drove the drug trade underground, so illegalizing abortions will—in the absence of any other changes—just drive the abortion trade underground. Anyone who considers the subject honestly knows this.

But wait. "In the absence of any other changes"? Is it possible that there are indirect ways to reduce or eliminate the number of abortions in the country, by eliminating the causes that create the demand for them? What would such an approach even look like?

What would it take to eliminate abortion?

According to nature

My thinking about this topic was inspired by Frederica Mathewes-Green, who wrote in a 2016 essay as follows:

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.”

Of course she's right. In a trivial sense, the only reason anyone chooses anything is that it looks better than the other options. As for her charge that many women feel trapped into having an abortion, I have no idea whether that's true or not. All I can say is that Frederica* has talked to a lot more women pre- and post-abortion than I have. So maybe provisionally I can take her word for it.

But I want to go back to one sentence that represents, for me, the key insight in this passage: You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” This is important. If we take Frederica's insight seriously, we have to conclude that something is badly wrong with the way we live.

You remember that the original point of this blog was to try to see the world "with classical eyes," and that this phrase implies in part a willingness "to accept that things have a nature, and that at least some things have a purpose." By these lights, there must be such a thing as "how we are meant to live by nature"; and abortion is so manifestly artificial an arrangement that it is very unlikely that abortion itself is by nature. (I mean medically-induced abortion here. There is a kind of abortion which is indeed by nature, but we call it miscarriage.) So if we find that there is currently a demand for medical abortions, there must be a reason. To put it broadly, we must be doing something wrong for such a demand to have arisen in the first place. In Frederica's terms, something must be really wrong in our environment.   

So when I ask whether abortion can be eliminated, I am really asking: What factors are causing this kind of stress in us, in the human animals? What's wrong with our environment that is pushing women to want access to abortions which presumably (in the absence of such stresses or other factors) they would not seek out in the same kinds of numbers? What would we have to change in our environment to eliminate that demand?

Why do women seek out abortions?

The first step is to inquire why women seek out abortions? Fortunately, it turns out there are studies on exactly this question. A quick Google search turns up three studies from different years, but their results are largely consistent. The studies are these:

• Biggs, M.A., Gould, H. & Foster, D.G. Understanding why women seek abortions in the US. BMC Women's Health 13, 29 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6874-13-29   
• L.B. Finer, L.F. Frohwirth, L.A. Dauphinee, S. Singh and A.M. Moore, Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2005, 37(3):110–118. https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/article_files/3711005.pdf
• Dawn Stacey, Why Do People Have Abortions?, December 19, 2021. https://www.verywellhealth.com/reasons-for-abortion-906589

Collating the results from these three studies, the primary reasons that women have abortions are, in order from most to least common, as follows:

1. They can't afford a baby financially.
2. They can't afford the disruption a baby will cause to their lives at this time.
3. They don't have the support they need (unmarried, partner does not want baby, partner is abusive, etc.).
4. They need to focus on other children.
5. A baby will ruin their future opportunities (education, employment).
6. They don't want people to know they had sex or got pregnant.
7. They are not mentally or emotionally ready to be mothers.
8. Health-related reasons (baby will be damaged, baby will endanger their health).
9. They cannot provide a good life for the baby.
10. They don't want to give the baby up for adoption.
11. They were victims of rape or incest.

There were minor differences among the three lists, but no significant ones. And these eleven reasons pretty much sum up all the reasons that were listed. So now the question that I posed above can be reframed as: What is wrong with our social environment today that makes these reasons possible? 

Or, to put it another way: If we were living the way we were meant to live, would these reasons all go away? What are the changes or gaps between how we were meant to live and how we actually live that make these reasons happen? 

Also, Can we go back? Can these reasons be eliminated? What would it take?

What do we have to change?

If we look at each of the eleven reasons in the list, our first question should be: What is the fundamental assumption behind each of these in turn that makes it a reason to abort one's child? Let me explain what I mean by giving an example. The first reason listed is, "They [the mothers] can't afford a baby financially." One assumption which makes that into a reason to abort is, "The mother has to bear the financial costs of the baby." Do you see what I mean? If that assumption were false—in other words, if mothers never had to bear the costs of their babies—then limited financial resources would no longer be a reason to abort a child. 

Note that when I say this, I'm not making any argument for or against a particular way of doing things. I'm not making an argument about who should bear the costs of babies. I'm just trying to explain what I mean by "finding the assumption behind a reason that makes it a reason." And the example I give doesn't have to be the only one. Maybe you can find another assumption too, that works the same way. This is just an example.

In fact, the list of fundamental assumptions behind these reasons is a lot shorter than the list of reasons itself. I think it's possible to write a minimal list of fundamental assumptions as follows:

• Nuclear families: We assume that mothers (and their partners, if any) are solely responsible for the care, nurturing, and expenses of their children OR ELSE they have to give up those children completely to someone else, in another nuclear family, who will accept that responsibility. (This covers reasons #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10.) 
• Sexual propriety: We assume certain kinds of rules around what constitutes decent or proper sexual behavior, with the result that women (or at least some women) will be shamed or punished if other people find out that they had sex or got pregnant. (This covers reason #6.)
• Health: We assume that it is bad to bear a child whose health will be fundamentally damaged from birth OR to continue a pregnancy which might kill the mother. (This covers reason #8.)
• Rape and incest: We assume that it is bad to bear a child that you will always hate and resent because you hate how he or she was conceived. (This covers reason #11.)

That's just four basic assumptions. What would it take to reverse them?

1. Nuclear families

This is the big one. Mothers are solely responsible for their children, OR ELSE they have to give up the children completely to somebody else. What would it take to undo this assumption, or to make it false?

Note, by the way, that the assumption has two parts to it. The first part says we assume that mothers are responsible for their children.** At this point it is easy to object, "But what about all those wonderful families waiting to adopt? If a mother can't take care of her own child, why can't she give him or her to a family who can provide a better life?" But that is just the second half of the same assumption. Underlying it all is the clear assumption that somebody—some one, identifiable, nameable person!—has to be responsible for the child, and also that people are naturally organized into households which contain either solitary adults or else nuclear families. Therefore, if a mother cannot take on the heavy and expensive responsibility to be that unique caregiver, she has to let someone else do it; and "letting someone else do it" means she will never see her baby again.

This is a lot to ask. Even mothers who know that they can't undertake the responsibility for their children don't want to give their babies up. In fact, the 2005 study identified above specifically discusses attitudes towards adoption (p. 117) and remarks: "While fewer than 1% of women in the quantitative survey volunteered that they would not consider or did not favor having a baby and giving it up for adoption, more than one-third of interview respondents said they had considered adoption and concluded that it was a morally unconscionable option because giving one’s child away is wrong." [Emphasis added.] In other words, more than a third of the women interviewed concluded that giving their child away for adoption was morally worse than aborting him or her.

This is the time that someone should object, "But what are the other alternatives? Surely either you look after your child or someone else does—right? Are there really any other choices?"

Of course there are other choices. Just not here and now.

• In an earlier day, the extended family offered an alternative. Especially if many members of the family lived all together (or at any rate very close by), there would have been any number of sisters and aunts and cousins to help raise one's child. Other people could share the work, other people could share the expense, and one wouldn't have to give up him or her completely.
  
  
• More fundamentally, if (as I have suggested earlier) "we were meant to live [tribally] in immediate-return foraging communities," children would have been raised by the whole tribe. Mothers would never have to give them up completely, but at the same time they would not have had to shoulder the awesome burden of sole responsibility that faces them today.

In other words, the first unnatural stress that makes the environment in our "nature preserve" so toxic is the nuclear family.

2. Sexual propriety

What's next? Because of our social rules of sexual propriety, women (or at least some women) will be shamed or punished if other people find out that they had sex or got pregnant. What would it take to undo this assumption, or to make it false?

To undo this assumption means eliminating the situation where any women are shamed or punished for having sex: to cover all the bases, let me clarify that this means for having sex at all, and for having sex at the wrong time, and for having sex with the wrong person. I insist on all those variants, because any one of them might result in a pregnancy that a woman would want to hide or make go away. 

Now clearly there are at least two ways to avoid that any woman ever fears shame or punishment for one of these things. One way is if she never has the wrong kind of sex. The other way is if she won't get punished for any kind of sex, regardless. In principle either approach would achieve the goal. But I consider that it is impossible to guarantee the first one. Therefore if we want to adjust society in order to eliminate this cause for abortions, we have to go after the second.

That is, the second thing that makes our environment so toxic are all our ideals of sexual propriety, including in particular: virginity, chastity, and monogamy. In saying this, I am not saying that everyone should live in a riotous carouse at all times. Do not misunderstand me. There are a lot of good things to be said in favor of monogamy and the rest. But to make them ideals or principles, whereby people who fail to live up to them are shamed or punished—well, the data show that doing so causes (a certain number of) abortions. 

In other words, holding up those ideals is the second unnatural stress that makes the environment in our "nature preserve" so toxic.

3. Health

Our third fundamental assumption is this one: It is bad to bear a child whose health will be fundamentally damaged from birth OR to continue a pregnancy which might kill the mother.

This one is more difficult. In the case where a pregnancy might actually kill the mother, I think I have to agree with Florence King: the mother was there first, so if it really is a strict choice between them, then she takes priority. In other cases of severe health risk, it is possible that better availability of health care might help sometimes. It is also true that some children born with severe health problems might well die young. Of the four fundamental assumptions supporting abortion, I think this is the hardest one to eliminate completely.*** So even if we eliminate all other causes, I think there would likely still be a small number of abortions resulting from health-related problems.

4. Rape and incest

The last fundamental assumption is this one: It is bad to bear a child that you will always hate and resent because you hate how he or she was conceived.

I admit I don't know what to say about this case. I have not known anyone personally who has had to face this situation, and in the absence of such personal acquaintance I would feel presumptuous laying down the law about a situation so intimate and so painful. It is possible that some of the pain could be alleviated if the child were able to fade back into the rest of the community or the tribe—not given away, exactly, but allowed to spend more and more time with other people, and therefore not posing the same kind of lifelong reminder to the mother. But I might be wrong. I am willing to listen to suggestions from someone else. For what it is worth, all three studies that I reference above list this as the cause of only a very small percentage of abortions.

My conclusion is that yes, if we pursue Frederica's thought-experiment, we can identify toxic stressors in our environment that push women to abort their unborn children. What is more, nine of the eleven regularly identified causes—accounting, cumulatively, for over 85% of all abortions****—can be traced to just two assumptions in our society. These two fundamental assumptions, these two "toxic stressors," are: 

• the nuclear family
• the ideals of virginity, chastity, and monogamy

Maybe these won't be so easy to eliminate. But that means maybe it won't be so easy to eliminate abortion. 

I have speculated before that we were meant to live in the way described by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá—and also, be it noted, by the divine Plato. It is worth observing that such a life would indeed avoid all these toxins. So perhaps it is fair to say that the fundamental reason so many women seek out abortions is that our lives are out of joint. We are not living as we should live, or as we were made to live, and the resulting stress is making us do crazy things.

The sad part is that, as I discuss in the earlier article, we may not be able to get back there from here. Still, it's nice to understand, at least. 

__________

* I will refer to Ms. Mathewes-Green consistently by her first name, because that's the name of her blog and how she refers to herself. This does not mean that I know her personally, more's the pity.   

** Naturally if the mother has a husband or other partner who is supportive and willing to share the burden and the expense, that's great. But all too often she doesn't (reason #3), or even if she does they just don't have the money (reason #1) or something like that. To keep the discussion simpler, I will say "mothers are solely responsible for their children" even though I recognize that these other cases exist.   

*** Not that any of them is easy. Eliminating the nuclear family, or all our ideals about sexual propriety? Good luck with that. 

**** Nearly all the rest are health-related. The number of abortions resulting from rape or incest add to less than 1.5% of the total. 

         

Gender dysphoria and transition, part 5: What about identity?

When I first planned this series, I expected to write four posts, including the introduction. But since then I thought of one more topic that I should address.

Up till now, I have addressed all these topics from the outside, as a philosophical observer from Elysium or the Moon, without any indication that I know what it feels like to be on the inside of this question, to have it be about you. And so it is fair to ask, What about the very real suffering of people with gender dysphoria? When I sit here on the outside, placidly saying that surgery is dangerous and you can't force anyone to trust you, what do I have to say to the people who find that their fundamental identity is at odds with the physical body they find themselves in? Am I just totally insensitive to such a crisis of identity?

It's a fair question, and my answer may not be satisfying. In fact I have two answers. The first answer tries to speak to our ordinary, lived experience; the second is more abstract and metaphysical. In any event, I will give them both.

The first answer is that people build their identities around all kinds of things, and these identities can be deep and all-embracing. This person knows deep in his* heart, from an early age, that he's going to be a great sports star; that one is going to be a Top Gun fighter pilot; another one over here is going to grow up to cure cancer. It's easy to make fun of these identities if we stand outside them, but they can be intensely real and absolutely fundamental to the people who live them. They deserve to be taken seriously.

And yet, most of the people who grow up knowing that they are destined for athletic greatness won't make it. Most of those who grow up knowing that they are destined to be fighter pilots won't make it. And nobody has yet cured cancer. One by one, each of these people has to confront an identity that has been smashed by the world. Is it a trivial comparison? Am I making light of gender dysphoria by comparing it with disappointed ambitions? Maybe so, but I wonder. If there were any way to measure how much pain is suffered by the one or the other, where should we place our bets? If you look at this gender-dysphoric youth here and that disappointed basketball star there, which one will spend more nights crying himself to sleep? I don't think I can say for sure, and I would feel presumptuous if I tried.

Of course, in the case of a disappointed career there is often the chance for second-best. The disappointed athletic star might still get a career as a sports coach. The disappointed fighter pilot might become a commercial pilot. The one who wants to cure cancer might in any event become an oncologist and do some good in the world that way. And some people mght argue that there is no second-best in the case of a badly-fitting gender identity.

But I think I disagree. That was the whole point of my argument in Part Two, that for all we know there may be a dozen genders. The argument there is that the person who believes his* body to be the wrong sex has in fact mistaken sex for gender. Insofar as he* wishes his body were shaped differently, he will be disappointed; but if the question is how to relate to himself and other people, the answer is to forget about the shape of his body and express himself in the way that fits him best. In the process, he may highlight the existence of a hitherto-unexplored combination of characteristics and habits that come together to form a new gender. And in all this the actual shape of his body is more or less immaterial.

That's my first answer. 

The second answer backs away from the personal point of view, and tries to look at the whole question from the perspective of classical Buddhist teaching.

You see, in Buddhism, your identity doesn't exist at all. Or rather, more exactly, when you dive deep down inside yourself to find the core of what is really You, you come up empty-handed. This is the doctrine of anatta, or "no-self." And all it means is that when you try to strip away the habits you've acquired from your friends, and the prejudices you acquired from your family, and all the other superficial affectations you got from wherever-you-got-them, ... that's all she wrote. There's nothing left that is truly You. To those of us who grew up in the West, in the shadow of René Descartes's ringing proclamation, "I think therefore I am," this sounds crazy. If I don't exist, then who is doing all the thinking that I hear inside my head? But Buddhism teaches that the thoughts can exist without a thinker, as just one more part of the whirl of existence that blows through like a raging tornado and then dissipates.

All this sounds pretty abstract. But look at it in concrete terms. Think about when you were six years old. Who was that person? What were your big concerns back then? Now how about when you were sixteen? Probably your photos show enough resemblance to when you were six that you can say they are pictures of the "same person" with a fair degree of reliability, but what was important to you when you were sixteen? What were you proud of? What were you afraid of? Is there any meaningful sense in which you can say that those two people were "the same" except that they shared a name and a history? Now how about when you were twenty-six? Or forty-six? Again, what's really the same? If you ask me these questions out of the blue, of course at first I'll say that all those are the same person. But when I think about it, ... well gosh, let's see:

• When I was six, my biggest enthusiasm was playing super-heroes.
• When I was sixteen, my biggest concern was to do well in high school.
• When I was twenty-six, I had just left graduate school and was trying to find my way in a new marriage. 
• When I was forty-six, I was responsible for two children and my marriage was already unravelling.

What did those four people have in common? My name, and my hair color. Not even that, really, because by forty-six I had already started to go grey. But the point is that we didn't have any more than that in common. And the more general point, because this isn't really just about me, is that "identity" is mutable. We talk about identity as if it were a thing, something solid and concrete. But it's not. It can change. And that's why the Buddhists say that in the final analysis, it doesn't exist at all. 

Today it's this. Tomorrow it will be that. And the day after? Who can even see that far ahead?

So yes, many people find themselves strongly committed to an identity that is not borne out in the visible and tangible world. It causes deep pain. It sucks. Really.

But also, it isn't solid. That might sound patronizing and I don't mean it that way. But over time, one identity shifts into another. It's a mystery to me how this happens, but it happens.

For all that anybody knows, it might happen to you too.

__________

* Once again, please remember what I said in a footnote to part 2 in this series, that when necessary "I still use he and his as the unmarked (generic) third-person singular personal pronouns.... [and that when I do] I am emphatically not trying to make a political point."

                

Gender dysphoria and transition, part 4: What about bathrooms?

Up till now, I've discussed the topics of gender dysphoria and gender transition from the perspective of the isolated individual: how to present yourself, whether to seek medical intervention in transitioning, and so forth. But we all live in society, and in a community governed by laws. So it is unavoidable to ask, How should other people treat or respond to the person who has chosen to transition from one gender to another?

The reason this is even a question at all is that, as a social and political community, we have chosen to make a number of discriminations routinely on the grounds of sex. The issue that always seems to serve as a flashpoint for collective outrage — on both sides of the topic — is the question of who is allowed to use which public bathrooms. For various reasons we have chosen, in nearly all cases, to say that bathroom usage should be segregated by sex; this legal provision causes difficulties for those whose sex does not align in an obvious way with their gender or their personal identification. But there are other kinds of examples. In certain contexts, professionals charged with intimate personal care are chosen so that they are of the same sex (and, implicitly, gender) as the patient. In athletic competitions, men generally do not compete against women because all the world knows that (on average, and ignoring individual exceptions!) men have innately larger and stronger muscles than women and therefore athletic competition between them would be in some ways unfair. There are surely other examples as well: some are cases of legislation (like the usage of public bathrooms) and some are cases of custom or perceived equity (like athletic competitions). But let me ask your permission to summarize all these questions, by synecdoche, under the general heading of "bathroom issues."

Why do we decide these questions on the grounds of sex? In the case of athletic competition, as noted, the fundamental issue is equity: there is a general presumption that it is not fair for men to compete against women. In most of the other cases, the fundamental issue is trust. When people are in very vulnerable circumstances, we as a society have chosen to presume that they are safer around members of their own sex — i.e., that members of their own sex can be trusted more than members of the other. This is an acknowledged pre-judgment, in advance of knowing the facts about any particular case. As a society we have decided that we don't need to know the facts in advance, because we are prepared to make this pre-judgment and encode it in law. "Pre-judgment in advance of knowing the facts" is the definition of the word prejudice, so this is a prejudice that we have chosen to encode as law. That's all.

So how should we think about this situation? If these laws are merely prejudices and nothing more, can they be justified at the bar of philosophical reason? Or should they be scrapped?

I answer that this is not a philosophical question at all. On the one hand, it is certainly true that to legislate the segregation of bathrooms by sex is simply to encode a kind of prejudice in law. On the other hand, coming at it from the other direction, it is nonsense to say that anyone has a moral right to require strangers to trust him under force of law. Remember that the context for most "bathroom issues" (leaving athletics aside for the moment) is that we as a society have chosen to say that in certain contexts people are safer with their own sex. We might have chosen differently, of course. We might have chosen to segregate bathrooms by race or by religion, while nonchalantly intermingling sexes. But we didn't. And when someone complains that he* is "forced" to use this bathroom when he identifies more with the people who use that bathroom, what he is really saying is, "Those people who use that bathroom should trust me to be around them when they are in a vulnerable state, and I want the law to force them to trust me by letting me use their bathroom!"

But what ground does he have to stand on? By what abstract moral principle can anyone ask that the law force others to trust him? When the Supreme Court in this country struck down racial segregation of schools, it was on the grounds that one set of schools were manifestly inferior to the other set. Nobody claims that the public bathrooms for men are manifestly and consistently worse than those for women, or vice versa. So it comes down to trust. And sometimes people award their trust in prejudicial ways. That's normal.

Notice that I say it's "normal," not that it is right. My real point is that all of these distinctions are arbitrary. At my undergraduate college, many of the bathrooms were integrated by sex: this doesn't mean that they only had room for one person (like today's "unisex" bathrooms), but just that nobody enforced the rules about segregation. With a very few exceptions, you could walk into whatever bathroom was closest and not think about it. Maybe you'd find a man in there, maybe a woman, maybe one of each. Or whatever. And in a community where everyone expects that, it's not a problem. 

This is why I say that there is no philosophical issue here to resolve. The only issue has to do with what people expect, and what they accept. That makes it a political issue. We're a democracy, more or less. If you want to see the laws change, organize a campaign for that change and get out the vote. As a pure prognostication, based on my reading of the electorate, I'll wager $50 that you lose. But I wouldn't mind losing the bet.** 

__________

* Remember what I said in a footnote to part 2 in this series, that when necessary "I still use he as the unmarked (generic) third-person singular personal pronoun.... [and that when I do] I am emphatically not trying to make a political point."

** If 100 people read this post, I'm not going to pay each of you $50. If anyone takes me up on this bet and then I subsequently lose, I'll pay off the first claimant and no others.

       

Gender dysphoria and transition, part 3: Medical intervention?

In my last post, a couple of days ago, I argued that gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon, in the sense that there are people who are unhappy to have been assigned to a particular sex at birth and wish they were the other sex. To be completely clear, I am not speaking here only — or even primarily — of those who were born intersex, or whose sexual morphology is somehow ambiguous at a biological level. While those who are biologically intersex are naturally involved in this discussion, my focus is on those whose biological sex is unambiguous but who are made unhappy or miserable by it.

The second thing I argued in the earlier post is that gender (including how one presents oneself to others) is a social and cultural category; and is therefore different from sex, which is a biological category. And I added furthermore that while there are mostly two sexes in a biological sense (always excepting the intersex), there could in principle be almost any number of genders in a social or cultural sense. Therefore, if you were raised to present yourself one way, but you now feel profoundly called to present yourself in a different way, I see no logical reason to dissuade you. Regardless which sex you belong to biologically, you might belong to a hitherto-unknown gender culturally; and therefore you should be free to express yourself as such.

The next step, naturally, is that the sufferer says, "Look, I identify only with that sex. Of course it's great that I can dress like them and act like them, but I want my body to correspond with them as well. I want to belong to that sex when I take my clothes off. And modern medicine can do amazing things. So I want medical intervention to change me into a member of that sex."

How should we think about this request? What is the best way to respond to this desire?

I think the only reasonable place to start is with the very same premise on which I built my previous argument, namely, a general confession of human ignorance. There is a lot that we don't know. But in this case it is important to recognize that this ignorance applies even in areas we are proud of. In particular, yes, modern medical techniques represent a huge advance over the techniques common even one or two centuries ago. But for exactly that reason, I am convinced that by the standards of one or two centuries in the future, today's medicine will be seen as all-too-primitive. Doubtless the people then will give us credit for doing the best we could with such limited knowledge as we have today; but I expect us still to learn so much about the body — things that we don't know yet — that it will beggar description.

The medical techniques used to enable gender transition typically involve a combination of surgery and hormone therapy. Each of these is a significant intervention in the body system as a whole. And I think we do not understand all the side-effects of these interventions. Sex reassignment surgery is vastly more complex than, say, appendectomy. It affects systems that interact with every other part of the body. And it is therefore not credible that anyone can have calculated what the all consequences will be.

Therefore, I think it is only prudent to avoid any such surgery or treatment — at least until our knowledge is a lot fuller and our skill is a lot greater than it is today. I assume that in two hundred years, people will look back on our age and say in wonderment, "Can you believe the kind of surgeries they did back in the early twenty-first century? By comparison with what we know today, they might as well have been witch-doctors working with kitchen knives! It's a miracle any of their patients survived."

Less fancifully, every year patients die in surgery. Every year, doctors make mistakes that ruin the lives of their patients — that's why doctors all have to carry malpractice insurance. In the face of these indisputable facts, honestly, it is prudent to avoid any surgery unless there is no alternative. 

As I write this, I am aware that there are some people for whom such a transition brings about a significant improvement in their lives. I have written about one such story (one I heard second-hand) in another venue, describing the patient as "A young man very angry with the world." According to the story as I heard it, he was a lot less angry with the world after becoming a woman. So yes, for some people their lives afterwards are better.

But there is no way to know in advance whether this person in particular will be one of the ones whose lives get better, and there is no way to know in advance what other subsystems of the body might be disrupted by the treatment. Moreover, it's not a two-way street: if the surgery doesn't bring the desired results, one can't go back. This is the line between science fiction and medical reality. We do not live in Beta Colony, and we should not expect to benefit from the miraculous technology that the Betans take for granted.

I said in the beginning of this essay that I would not primarily discuss the intersex, but if I say nothing whatever about them I will be called to account for the omission. But here I would avoid making any general rule, suggesting instead that each case be addressed individually through deep consultation between doctor and patient. If there is no need for serious intervention, I think (as suggested above) that prudence cautions us not to intervene seriously. Naturally if there is a situation that has to be addressed — because the patient simply cannot live with the status quo, for whatever reason — then address it.

Update added May 10, 2022: Just this morning I ran across a blog post from four years ago by a trans woman who discusses her experience with some precision. You can find it here. Her description does not make me change my mind about any of what I wrote here.

                           

Gender dysphoria and transition, part 2: How to present?

The first question to address, when considering gender dysphoria, is also the easiest. Is this even a thing in the first place? Does gender dysphoria really exist?

The answer is obviously Yes. Dysphoria means pain or misery or unhappiness. If at least one person on Earth is unhappy about the gender he* was assigned at birth, gender dysphoria exists. That was easy.

But if someone suffers from gender dysphoria, what next? When people feel deeply alienated from the genders they** were assigned at birth, what advice should they be given about how to live their lives and present themselves to the world?

The answer to this second question is a little more involved, and relies on two premises.

The first premise is the modern (non-linguistic) distinction between gender and sex. This evening, Wikipedia defines gender as: 

either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female.

In other words, if sex is taken to denote a biological structure — a structure involving genital organs shaped like this and hormonal chemicals balanced like that — then gender (by contrast) involves someone's social and cultural identity: how he acts, and how he is received and treated by others. This distinction will become important in a minute.

The second premise is a general confession of human ignorance. There is a lot that we don't know. And it behooves us to tread cautiously in areas we don't understand. Since we sometimes learn that we were confused even about topics we thought we understood,*** it behooves us to tread cautiously in most areas.

The implications of these two premises become clear when we ask the question, How many genders are there? The unthinking answer is, Two, of course! Umm ... aren't there? 

But let's slow down. We know that the vast majority of humans belong to one of two biological sexes. (A few people are intersex or fail to fit the standard male-or-female categorization in some other way at a biological level.) But gender has to do with cultural and social systems and categories. And we all know that cultural and social systems are far more creative, and show far more diversity, than biological systems. So how can we be sure that there are only two genders? How can we be sure that there aren't three, ... or four, ... or six, ... or twelve, ... or twenty-seven?

We can't.

And therefore there are no reasonable grounds on which to constrain the ways that people choose to present themselves. For all that we know, there are more genders than we are aware of: so perhaps this person belongs to one of those unknown genders, and perhaps members of that (unknown) gender normally dress like this and act like that. Maybe it is normal for people in the gender to which this person actually belongs to present themselves in this way, or in this complex of ways. We just don't know, because we just can't know how many genders there really are. And therefore we have no grounds for telling this person, You're doing it wrong. 

Therefore the advice to those who feel alienated from the gender to which they were assigned at birth has to be, Act, dress, and present yourself in whatever way seems right to you in your own eyes. We have no grounds to say anything else.     

__________

* Yes, I still use he as the unmarked (generic) third-person singular personal pronoun. I recognize that some readers will find this usage problematic, but I have not yet seen an alternative which is both euphonious and standardized. Often I will reword the sentence so that I can use they with a plural verb, but sometimes I find I have painted myself into a corner. In the cases when I use he, as I once advised in another context, I am emphatically not trying to make a political point.

** Ha! That time I got to use they! See? I do try. 😀

*** There were a lot of people who were certain they understood astronomy because they had studied Ptolemy, and who were certain they understood medicine because they had studied Galen. They were wrong.

    

Gender dysphoria and transition, part 1: Topics

A week and a half ago, I got a phone call from a guy I'd gone to college with forty years ago, and whom I hadn't really heard from since then. I'll call him Cassius. It was a long phone call, filled with a lot of news on both sides, and I've written about the rest of it elsewhere. But one of the things he told me was that he has come to the realization that he suffers from gender dysphoria, and that he wants to transition to living as a woman. (I don't remember if he said he was simply thinking about transition, or if he has already made plans. Some of his other news makes me suspect he is still at the "thinking about it" stage.)

I have to admit I wasn't expecting that, though when I discussed it with another common friend who knew us both back then she said she wasn't surprised. (That makes one of us.) What I told Cassius at the time, and in a follow-up email afterwards, was that I had not tought a lot about transgender topics, but that of course I supported my friends. This was only partly true, because I have actually spent a certain amount of time mulling the issue over the last few years, just because it seems to be somehow in the air. But until now I have not had any concrete reason to sit down and spell out my thoughts in any detail. Also, I didn't think that phone call was really the time to get into a philosophical exploration of the subject.

The stated purpose of this blog is to see the world through classical eyes, and the classical world certainly understood that gender is not an immutable category. Dionysus was in many ways a gender-bending character: nominally male, but without any of the martial or heroic attributes that the Greeks assigned to masculinity, and followed by women who were intoxicated and deadly. The seer Tiresias was transformed into a woman and spent seven years of his life as one before being transformed back into a man. And Greek mythology also recognized the character of Hermaphroditus, who can be thought of as an ancient Greek futanari.

What part of this requires philosophical thought? I think there are at least four questions to consider:

1. Is gender dysphoria a real thing?
2. When people are assigned to one gender but feel deeply that they belong to another, how should they act and present themselves?
3. What should be the extent or role of medical intervention?
4. How should these people be treated by our laws, and by society at large?

I plan to address these questions in my next three posts. I will address Questions 1 and 2 together, and then write one post each for Questions 3 and 4.

If there are other questions I have missed, or if you have any other feedback, I welcome comments.

           

Morals from Nature: What about homosexuality?

When I started writing about how morality can be founded on Nature, it was in the context of a discussion with a couple of friends, one of whom kept raising the example of homosexual behavior as something that he thought obviously "contrary to Nature" and that he expected any teleologically-based ethics to condemn. Since then that conversation has wandered off in other directions, But I thought maybe I should address his question here.

I think the objections of this first friend, at least at a philosophical level, relied on some kind of argument that homosexual acts are intrinsically non-procreative and therefore somehow "wrong by nature." (I emphasize the words "at a philosophical level" because he also tended to wander of the subject and start growling about new laws around bathroom usage. But I didn't find anything of philosophical substance in that part.) But then the other friend broke in asking, "Why don't you think of homosexuality as something like a cleft palate, where Nature clearly intended one outcome but Her hand slipped when She made this one individual so he turned out not to match the design? Then you could say it's too bad and all, but there's no moral problem."

I think my second friend was trying to be a liberalizing influence here, but still I cringed a little at the image. To be clear, I don't have a horse in this race -- not personally -- but I do think it's valuable to understand the truth, and I don't think either of my friends has gotten there yet.

As far as non-procreative sex is concerned, I dealt with that in my previous post here. In the terms of that discussion, any sex that sparks love or brings people together is fulfilling at least one of its natural ends, whatever else we might say. But I can imagine that my second friend might answer back something like this:

"You know, Hosea, I have no problem with the fact that a homosexual couple won't beget new children. But my comparison of homosexuality with a cleft palate gets at another question entirely. I'm asking, 'Why does anybody want to do this in the first place?' It's clear to me why we (or most of us) are born with an attraction for the other sex: without it the species would never survive. But why do 3% of the population have an attraction for the same sex? At a biological or chemical level, how does that even happen? That's what I meant by saying that Nature was trying to reproduce the same pattern She uses for everyone else and somehow slipped."

Suppose he were to ask that. (In real life we haven't had this particular conversation.) What's the answer?

The first part of the answer is that it is misleading to use the words "at a biological or chemical level." As I argued way back in 2012, homosexuality is not a thing. There is no genetic marker for it. The only ways to find out whether someone is gay is to ask or watch; a blood test won't tell you.

The immediate objection to that position is that it makes homosexuality sound like a mere preference, like between chocolate and vanilla, or between pistachio and mint chocolate chip. And in that case, why is the incidence so small? Wouldn't we expect to see more of a bell curve, where a few die-hards are found out at each end who love chocolate and loathe vanilla (or the reverse) while most people are somewhere in the middle?

Indeed we would. And if we conducted our survey in -- oh, let's say Athens in the 4th century BCE -- that's more or less what we would find. Look at the discussion in the Symposium, which covers attraction to both girls and boys and in which the highest teaching comes from a woman (Diotima) ... but where some (not all) of the participants are frank about preferring boys. But in our own society there have historically been such a strong opposition to homosexual behavior and such a pervasive assumption of heterosexuality that you would expect anyone in the middle to settle for living a conventional heterosexual life without ever thinking about it. You would expect that the only ones ever to make an issue of it would be the die-hards out at one end who love pistachio and loathe mint chocolate chip.

That would be our 3%.

So much for the statistical distribution. As for the moral side, I really think it is all covered, in principle at least, in the earlier post.
  

Morals from Nature: What about sex?

If Nature, by providing a teleology for Man, is the source of our morality, then what is the morality of sex?

There have been a number of answers to this question over the years. The Catholic Church has articulated a theology of sexuality which is probably familiar in outline to most people: sex is good inside marriage when it is for the sake of begetting children; but sex outside of marriage, or sex acts where children are impossible (think of contraception, masturbation, or many other examples), are "intrinsically disordered" and wrong. What is interesting is that a number of authors who believe they are writing science find themselves in a similar boat for a similar reason: these are the authors who look at sex through the lens of sociobiology or "evolutionary psychology". They seem to have a lot to say about sexual jealousy, differential investments in childrearing, and so on, but to have some trouble accounting for non-procreative sexual activity. And of course the argument would be that non-procreative sexual activity doesn't leave children behind (obviously!) and therefore can hardly be selected-for in any normal Darwinian sense.

What interests me about both these positions is that on the surface they look so logical, but in their consequences they look totally at odds with the way human beings really live -- around the globe and over the ages. What's more, it is easy to think you have found the flaw in the argument and then go astray in another direction.

Both the Catholic and the "evolutionary psychological" positions rest on the premise that the purpose of sex is reproduction. From that, all the rest follows. If you want to reject those conclusions, the easiest way is to reject teleology and say "There are no purposes! Go do what you want!" But you know by now that I consider teleology to be a basic fact about living beings, so that too is an error.

What then?

If an argument leads to results which look absurd, but all the steps of the argument are logical, the error is probably in its premises. As noted, the premise behind both the Catholic and the "evolutionary psychological" teachings is this: Reproduction is the purpose of sex. But where is the error? If we concede that there are purposes in Nature, how can this premise possibly be false? Isn't that how we get children, through sex? Isn't it the only possible way to create new children?

Of course it is. And while I do affirm there is an error in that sentence, it's subtle. Only one word is wrong, and that word is not "reproduction." Its "the."

The point is that this premise ("Reproduction is the purpose of sex") itself relies on an earlier, hidden premise which states, "A thing can have only one purpose." But where is the evidence for that? How would you ever go about proving it? Can you prove it?

Presumably the argument would start by conceding that a thing can be used in lots of different ways, but would insist that only one of them is the true natural end or goal or purpose. A car can be used to get money (by selling it) or to impress your neighbor (by polishing it ostentatiously and parking it where he has to see it); but its natural purpose is to drive. And as far as it goes, the analogy sounds plausible. Does it work the same way in Nature? You could argue that I can use the hair on top of my head to make a political or fashion statement depending on how I wear it, but its natural purpose is to keep my head warm. Maybe the rest of Nature is like that too.

Only it's not. I can formally disprove the allegation that everything has only one purpose, as follows:

Lemma: It is possible for a thing to have more than one natural purpose.  

Proof: For the sake of an example, consider the penis. What is its natural function: elimination of waste, or reproduction of the species? Both are essential to survival. Neither one can possibly be considered an incidental, side use. Neither one can be considered an abuse. Both purposes are absolutely fundamental. But they are different. Therefore it is possible for a thing to have more than one natural purpose. QED.

And with this proof, both the Catholic and the "evolutionary psychological" teachings collapse. Because while it is obvious that reproduction is a purpose of sex, there is no evidence whatever that it is the only one.

What else then? What other purpose can we reasonably suppose sex to have? Recall that I recently argued that the highest end for Man is friendship. And recall the argument I made ... gosh, almost three years ago, by now ... that the purpose of the orgasm is to make love -- to create or generate love even where it did not exist before (and therefore a fortiori to strengthen it where it does). Based on these two arguments, I think it is inescapable that one essential, natural purpose for sex is to bind us together, to help us love each other, to unite us as friends and lovers.

Naturally there are other ways to make friends too. Don't misunderstand me to say sex is the only path to friendship! But it can be one of them.

But if the purpose -- oops, excuse me, one of the purposes -- of sex is friendship and human bonding, then what should the morality of sex look like? Suddenly there is nothing wrong with all the different varieties of non-procreative sex (including contraception, masturbation, and all the others), as long as they are serving the purposes of love and bringing people together. On the other hand, rape is pretty obviously still bad because it takes something that should be a means towards unity and makes it a violent weapon instead.

I don't have a complete teaching to offer about the other consequences of this new understanding. This is new ground, and I am still thinking it through. But I expect the changes to be real, and -- what is more important -- closer in line with our lived human experience than the earlier teachings were.
      

The function of the orgasm

I've never read Wilhelm Reich's famous book by this name. I don't know what he says. Probably it is a lot more complex than anything I have to say. Still, I've been thinking about this for a while and want to write it down.

Apparently there is a debate among evolutionary biologists -- or was ten years ago -- about how the female orgasm evolved. See, for example, this book review as evidence. Why only the female orgasm? Apparently the thought is that it is pretty easy to account for the existence of the male orgasm in evolutionary terms: it has an adaptive value because it encourages men to have sex ("with women" is clearly assumed) and therefore ensures descendants. But this explanation has trouble explaining why women have orgasms too. After all, they don't have orgasms every time they have sex, and an orgasm is not necessary in order for a woman to get pregnant. One theory is that they tag along as a by-product of men's orgasms, the same way men have nipples but don't use them for anything. But not everyone accepts this theory; and, speaking as a layman, I have to add that it is a pretty remarkable by-product which -- when it gets going -- is so much more powerful, more energetic, and more renewable than the primary phenomenon from which it is derived. Maybe that's not what biologists find wrong with the theory, but I think it will do for a start.

From my perspective, though, the whole approach is wrong, starting with the very first step. That first step, remember, is that orgasm is a kind of bait to lure us into having sex in order that we have lots of children who spread the desire for sex, thus having still more children, and so on. And I reply that using orgasm as a bribe to get us to do something (in this case, have children) is outrageously inefficient and unreliable. If the only point of sex were children, we could be prompted to do it a lot more often with a lot less fuss. Look at eating: it's necessary for life, and we do it because we get hungry. Look at sleeping: it's necessary for ... well, something, I'm not sure we know what but it is clearly important ... and we do it because we get tired. Any man, be he never so orgasmic, will over the course of his life eat and sleep far more times than he will have sex. So if the purpose were to encourage us to have sex (and therefore many offspring), it could be achieved with a lot less fuss by making sex an activity like eating and sleeping: one that we engage in because to avoid it makes us grumpy and uncomfortable. There would be simply no need for the ecstasy and sublime exaltation of the spirit that come from orgasm.

What's more, if the purpose of orgasm is to make us generate children, orgasm should be impossible from same-sex contact. It should be impossible from masturbation. Manifestly it is neither of these things. Therefore, mere reproduction of the species cannot be the real or ultimate purpose of sex and of the orgasm.

What is?

Let's look at how it functions. Orgasmic ecstasy doesn't just feel good; it's not just a reward. Orgasmic ecstasy makes love -- that is, creates or generates love where it didn't exist (or might not have existed) before. That is, orgasmic ecstasy binds us to our partner. This binding need not be exclusive: the history of monogamy is a very spotty one. But it is binding, all the same. And interpersonal bonds are the fundamental components that make human society possible. If we love each other, then -- other things being equal (and boy, is that a huge condition!) -- we are more likely to stick together. Note that it is possible to spin this as an argument for choosy, consensual nonmonogamy. I'm not going to push that argument but I recognize that it is possible and some people have made it.

For those who really want to ground any discussion of purposes in a Darwinian framework, the next step is to point out that humans are pretty much defenseless on our own. What gives us survival potential is our sociability, our ability to live and work in groups. Anything that sustains and encourages sociability therefore has adaptive value, and sex is surely at the top of that list. That sex is (of course) also useful in reproduction can be seen, in this light, almost as a useful side-effect, a case of nature generously giving us two benefits for the price of one. That said, though, the only plausible reason or purpose behind an experience as extravagant as orgasm has to be not merely children but love.
        

Sex at Dawn, and the Republic

Name anything written by Plato. I bet the first thing you thought of -- maybe the only one -- was the Republic.

Tell me something about the Republic. Once we skip past "It's long," "It's boring," and "I think we had to read it in college but I just blew it off" the next thing to trip off the tongue -- the first remark that has anything to do with the content -- is probably "It's idealistic and impractical."

Plato gets that a lot. In the central books of the Republic, Socrates describes a made-up city, and commentators ever since (starting with Aristotle) have fallen all over themselves criticizing how silly his ideas are. It got so bad for so many centuries that in the late 1940's Leo Strauss proposed (and his students have later extended) the theory that Plato was just kidding. Strauss's student Allan Bloom, responsible for one of the most widely-used translations of the Republic, amplified this suggestion by saying that the Republic is really meant to expose the true nature of political life, and the true demands of political justice, so that we can all see just how problematic politics and justice are once we realize that the true demands of political community are impossible.



Impossible? How so? Well, there are plenty of fish to shoot in this barrel, but Bloom focusses on three specific proposals, which Socrates himself acknowledges are huge, saying they will provoke "three waves" of ridicule from his listeners: that the Guardians of the City should hold all their possessions in common, that they should hold their women and children in common, and that the whole show should be ruled by philosophers. Bloom says that every listener will naturally reject these proposals, because they leave us no fragment of private life, ... because everybody will naturally want to hold on tight to his own personal property, nobody will want to share his bed-partner with another (because of jealousy), everybody will be attached to his own children at the expense of all the others, and besides philosophers are ridiculous. Who would ever accept being ruled by them? The point, Bloom goes on to explain, is that real community -- if the word means anything -- is like that. Political groups, social groups, kinship groups ... they require everything from us, they ask for our total devotion. Holding anything back is invariably perceived as disloyal, as unjust, even (potentially) treacherous or treasonous. But since (Bloom concludes) we can't help but hold things back -- since it's a simple fact of nature that we won't give up our stuff, that we won't let our neighbors fuck our spouses, and that we'll always cheer for our own kids at Little League -- perfect justice and perfect community are impossible. There is and will always be a permanent tension between the demands of justice, of community, of the group, and the immutable requirements of human nature.



And ... well, that's fine, I guess. It's actually an impressive argument when he spells out all the details. Only, ... pause with me for just a minute to remember the argument of Christopher Ryan's and Cacilda Jethá's delightful book Sex at Dawn. Ryan and Jethá argue a number of things, but foremost on the list is their claim that the way we organize sex and child-rearing -- all our presuppositions about chastity and fidelity, about infidelity and immorality, about legitimacy and bastardy and parental affection -- that all this is a product of the agricultural revolution, or at any rate of the introduction of food surplusses that can be saved. They argue further that among "immediate-return foraging societies" these concepts are unknown. And they wind up by pointing out that for most of human history, we grouped together into bands that lived by immediate-return hunting and foraging. Durable property was unknown, food storage was unknown, ... and so were most of the concepts we use today to think about sex.

In fact, the more you think about it, the more you see that the first two of those three huge proposals actually describe the very same societies Ryan and Jethá write about. Holding all property in common? If "property" means rocks used for pounding, why not hold them in common? There are plenty lying around on the ground. Sticks sharpened to spears? There are always more sticks. Cars, computers, refrigerators, houses, money, jewelry, swords, metal of any kind? Nope, hadn't been invented yet. Look at the description of the Bushman community in the first few minutes of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" -- before the Coke bottle -- and you'll see what I mean.


What about "women and children"? Socrates says (at Stephanus 457 D), "All these women are to belong to all these men in common, and no woman is to live privately with any man. And the children, in their turn, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent." And right away his interlocutor (I think it is Glaucon at that point, though it is a little hard to keep track.) objects that this arrangement sounds both impractical and undesirable. But isn't this exactly the scenario that Sex at Dawn describes? That in paleolithic communities, men and women fucked whom they wanted when they wanted, and then the whole tribe raised children together, loving them all without caring who was whose? The whole discussion of "partible paternity" and of "intersecting webs" of mothers and fathers in Chapters Six and Seven are about exactly that. Again, so far from being impossible or impractical, this measure looks like something that may well have been the norm for most of human history.

The third proposal, rule by philosophers, we can probably write off as a piece of special pleading. But Bloom points out that in principle we would all like the wise to rule, more or less. We may disagree that philosophers are especially wise, but that is another point. Even here, though, I think there is not a total disconnect. Ryan and Jethá write that in the societies they study there is very little social hierarchy and a broad sense of social equality. Similarly, there is a reluctance to do what somebody else tells you, unless there is a better reason than that they said so. In a society like that, the most influential people are likely to be the ones who are most persuasive. And since these tribes are small and everybody has known everybody else forever, that doesn't mean someone who can run a slick propaganda campaign. Most often it will mean someone whose ideas have proven right before. Philosophers? Maybe not. But the wise? Maybe closer.

This way of looking at the subject casts a whole new light on Bloom's claim that Socrates here shows the nature of community and justice. If this is how we lived for most of human history, if this is (as far as anything can be) the way we evolved to live, then an immediate-return foraging community may indeed be the very kind of community we are built to live in. So far as we can infer purpose from long-term evolutionary development -- and I am bracketing a huge philosophical discussion here, about which let me say right now only that whatever you think of the idea of innate human purposes, it is pretty clear that cats have long claws and strong pouncing muscles in order to catch mice* -- I say, so far as we can infer purpose from this kind of evidence it seems plausible that we were meant to live in immediate-return foraging communities. But these are indeed exactly communities where all individual interest is subordinated to the communal interest, where there is no private property to speak of, where sexuality is not channeled to monogamous forms of expression, and where children are raised by the whole tribe as a huge pool of fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts. In other words, the true nature of human community, the true nature of political organization, the true nature of justice ... at heart it really is this kind of communal life. Bloom is right about that. The only place he goes wrong is to say that it is impossible, when that's how we lived for most of our life as a species.

So is the tragic Straussian prognosis wrong as well? ... the gloomy story that says there is a permanent conflict (or "tension") between what is best for the individual and what is best for society? If a just society is possible because we lived that way in the Stone Age and they live that way now in the Kalahari, does that mean we truly can achieve justice and community in our lifetimes?

Sure. Move to the Kalahari.**

But short of that, ... no, I don't think so. Ryan and Jethá are really clear about saying that times have changed. With the introduction of agriculture and property, it becomes impossible to lead a life of the kind of sexual freedom they describe. And as sex goes, so goes justice. As long as we live around agriculture and property -- hell, as long as we can hoard resources for tomorrow, which may not take much more than salt and fire -- for so long we will live in an "ownership society."*** And for so long will the joy of true community in the deepest sense -- including (but not limited to) a social acceptance of promiscuity -- be unavailable to us. We can't get there from here. Sadly, Strauss and Bloom are right about that too.



* Six years after writing this post, I finally spelled out the beginnings of the argument I allude to here -- viz., the argument that there are innate purposes, and that what you evolved for is that purpose. You can find it here.
** Or Mars. This kind of society also looks exactly like the Nest that Valentine Michael Smith sets up at the heart of the Church of All Worlds in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. In fact, for some years I have toyed with the idea that Stranger is really an extended gloss on the Republic. If you're on your way to Mars, call me when you get there.

*** Stephen Snyder's review of Sex at Dawn is really good on this point, so I am glad that Ryan and Jethá posted it on their website.