You’ve got the causality backwards. People starting engaging in and approving of premarital sex because the costs of premarital sex plummeted. The pill and legal abortion (declared by judicial fiat, not some market or democratize faction) meant that you could have sex without the risk of creating life. Note that it’s not sex without consequences, because sex always has consequences on the person engaging in sexual activity, especially women.
To your question on who decides abortion laws, I don’t care how it gets implemented but I want to stop wholesale legal murder of innocent infants. Science and common sense both dictate that life begins at conception. At the very least, we could get heartbeat laws. A child born of rape and incest is an innocent child and also a human person with the same rights as you, but in general I’m willing to tolerate those exceptions if it gets the laws passed.
I think the missing driving factor in this story is the general decline in trust in, and respect for, traditional institutions of authority over the same time period. This includes secularization but also encompasses decline in trust in secular institutions-- anybody who would tell you to follow norms "because I/we say so".
Martin Gurri rightly says that technology decreases this trust when it makes the public more viscerally aware of the malfeasance, incompetence, and hypocrisy of those in authority. That trend didn't start with social media, and the 1960s were just as much a time of acceleration for it as the 2010s. Think of the photos and TV footage of the Vietnam War, or the DNC demonstrators in 1968 chanting "The whole world is watching!" Ironically, this same process has *increased* the stringency of sexual behavior norms specifically for powerful men: JFK was the last POTUS who could be confident reporters would withhold from the public their knowledge of his philandering.
In an individualistic society with low trust in traditional authorities, the difficulty of enforcing a norm is a function of two main factors:
1. The intrinsic cost of norm compliance. How big a sacrifice are you asking people to make?
2. The ability to tell a credible-sounding story of how norm violators materially harm innocent bystanders. Paternalistic stories that imply "you don't know what's good for you" won't cut it.
For example, modern social-justice-related language-bowdlerization norms are relatively easy to enforce because they have very low intrinsic cost of norm compliance: to all but a few curmudgeons, larding one's speech with euphemisms is a minor annoyance. Nonetheless, the norm-enforcers feel compelled to tell an elaborate story about "microaggressions" dressed up with pseudoscience to support the claim of material harm from norm violation. The story is fragile-- it is easy to point out that that story is unsupported by evidence and that hurt feelings are not material harm-- and this predicts that the norms themselves will also be fragile.
Flight-shaming and other anti-consumption environmentalist norms are examples where, despite a much more credible harm-to-bystanders story, enforcement is unlikely to get very far because the cost of compliance is too high. Even most people very concerned about climate change (fwiw I would include myself in this category) realize that we need technology to drastically lower, indeed ideally to eliminate, the compliance cost of reducing one's carbon footprint, because moral suasion isn't going to work.
Norms against premarital sex are doubly doomed. The compliance cost in intrinsic pleasure foregone is extremely high, and in the presence of effective contraception and STI protection, the harm-to-bystanders story becomes very difficult to support-- and arguments about long-term marital happiness are an ineffective substitute because they are paternalistic.
1) We can't expect anyone to make even the smallest personal sacrifice, even for their own long run good.
2) We can't give provide anyone advice or example of what are good behavioral norms because that would be "paternalistic". Every person must invent their norms ex nihilo, the only advice being that one should almost always do whatever one wants at the moment as there is no objective standard to judge ones desires against and all of your feelings are a valid truth.
Seems like a total train wreck if you ask me.
Obviously people will engage in personal sacrifices, both willingly and/or with little resistance. We just saw this during COVID. I watched people wear masks alone on hikes in the mountains. I watched them essentially engage in child abuse of their own children for two years. The story of harm being told here was a lot flimsier then those I'm told are too paternalistic. And as far as I can tell peer pressure rather than re-evaluation of risks drove sudden changes in behavior throughout the pandemic.
If you want a less pandemic driven example elite opinion on smoking and its opinion on other drugs (as or more harmful) varies substantially based on peer pressure alone. The second hand smoke story being a lot weaker than several other vice side effects elites champion.
In short, what I see is that people will make immense sacrifices to the point of lunacy if their peer group tells them to on the flimsiest justification.
Speaking wokeness certainly offends people more truth driven than peer driven, but there is also a correct instinct that words lead to actions. The motte is "just be sensitive" the Bailey is "equity", the hard redistribution of resources. I went to college on a full ride thanks to the SAT. My kids will not get this opportunity. Multiply this across all woke demands.
As to pre-marital sex, the idea that "the compliance cost in intrinsic pleasure foregone is extremely high" is what young people who need to discover their norms ex nihilo feel. And not even always because they are that horny (many want companionship and affirmation, and you can only get that with sex if the norm is nobody marries till 30). Older people who have been through this are supposed to "paternalistically" instruct them that busting a nut isn't all its cracked up to be, and provide a road map to a different way of forming relationships.
And that would bring me to my last point. Giving people advice they don't want to hear, paternalism, is in my experience the greatest expression of love. It's not pleasant to give, and we usually only give it to ones we care deeply about because it's unpleasant. Affirming or ignoring everything everyone does is the definition of not giving a shit about them.
From what I could tell "be more paternalistic, stop outsourcing paternalism to the state" was the thesis of Charles Murray's book.
Your examples only strengthen my point. Whatever you think about the empirical merits of the case for COVID masking or against secondhand smoke, both posit a clear causative link, with at least some scientific evidence behind it, between norm violation and material harm to bystanders. They appeal, that is, to what Jonathan Haidt calls the harm/care moral foundation; and they do not essentially depend on appeals to the purity, loyalty, or authority foundations, which arguments for sexual traditionalism typically appeal to, and which most people have (in my view, both rightly and irrevocably) downgraded in their moral systems since the 1960s.
If by Murray's book you mean _Coming Apart_, I don't think his claims there support your case either. As far as I can tell and remember, Murray argues in _Coming Apart_ that:
-- There is an American elite-- IIRC he calls them "Belmonters"-- who have excellent life outcomes which have recently diverged from those of other Americans.
-- Belmonters have such great life outcomes largely because they make, and culturally pressure their children to make, responsible life choices.
-- If Belmonters "preached what they practice," i.e. openly avowed that their cultural practices really are superior and recommended them to others, it would help reduce poverty, inequality, and social polarization. This is the non-state paternalism he's aiming at.
That all may or may not be true. But if it is true, it's a poor argument for sexual traditionalism-- because, as a lifelong Belmonter in good standing, I can tell you Belmonters are definitely not sexual traditionalists. They (we) definitely have low rates of divorce and single parenthood, but it's certainly not due to abstinence until marriage.
I've taken issue with Charle's view of Belmont in the past. Belmont avoids divorce and single parenthood by delaying and avoiding marriage and parenting. Hence the low TFR of Belmont liberals (0.6 per woman that are very liberal). I would say that the inferior norms of the 60s revolution have affected them in a different way, but still a negative way. It shows up in things not done and potential not reached rather than spectacular failure.
This was on display during the pandemic too. Belmont behavior caused them to engage in damaging self harm, especially to their children if they had them. But "two years of miserable isolation and masking" doesn't have the same headline as a drug overdose.
Still, his general view that Belmont's are giving bad advice to FIshtowner's is true (as it was during the pandemic).
"and they do not essentially depend on appeals to the purity, loyalty, or authority foundations"
During the pandemic it was very obvious that purity, loyalty, and appeal to authority were driving peoples behavior. This was so overwhelming that I don't think it can be denied. Authorities engaged in 1984 levels of "we have always been at war with East Asia" constantly throughout the pandemic, and many of their pronouncements were so illogical and contradictory even ordinary people could obviously see it. Everywhere I went it was clear that loyalty and purity were the driving forces of behavior.
Care/harm would have inspired people to behave totally differently. For instance, closing schools and masking children clearly harmed them, and those I saw defy those mandates did so because they cared about protecting the children (like my kids daycare, that refused the mask mandate despite state penalties). Social isolation in general harms. Forgone healthcare harms. The damage to the economy from lockdowns harms.
If you were just doing a list of cost/benefit analysis you would end up with something like Bryan Caplan's analysis of the pandemic or the Great Barrington Declaration. That's what care/harm would get you. What we got was clearly purity/loyalty/authroity driven. Quite frankly, it was a cultish.
At best some people occasionally made very thin appeals to why their decisions were care/harm based, but this was thin gruel few could believe. Often one didn't even bother with such rationalizations.
But even if harm/care was driving the train...clearly it was a train wreck. When push comes to shove care/harm came to be "who do I trust to inform me of what the care/harm." It ends up just being loyalty, authority, and purity since that is how people try to determine care/harm (what is harm, who should I care about and how).
I agree that views on abortion are basically about views on chastity.
However, I think modern views on chastity are wrong.
1) Promiscuity doesn’t seem to make people happy or lead to better marriages. Research shows chastity makes for happier and longer lasting marriages. You probably notice this in your own life.
2) At best delayed marriage helps reduce divorce for the upper middle class (but clearly not average people, let alone the lower class). However, the cost deeply reduced fertility which is bad for the UMC and society.
3) As you note, there were no laws forcing chastity. There was a cultural consensus. I believe that consensus was correct and the sexual revolution was wrong.
I think that view is the dividing line between conservatives and classical liberals (let alone leftists).
4) it’s pointless to say “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the bottle”.
Cultural power can get people to believe in 100 genders and mask their toddlers for two years. It can do anything.
Furthermore, cultural power can easily be driven by a small determined minority that just cares more.
And it ain’t going to get easier. Once you’re at SK fertility levels the natural constituency for pro family policies doesn’t exist anymore.
This is just one of those things were I think you have to bite the bullet.
> I understand that the majority of Americans believe that there should be some restrictions on abortion. But think that through. Who do you want to decide at what week to draw the line? Who do you want do decide what exceptions (rape, health concerns of the woman, etc.) to allow? If you think that legislators or judges or “the will of the people” should be making those decisions, then you are a bigger fan of state power than I am.
Are you comfortable with the state defining the distinctions between murder and self-defense? Then you should be comfortable letting the state define limits on abortion. The reason why most people want limits on abortion (and why most western countries have limits) is that they realize (at least after some point in the development process) it is infanticide.
Also, just from a practical perspective, the median view is more permissive than my own, so I have no real reason to object.
Isn’t it true that most advanced democracies regulate abortions and use some variation on the three trimester system? And isn’t it true that this compromise is largely uncontroversial in such countries? Why then is abortion such a hot button issue here?
I think we got blowback because it was decided for an entire nation of 300M odd people by judicial fiat. It wasn’t the result of people persuading their neighbors and lobbying their legislators. “No taxation without representation” could just as well be “No legislation without representation.”
(Let me set aside, in this comment, the fetus' status in the normative controversy about abortion.)
Arnold's explanation of the sexual revolution neglects crucial technology shock in the 1960s and 1970s: (a) The combined oral contraceptive pill and (b) new abortion technology—vacuum aspiration—safe for the pregnant woman:
Is there good evidence that "Before the mid-1960s, pregnancy was regarded as the punishment that fit the crime [violation of social norms] of premarital sex"? My intuitions are that two well-founded beliefs shaped social norms about premarital sex:
(1) Coitus would entail substantial risk of pregnancy.
(2) Abortion would present a major health risk to the pregnant woman, given traditional abortion technologies.
Norms against premarital sex protected young women from pregnancy.
Norms of shotgun marriage protected young women from opportunistic breach by men.
I wrote "coitus" rather than "premarital sex" because, as everyone has always known, various kinds of smart sex, which avoid risk of pregnancy, are alternatives to coitus.
And everyone knows that preventive contraceptives (e.g., the pill) greatly reduce, but do not eliminate risk of pregnancy.
Pregnancy is a known risk of a specific kind of interaction. Is the interaction voluntary? The answer depends on whether (a) the persons are adults; and (b) coitus is a choice, or, alternatively, an irrepressible drive. I submit that most people believe that coitus between adults is a voluntary interaction, except in case of rape. (A person's judgment may be impaired by inebriation because alcohol disinhibits. Many persons choose to drink in pursuit of romance.)
However, teenage girls constitute a different category because (i) they are minors, (ii) "17 is the new 15", and (iii) the age at menarche decreased from 15-16 to 12-13 in the latter half of the 20th century:
"If you think that legislators or judges or “the will of the people” should be making those decisions, then you are a bigger fan of state power than I am."
It seems you have already been beaten up quite a bit but I'll add a little more. There are a lot of people who see abortion as akin to murder. Some see it from day one, others a heartbeat, others viability, and I'm sure there are other cutoffs but you get the point. I suspect many think there should be some cutoff but haven't figured out where or even thought about it much. Given that most people think there should but some limits (surveys ALL suggest this), how is the government making a law any different than laws defining murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, and an accident?
I haven’t read the book, but there should be a distinction between men and women as to their willingness to have pre marital sex. Men (most) were always in favor. Women were not except for that golden period after the pill and before aids. Not sure about today. I am Too old.
Why did prudence become a bad thing? Promiscuity is imprudent. It is particularly imprudent for women, because catchers are more likely to have unhappy results than pitchers. Norms against male promiscuity reduce the pressure on women, as well as reducing the stigma for men who don’t get any.
"approval of premarital sex meant that young people could marry later without having to forego sex. This produced greater marital stability, because marrying later means you are less likely to make a mistake leading to divorce." (Twenge)
For the upper third IQ folk, they can enjoy teen & 20s sex before marriage, "responsibly", with little fear of pregnancy. And then get married, assortatively, and stay married. Which is what they're doing.
For the below avg IQ third, they've also reduced divorce - by not getting married at all. Among Blacks, it's some 75% kids whose parents are not married; 40% in total US population.
Looks like a trade-off: more promiscuity means less divorce (for the top, especially), but more single parents (especially for the bottom). It's a bad trade-off. Less sex by the young, and less fertility, is becoming more normal.
We need norms & laws & programs to optimize the behavior of the bottom, low IQ, low education; maybe low impulse control, less agreeableness, lazy, careless.
Bring back Slut-Shaming, and we need a better term for promiscuous men: slut-cad? slut-jerk?
They too should be shamed: Trump, Biden, Clinton, JFK, MLK, LBJ, RFK & Teddy. Men should reduce, not increase, their respect for the womanizers -- who do have more sexual fun with promiscuous approval.
Re: "I understand that the majority of Americans believe that there should be some restrictions on abortion. But think that through. Who do you want to decide at what week to draw the line? Who do you want do decide what exceptions (rape, health concerns of the woman, etc.) to allow? If you think that legislators or judges or “the will of the people” should be making those decisions, then you are a bigger fan of state power than I am."
1) One must also think though the implications of *no restrictions* on abortion.
2) Compare another vexed question: May the State regulate the family in the interest of the child? Few people will bite the bullet and grant parents full sovereignty over their minor children. Consequently, legislators and judges do make decisions about rules and exceptions. Rules change.
For example, the rule in child-custody disputes has changed from "maternal presumption" to "best interest of the child." An unintended consequence has been to increase the bargaining power of fathers against the interests of mother and child, in cases where the father pretends to want custody, as leverage to diminish financial obligations. Thus regulation is indeed imperfect. Nonetheless, few people would countenance zero regulation.
Back to abortion. Many people, who have thought it through, carefully come to the conclusion that abortion should be regulated in some ways, insofar as the fetus is—or gradually becomes—an unborn child, who deserves protection under the law.
As I understand it, the foetus does not "become" a human being. It is a human being. The organism that you are, right now, began at conception; conception is simply the beginning point of an organism. At no point were you anything other than a human being. The notion of something "gradually becoming" human does not make sense; a mature human is not "more human" than a child. They are simply different stages of development. If this is incorrect I would be happy to know why...
What is meant is when the fetus becomes eligible for protection under the law. Putting this in terms of when a fetus "becomes" a human being is of course inexact, since as you said, the fetus is always a human being in some sense, but then again, there have been many times throughout history when certain classes of human beings were outside the protection of the law, and could be killed with minimal or no oversight or punishment by the state or other authorities. Even today, most states allow homicide to be justifiable for self-defense when one's life is at risk.
There is also an argument that the fetus, even though being human and genetically distinct from its conception, is not actually a separate person until birth, but instead, part of the mother. Even today, fetuses generally don't receive legal names or birth certificates, although they may be formally recorded as stillborn if they die before birth after a certain fetal age.
I don't doubt the story and causal mechanisms with regard to premarital sex, norms, and the inevitable fall of abortion restrictions. There is another salient element that was always there and will be ever important considering the demographic fault lines between the dominant political coalitions in the present. The long history of infanticide in most civilizations of the ancient world and in hunter gatherers facing resource constraints and tradeoffs between children born too soon together. A significant number of abortions are actually women who already have children and do not want more.
On demographic changes, we don't have a good metric to differentiate between cultures where women average the same 2 children each, but one at 25, the other at 35. These cultures will have different TFR measures, even with the same number of kids per woman. Because timing also matters.
We need a cultural return to promiscuity shaming - sex that leads to unwanted pregnancy is dumb, and should be uncool. Which seems to be happening with both fewer abortions and fewer unmarried teen mothers.
Tho not talking about the 75% of Black kids growing up with their unmarried parent (?95% mother?) means there remains a problem and the difference in Black-White behavior will be causing bigger result differences in the future.
There are more poor White kids with unmarried parents than poor Black kids (#s, not %s). The kids are born innocent. The parents should be shamed, and should be ashamed of themselves - but society/ gov't cannot give any punishment to the guilty parent without it hurting the innocent kid.
Some state gov't should start rewarding women who DON'T have kids outside of marriage in those areas with high rates on unmarried married. Our gov't will be trying to reduce problems with gov't money carrots -- we should orient more of the gov't money to reward good behavior rather than shameful actions.
"I understand that the majority of Americans believe that there should be some restrictions on abortion"
Just a tangential comment on this particular sentence but was recently talking to my brother over some drinks and we were talking about "things which can't be spoken in public" and one thing he mentioned was "you know what ethnic group I hate the most, EU'opeans and their American apologists / EUphiles" and his reasoning was he just sick of everyone in the world, but especially EU citizens both locally, in the media, etc. crapping on the US. This was something I noticed a couple years ago myself but equally gets on my nerves as I primary consume "foreign" outlets (and not their US branches) such as BBC, DW, etc and their front pages will often be nothing but stories about municipal US issues while flagrantly ignoring the same issue down the street as to pretend it they don't report on it it doesn't exist like Japanese homelessness.
What I'm getting out here though is find me a SINGLE country in the entire world where the MAJORITY of the population doesn't believe there should be restrictions on abortion. Find me a SINGLE country in the entire world where abortion is unrestricted; excluding failed states of course.
Tired of the whole world crapping, but especially EU'opeans on the US for immigrations, abortion, free speech, police brutality, etc. You think Algerians or Turks in France / Germany respectively don't face discrimination in the criminal legal system? You think Germany has free speech? You think illegal immigrants to Austria have an easy path to naturalization? You think in a SINGLE EU country abortion is both unrestricted AND/OR the majority of their population support unrestricted abortion?
How about we quit crapping on America here by implying Americans are a pariah outside international norms on abortion, we aren't even if you just limit the world to the "EU".
Yes, "one might expect there to be a politically satisfactory balance between how much government protection is afforded individuals in helping them to prevent themselves from engaging in self-destructive behavior and how much government support is afforded to individuals suffering from the results of their self-destructive behavior."
Right now gov't rewards bad behavior - to reduce the suffering from the bad behavior.
You’ve got the causality backwards. People starting engaging in and approving of premarital sex because the costs of premarital sex plummeted. The pill and legal abortion (declared by judicial fiat, not some market or democratize faction) meant that you could have sex without the risk of creating life. Note that it’s not sex without consequences, because sex always has consequences on the person engaging in sexual activity, especially women.
To your question on who decides abortion laws, I don’t care how it gets implemented but I want to stop wholesale legal murder of innocent infants. Science and common sense both dictate that life begins at conception. At the very least, we could get heartbeat laws. A child born of rape and incest is an innocent child and also a human person with the same rights as you, but in general I’m willing to tolerate those exceptions if it gets the laws passed.
I think the missing driving factor in this story is the general decline in trust in, and respect for, traditional institutions of authority over the same time period. This includes secularization but also encompasses decline in trust in secular institutions-- anybody who would tell you to follow norms "because I/we say so".
Martin Gurri rightly says that technology decreases this trust when it makes the public more viscerally aware of the malfeasance, incompetence, and hypocrisy of those in authority. That trend didn't start with social media, and the 1960s were just as much a time of acceleration for it as the 2010s. Think of the photos and TV footage of the Vietnam War, or the DNC demonstrators in 1968 chanting "The whole world is watching!" Ironically, this same process has *increased* the stringency of sexual behavior norms specifically for powerful men: JFK was the last POTUS who could be confident reporters would withhold from the public their knowledge of his philandering.
In an individualistic society with low trust in traditional authorities, the difficulty of enforcing a norm is a function of two main factors:
1. The intrinsic cost of norm compliance. How big a sacrifice are you asking people to make?
2. The ability to tell a credible-sounding story of how norm violators materially harm innocent bystanders. Paternalistic stories that imply "you don't know what's good for you" won't cut it.
For example, modern social-justice-related language-bowdlerization norms are relatively easy to enforce because they have very low intrinsic cost of norm compliance: to all but a few curmudgeons, larding one's speech with euphemisms is a minor annoyance. Nonetheless, the norm-enforcers feel compelled to tell an elaborate story about "microaggressions" dressed up with pseudoscience to support the claim of material harm from norm violation. The story is fragile-- it is easy to point out that that story is unsupported by evidence and that hurt feelings are not material harm-- and this predicts that the norms themselves will also be fragile.
Flight-shaming and other anti-consumption environmentalist norms are examples where, despite a much more credible harm-to-bystanders story, enforcement is unlikely to get very far because the cost of compliance is too high. Even most people very concerned about climate change (fwiw I would include myself in this category) realize that we need technology to drastically lower, indeed ideally to eliminate, the compliance cost of reducing one's carbon footprint, because moral suasion isn't going to work.
Norms against premarital sex are doubly doomed. The compliance cost in intrinsic pleasure foregone is extremely high, and in the presence of effective contraception and STI protection, the harm-to-bystanders story becomes very difficult to support-- and arguments about long-term marital happiness are an ineffective substitute because they are paternalistic.
1) We can't expect anyone to make even the smallest personal sacrifice, even for their own long run good.
2) We can't give provide anyone advice or example of what are good behavioral norms because that would be "paternalistic". Every person must invent their norms ex nihilo, the only advice being that one should almost always do whatever one wants at the moment as there is no objective standard to judge ones desires against and all of your feelings are a valid truth.
Seems like a total train wreck if you ask me.
Obviously people will engage in personal sacrifices, both willingly and/or with little resistance. We just saw this during COVID. I watched people wear masks alone on hikes in the mountains. I watched them essentially engage in child abuse of their own children for two years. The story of harm being told here was a lot flimsier then those I'm told are too paternalistic. And as far as I can tell peer pressure rather than re-evaluation of risks drove sudden changes in behavior throughout the pandemic.
If you want a less pandemic driven example elite opinion on smoking and its opinion on other drugs (as or more harmful) varies substantially based on peer pressure alone. The second hand smoke story being a lot weaker than several other vice side effects elites champion.
In short, what I see is that people will make immense sacrifices to the point of lunacy if their peer group tells them to on the flimsiest justification.
Speaking wokeness certainly offends people more truth driven than peer driven, but there is also a correct instinct that words lead to actions. The motte is "just be sensitive" the Bailey is "equity", the hard redistribution of resources. I went to college on a full ride thanks to the SAT. My kids will not get this opportunity. Multiply this across all woke demands.
As to pre-marital sex, the idea that "the compliance cost in intrinsic pleasure foregone is extremely high" is what young people who need to discover their norms ex nihilo feel. And not even always because they are that horny (many want companionship and affirmation, and you can only get that with sex if the norm is nobody marries till 30). Older people who have been through this are supposed to "paternalistically" instruct them that busting a nut isn't all its cracked up to be, and provide a road map to a different way of forming relationships.
And that would bring me to my last point. Giving people advice they don't want to hear, paternalism, is in my experience the greatest expression of love. It's not pleasant to give, and we usually only give it to ones we care deeply about because it's unpleasant. Affirming or ignoring everything everyone does is the definition of not giving a shit about them.
From what I could tell "be more paternalistic, stop outsourcing paternalism to the state" was the thesis of Charles Murray's book.
Your examples only strengthen my point. Whatever you think about the empirical merits of the case for COVID masking or against secondhand smoke, both posit a clear causative link, with at least some scientific evidence behind it, between norm violation and material harm to bystanders. They appeal, that is, to what Jonathan Haidt calls the harm/care moral foundation; and they do not essentially depend on appeals to the purity, loyalty, or authority foundations, which arguments for sexual traditionalism typically appeal to, and which most people have (in my view, both rightly and irrevocably) downgraded in their moral systems since the 1960s.
If by Murray's book you mean _Coming Apart_, I don't think his claims there support your case either. As far as I can tell and remember, Murray argues in _Coming Apart_ that:
-- There is an American elite-- IIRC he calls them "Belmonters"-- who have excellent life outcomes which have recently diverged from those of other Americans.
-- Belmonters have such great life outcomes largely because they make, and culturally pressure their children to make, responsible life choices.
-- If Belmonters "preached what they practice," i.e. openly avowed that their cultural practices really are superior and recommended them to others, it would help reduce poverty, inequality, and social polarization. This is the non-state paternalism he's aiming at.
That all may or may not be true. But if it is true, it's a poor argument for sexual traditionalism-- because, as a lifelong Belmonter in good standing, I can tell you Belmonters are definitely not sexual traditionalists. They (we) definitely have low rates of divorce and single parenthood, but it's certainly not due to abstinence until marriage.
I've taken issue with Charle's view of Belmont in the past. Belmont avoids divorce and single parenthood by delaying and avoiding marriage and parenting. Hence the low TFR of Belmont liberals (0.6 per woman that are very liberal). I would say that the inferior norms of the 60s revolution have affected them in a different way, but still a negative way. It shows up in things not done and potential not reached rather than spectacular failure.
This was on display during the pandemic too. Belmont behavior caused them to engage in damaging self harm, especially to their children if they had them. But "two years of miserable isolation and masking" doesn't have the same headline as a drug overdose.
Still, his general view that Belmont's are giving bad advice to FIshtowner's is true (as it was during the pandemic).
"and they do not essentially depend on appeals to the purity, loyalty, or authority foundations"
During the pandemic it was very obvious that purity, loyalty, and appeal to authority were driving peoples behavior. This was so overwhelming that I don't think it can be denied. Authorities engaged in 1984 levels of "we have always been at war with East Asia" constantly throughout the pandemic, and many of their pronouncements were so illogical and contradictory even ordinary people could obviously see it. Everywhere I went it was clear that loyalty and purity were the driving forces of behavior.
Care/harm would have inspired people to behave totally differently. For instance, closing schools and masking children clearly harmed them, and those I saw defy those mandates did so because they cared about protecting the children (like my kids daycare, that refused the mask mandate despite state penalties). Social isolation in general harms. Forgone healthcare harms. The damage to the economy from lockdowns harms.
If you were just doing a list of cost/benefit analysis you would end up with something like Bryan Caplan's analysis of the pandemic or the Great Barrington Declaration. That's what care/harm would get you. What we got was clearly purity/loyalty/authroity driven. Quite frankly, it was a cultish.
At best some people occasionally made very thin appeals to why their decisions were care/harm based, but this was thin gruel few could believe. Often one didn't even bother with such rationalizations.
But even if harm/care was driving the train...clearly it was a train wreck. When push comes to shove care/harm came to be "who do I trust to inform me of what the care/harm." It ends up just being loyalty, authority, and purity since that is how people try to determine care/harm (what is harm, who should I care about and how).
I agree that views on abortion are basically about views on chastity.
However, I think modern views on chastity are wrong.
1) Promiscuity doesn’t seem to make people happy or lead to better marriages. Research shows chastity makes for happier and longer lasting marriages. You probably notice this in your own life.
2) At best delayed marriage helps reduce divorce for the upper middle class (but clearly not average people, let alone the lower class). However, the cost deeply reduced fertility which is bad for the UMC and society.
3) As you note, there were no laws forcing chastity. There was a cultural consensus. I believe that consensus was correct and the sexual revolution was wrong.
I think that view is the dividing line between conservatives and classical liberals (let alone leftists).
4) it’s pointless to say “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the bottle”.
Cultural power can get people to believe in 100 genders and mask their toddlers for two years. It can do anything.
Furthermore, cultural power can easily be driven by a small determined minority that just cares more.
And it ain’t going to get easier. Once you’re at SK fertility levels the natural constituency for pro family policies doesn’t exist anymore.
This is just one of those things were I think you have to bite the bullet.
> I understand that the majority of Americans believe that there should be some restrictions on abortion. But think that through. Who do you want to decide at what week to draw the line? Who do you want do decide what exceptions (rape, health concerns of the woman, etc.) to allow? If you think that legislators or judges or “the will of the people” should be making those decisions, then you are a bigger fan of state power than I am.
Are you comfortable with the state defining the distinctions between murder and self-defense? Then you should be comfortable letting the state define limits on abortion. The reason why most people want limits on abortion (and why most western countries have limits) is that they realize (at least after some point in the development process) it is infanticide.
Also, just from a practical perspective, the median view is more permissive than my own, so I have no real reason to object.
Isn’t it true that most advanced democracies regulate abortions and use some variation on the three trimester system? And isn’t it true that this compromise is largely uncontroversial in such countries? Why then is abortion such a hot button issue here?
I think we got blowback because it was decided for an entire nation of 300M odd people by judicial fiat. It wasn’t the result of people persuading their neighbors and lobbying their legislators. “No taxation without representation” could just as well be “No legislation without representation.”
I should add that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself thought that the reasoning in Roe v Wade was shoddy.
(Let me set aside, in this comment, the fetus' status in the normative controversy about abortion.)
Arnold's explanation of the sexual revolution neglects crucial technology shock in the 1960s and 1970s: (a) The combined oral contraceptive pill and (b) new abortion technology—vacuum aspiration—safe for the pregnant woman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_aspiration
Is there good evidence that "Before the mid-1960s, pregnancy was regarded as the punishment that fit the crime [violation of social norms] of premarital sex"? My intuitions are that two well-founded beliefs shaped social norms about premarital sex:
(1) Coitus would entail substantial risk of pregnancy.
(2) Abortion would present a major health risk to the pregnant woman, given traditional abortion technologies.
Norms against premarital sex protected young women from pregnancy.
Norms of shotgun marriage protected young women from opportunistic breach by men.
I wrote "coitus" rather than "premarital sex" because, as everyone has always known, various kinds of smart sex, which avoid risk of pregnancy, are alternatives to coitus.
And everyone knows that preventive contraceptives (e.g., the pill) greatly reduce, but do not eliminate risk of pregnancy.
Pregnancy is a known risk of a specific kind of interaction. Is the interaction voluntary? The answer depends on whether (a) the persons are adults; and (b) coitus is a choice, or, alternatively, an irrepressible drive. I submit that most people believe that coitus between adults is a voluntary interaction, except in case of rape. (A person's judgment may be impaired by inebriation because alcohol disinhibits. Many persons choose to drink in pursuit of romance.)
However, teenage girls constitute a different category because (i) they are minors, (ii) "17 is the new 15", and (iii) the age at menarche decreased from 15-16 to 12-13 in the latter half of the 20th century:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26703478/
"If you think that legislators or judges or “the will of the people” should be making those decisions, then you are a bigger fan of state power than I am."
It seems you have already been beaten up quite a bit but I'll add a little more. There are a lot of people who see abortion as akin to murder. Some see it from day one, others a heartbeat, others viability, and I'm sure there are other cutoffs but you get the point. I suspect many think there should be some cutoff but haven't figured out where or even thought about it much. Given that most people think there should but some limits (surveys ALL suggest this), how is the government making a law any different than laws defining murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, and an accident?
You'll draw a line somewhere. The only question is when: at what point in time? It all begins with a definition. Good luck!
I haven’t read the book, but there should be a distinction between men and women as to their willingness to have pre marital sex. Men (most) were always in favor. Women were not except for that golden period after the pill and before aids. Not sure about today. I am Too old.
Why did prudence become a bad thing? Promiscuity is imprudent. It is particularly imprudent for women, because catchers are more likely to have unhappy results than pitchers. Norms against male promiscuity reduce the pressure on women, as well as reducing the stigma for men who don’t get any.
You are right, so why (accept promiscuity)?
"approval of premarital sex meant that young people could marry later without having to forego sex. This produced greater marital stability, because marrying later means you are less likely to make a mistake leading to divorce." (Twenge)
For the upper third IQ folk, they can enjoy teen & 20s sex before marriage, "responsibly", with little fear of pregnancy. And then get married, assortatively, and stay married. Which is what they're doing.
For the below avg IQ third, they've also reduced divorce - by not getting married at all. Among Blacks, it's some 75% kids whose parents are not married; 40% in total US population.
Looks like a trade-off: more promiscuity means less divorce (for the top, especially), but more single parents (especially for the bottom). It's a bad trade-off. Less sex by the young, and less fertility, is becoming more normal.
We need norms & laws & programs to optimize the behavior of the bottom, low IQ, low education; maybe low impulse control, less agreeableness, lazy, careless.
Bring back Slut-Shaming, and we need a better term for promiscuous men: slut-cad? slut-jerk?
They too should be shamed: Trump, Biden, Clinton, JFK, MLK, LBJ, RFK & Teddy. Men should reduce, not increase, their respect for the womanizers -- who do have more sexual fun with promiscuous approval.
Re: "I understand that the majority of Americans believe that there should be some restrictions on abortion. But think that through. Who do you want to decide at what week to draw the line? Who do you want do decide what exceptions (rape, health concerns of the woman, etc.) to allow? If you think that legislators or judges or “the will of the people” should be making those decisions, then you are a bigger fan of state power than I am."
1) One must also think though the implications of *no restrictions* on abortion.
2) Compare another vexed question: May the State regulate the family in the interest of the child? Few people will bite the bullet and grant parents full sovereignty over their minor children. Consequently, legislators and judges do make decisions about rules and exceptions. Rules change.
For example, the rule in child-custody disputes has changed from "maternal presumption" to "best interest of the child." An unintended consequence has been to increase the bargaining power of fathers against the interests of mother and child, in cases where the father pretends to want custody, as leverage to diminish financial obligations. Thus regulation is indeed imperfect. Nonetheless, few people would countenance zero regulation.
Back to abortion. Many people, who have thought it through, carefully come to the conclusion that abortion should be regulated in some ways, insofar as the fetus is—or gradually becomes—an unborn child, who deserves protection under the law.
As I understand it, the foetus does not "become" a human being. It is a human being. The organism that you are, right now, began at conception; conception is simply the beginning point of an organism. At no point were you anything other than a human being. The notion of something "gradually becoming" human does not make sense; a mature human is not "more human" than a child. They are simply different stages of development. If this is incorrect I would be happy to know why...
What is meant is when the fetus becomes eligible for protection under the law. Putting this in terms of when a fetus "becomes" a human being is of course inexact, since as you said, the fetus is always a human being in some sense, but then again, there have been many times throughout history when certain classes of human beings were outside the protection of the law, and could be killed with minimal or no oversight or punishment by the state or other authorities. Even today, most states allow homicide to be justifiable for self-defense when one's life is at risk.
There is also an argument that the fetus, even though being human and genetically distinct from its conception, is not actually a separate person until birth, but instead, part of the mother. Even today, fetuses generally don't receive legal names or birth certificates, although they may be formally recorded as stillborn if they die before birth after a certain fetal age.
I don't doubt the story and causal mechanisms with regard to premarital sex, norms, and the inevitable fall of abortion restrictions. There is another salient element that was always there and will be ever important considering the demographic fault lines between the dominant political coalitions in the present. The long history of infanticide in most civilizations of the ancient world and in hunter gatherers facing resource constraints and tradeoffs between children born too soon together. A significant number of abortions are actually women who already have children and do not want more.
On demographic changes, we don't have a good metric to differentiate between cultures where women average the same 2 children each, but one at 25, the other at 35. These cultures will have different TFR measures, even with the same number of kids per woman. Because timing also matters.
We need a cultural return to promiscuity shaming - sex that leads to unwanted pregnancy is dumb, and should be uncool. Which seems to be happening with both fewer abortions and fewer unmarried teen mothers.
Tho not talking about the 75% of Black kids growing up with their unmarried parent (?95% mother?) means there remains a problem and the difference in Black-White behavior will be causing bigger result differences in the future.
There are more poor White kids with unmarried parents than poor Black kids (#s, not %s). The kids are born innocent. The parents should be shamed, and should be ashamed of themselves - but society/ gov't cannot give any punishment to the guilty parent without it hurting the innocent kid.
Some state gov't should start rewarding women who DON'T have kids outside of marriage in those areas with high rates on unmarried married. Our gov't will be trying to reduce problems with gov't money carrots -- we should orient more of the gov't money to reward good behavior rather than shameful actions.
"I understand that the majority of Americans believe that there should be some restrictions on abortion"
Just a tangential comment on this particular sentence but was recently talking to my brother over some drinks and we were talking about "things which can't be spoken in public" and one thing he mentioned was "you know what ethnic group I hate the most, EU'opeans and their American apologists / EUphiles" and his reasoning was he just sick of everyone in the world, but especially EU citizens both locally, in the media, etc. crapping on the US. This was something I noticed a couple years ago myself but equally gets on my nerves as I primary consume "foreign" outlets (and not their US branches) such as BBC, DW, etc and their front pages will often be nothing but stories about municipal US issues while flagrantly ignoring the same issue down the street as to pretend it they don't report on it it doesn't exist like Japanese homelessness.
What I'm getting out here though is find me a SINGLE country in the entire world where the MAJORITY of the population doesn't believe there should be restrictions on abortion. Find me a SINGLE country in the entire world where abortion is unrestricted; excluding failed states of course.
Tired of the whole world crapping, but especially EU'opeans on the US for immigrations, abortion, free speech, police brutality, etc. You think Algerians or Turks in France / Germany respectively don't face discrimination in the criminal legal system? You think Germany has free speech? You think illegal immigrants to Austria have an easy path to naturalization? You think in a SINGLE EU country abortion is both unrestricted AND/OR the majority of their population support unrestricted abortion?
How about we quit crapping on America here by implying Americans are a pariah outside international norms on abortion, we aren't even if you just limit the world to the "EU".
Yes, "one might expect there to be a politically satisfactory balance between how much government protection is afforded individuals in helping them to prevent themselves from engaging in self-destructive behavior and how much government support is afforded to individuals suffering from the results of their self-destructive behavior."
Right now gov't rewards bad behavior - to reduce the suffering from the bad behavior.