Wellwisher said:
Morality is based on principles that maximize the group. Morality is not about maximizing individuals, per se, but rather it is about maximizing the team. If the individuals sacrifice their ego for the good of the team, the team is able to benefit the individuals, by making them all rise into a champion.
I don't disagree with the concept in the abstract; what is harder to reconcile, though, is the application to reality. In some cases this is a matter of definitions; in others, it is a matter of circumstance.
For instance, you've seen some of the rolling firefight going on here about social conservatism and sexual mores. We can isolate and argue according to the abstract principle you've asserted that what, say, Bells and I might consider misogynist, is in any one isolated consideration morally proper.
But if we don't fracture the outlook into individual issues that have nothing to do with one another, yes, it really does come about that the practical application of such morality is
devastating for women.
Remember, we're less than a quarter-century out from the last marital rape exemption, and we still hear the argument from some politicians. And this is a society in which the proposition that women exist for the sake of men still holds such sway that I can name you right now two former prosecutors turned politicians who will not reject a man's right to force a woman to have sex. One is a sitting U.S. Congressman from Colorado Four, Rep. Ken Buck. The other is a carpetbagging state legislator in ... Virginia, I think, who finds occasional success at the ballot box. His name is Dick Black. Mr. Buck, formerly the Weld County prosecutor, once infamously refused to prosecute a confessed rape because he felt the woman didn't do enough to prevent it. Mr. Black, formerly a military prosecutor, has explained that rape in the military is natural, and considers marital rape an injustice against a man who forces his wife to have sex with him.
And you're familiar with IPA. What would be
infinite prevention advice except that we've finally discovered a boundary:
Suspect everyone, but #NotAllMen, and especially not me. It turns out that when we take the IPA aimed at a statistical slender minority of rapes and turn it back toward the statistical majority of rapes, advocates freak out. Don't let other people pour your drink? Okay, now what if that other person is your husband? Nice fuckin' marriage they've got, isn't it?
And that's the boundary.
There is, of course, the anti-abortion movement, and now social conservatives are even coming after birth control. At some point, it really does start looking, in practical application, like the point is to knock women up and keep 'em that way.
Collectively, this would be a devastating outcome for women. And their individual sacrifices for our greater good of Liberty and Justice for all would be to live by lesser imitations of each.
We should not be surprised that the beneficiaries of this moral paradigm just happen to be men.
That's the way it works.
It affects all such cohorts; the Catholic Church, once upon a time, was a social order, and Islam is a social order in much of the world today. The morality prescribed almost always―allowing for the necessary deviations natural variation demands―benefits the image of who is in control. We can witness daily intimations of the desire in certain sectors of American Christianity.
Think of the overlap between evangelical Christians and economic conservatism. Just how is it that the prevailing morality of a Christian identity comes to reject the Apostles? It is because the moral structure under those influences is tailored to profit the empowered very immediately, with little regard for the middle and long-term effects.
And while some would point to the fantastical aspects of such thought in order to note their seemingly infinite adaptivity, that's probably pouring on just a bit.
That is, the point at hand has to do with the difference between the abstract and the practical.
The general and partiular can wait.
That the majority of a society should live in depravation under a social contract of Liberty and Justice for all is an inappropriate sacrifice. Indeed, by the framework of the society, it is the antithesis of maximization for the group.
But if you appeal to the defenseless little zygotes? Okay, it is possible to construe a moral argument against abortion if we restrict the framework. After all, if you don't want a baby, don't get pregnant.
It is also possible to construe a moral argument against birth control, and before it was tied to the abortion question, it was rooted in notions of a woman's proper place, including the effective outcome that birth control would make women immoral by allowing them to have sex with who they want when they want, instead of properly by getting married to a husband who will tell her when to have sex and when to have a baby. In either case, there is a functional dissonance in the fact that the same people who oppose abortion want to make it harder for women to not get pregnant.
It is also possible to construe a moral argument that it is a woman's job to prevent a man from raping her. This, however, is a bit more complex becauses it profits the moral authority in at least two ways. In the first, it is tied to the notion of a woman's proper place under a man. And, to the other, it relieves the rape culture that results from such hideous notions of the responsibility of doing anything to curb rape.
So, within this aspect of the social conservative movement, we should not be surprised that the big winners in this are the men who hold the most levers of influence. It isn't so much morality in the end as a massive swindle of grotesque dimensions.
And this is the challenge, the gap 'twixt abstraction and application. It's not always about religion
per se, but we can also use a religious analogue:
It's kind of like walking in Christ's footsteps. We know there is a better way, but simply saying we found it doesn't mean we actually have.
And from there, people shape their morality according to their profit, and where there is enough common overlap between people of influence, that shape starts to assert itself over the larger society. As a result, the greatest sacrifices we demand of individuals most often have nothing at all to do with group maximization.
The gap 'twixt abstraction and application.