The economics of sexual morality

1 posts

Bob Dylan Roof
It's another variation on the same argument involving the application of philosophy to situations where certain goods are scarce. I never specificed "material resources" (which you have fixated upon) because these are not the only subject of economic calculation. However, it is nevertheless irrefutable that, where the benefits of sexual promiscuity are outweighed by its risks, as is generally the case for the poor in most civilizations, the poor will tend to promote more conservative sexual mores. Often, though not always, the benefits and risks of sexuality are manifested in the allocation of material resources. "Poor" here does not refer to an absolute standard of wealth as you insinuated by disingenuously comparing the worth of German barbarians with the modern Portuguese middle class. Further, this argument does not imply (nor did it imply in the initial post) that conservative sexual mores are exclusive to the poor. I tried to clarify this point several times in my subsequent posts, which you didn't respond to.

The ultimate point here concerns how the manipulation of purely economic incentives can dramatically alter the behavior of individuals. This is, after all, the primary method of the state-backed social engineer. You are (apparently) incensed because you think this thread represents an incursion on your own method for revealing the truth about human behavior, but it does not. As I have written elsewhere in this thread, economic incentive structures are mostly determined by cultural assumptions and biological impulses. However, controlling for variations between cultures, it is nevertheless clear that individuals engage in economic calculation in navigating the sexual market. This means that they weigh the material as well as the immaterial costs and benefits of a given behavior. Indeed, government welfare for single mothers among ancient Germans would have incentivized sexual promiscuity in the same way that it does today, although perhaps with less force if Tacitus' history is correct. The cultural value of monogamy amongst the Germans may have been so high that no amount of free resources (or some other intangible good) could dissuade them from adhering to monogamy.