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Single People and Women Should Receive Less Pay For Equivalent Work

Treating people as things is where most evil starts, and employees are real people not things. As real people employees have human natures, and human nature isn't Kantian universalism or Nietzschean will-to-power or whatever: human nature is social, human beings are raised by mothers and fathers in families, and not everyone is a father at all let alone is everyone equally a father all at the same time. To hire a father is to hire a person who has primary responsibility for materially providing for his family; such a hiring is a different kind of thing from hiring a teenager to mow the lawn or hiring an older mother with an empty nest looking for some extra cash to spend on the grandkids.

Employment as an institution which treats a father of five as a fungible productivity unit equivalent to a bachelor, or a single woman, or even a wife and mother, is a deliberate institutionalization of inhumanity. Deliberate institutionalization of inhumanity is a moral evil, so the institutionalization of equal pay for equal work is immoral.

That doesn't imply that in every case a woman should make less money than a man, or any such risible extrapolation. It doesn't mean that a family-man slacker should draw more pay than a diligent spinster. Human beings being what they are, exceptional circumstances are common and varied, judgement of individual circumstances is always required, and few things are more inhuman than "zero tolerance" categorical rules about the nuts and bolts of everyday life as actually lived.

But as some kind of categorical employment imperative backed by the force of law, the concept of equal pay for equal work is fundamentally inhuman and immoral. There is a basic difference between treating people as human beings with inherent dignity and treating them as interchangeable fungible productivity units, despite how amusing it is to say "fungible productivity unit".

I understand the objections: it is presently illegal to hire and set pay based on marital status and children, it is difficult to get employers to do the right thing, if fathers are morally entitled to greater pay - a living wage - than those who do not have the garnering of a living wage as their natural duty, well, capitalism as presently consitituted is going to lock fathers out of the workplace, fragment jobs into contract work and piecemeal jobs, and hire the cheapest workers. I get all that.

So much the worse for how things are presently constituted.

Comments (168)

Arguably, the living wage distorts the information revealed by the price system, which in theory measures the scarcity of a thing or a skill set.

But this argument, which immediately came to my mind, reveals just how severely quantitative concerns have obscured considerations of worth and duty. The first seems more obvious and authoritative than the latter. Economism and scientism go hand in hand.

Single men, however, have to make as much as married men, so that they can demonstrate to single women that they are able to support a wife and family. Otherwise they are liable to remain single men.

Would an employer who hired a single man be obliged to give him a raise if he got married, and subsequent raises for each child he fathered? If so, that's a "marriage penalty" that I could have lived with as a young man!

Yes, let's pay people to have children. Brilliant.

No, let's support people who have children. Brilliant indeed.

No, let's support people who have children.

One of the arguments against the welfare state has always been that it encourages women to have more children in order to get a bigger check.
In order for the concept of giving raises based on marriage and births not to be similar in effect, it would seem that the married men getting more salary based on having more children would need also to become proportionally more productive with each raise, in order not to damage the economy by having increased his family size. Or, am I missing something there?

Aside from the drawbacks listed in the article. I see the following flaws:

1. It is nightmarishly bureaucratic
If the employer must pay the one with dependents more, then he will charge more for his work. Can you imagine going to Burger King and seeing this menu:

Whopper - $2.99
Whopper made by single mother with 5 kids - $10.99

Yikes. This situation would be repeated everywhere.

2. This economic discrepancy is already accounted for in taxes.
We have different tax rates for marital status and tax breaks for dependents. As much as I hate the government economically penalizing me for not marrying the first thing that came around, for not impregnating girls to chalk up my list of dependents, etc...I find it far more palatable than private business doing the same.

3. Whose to say single people aren't saving money to get married? Or have none-child dependents?

Rodak,

See, it's OK to pay people to have children when business pays, not the government. That way, someone else has to open his wallet whereas when the government does it, I (and you) have to.

See?

Of all the practical points raised here, the one by the second commentator seems to me most relevant for a reason particular to my own worries about the whole "living wage" concept: I think there needs to be more, rather than less, pressure on men in our society to make sure that they can support a wife before they take one. I object to the notion that a guy can get married unthinkingly and then expect "someone else" to take care of the increased expenses, especially if children arrive quickly. Now, these days, that "someone else" is usually the wife herself! She's ususally expected to work. But in a "living wage" situation there could still be the encouragement of thoughtlessness: He would just expect some employer to take pity on him and increase his wages or hire him at a living wage. Then if it didn't happen, he, and his wife, would be stuck. The girl considering getting married would not be able to tell if her husband would be able to support her, much less children, ahead of time, and thus she and her parents would find it hard to exercise due discretion in choosing a husband and counseling the young engaged couple. This is a problem now. It seems to me "living wage" pressure on employers would simply continue that problem in a different way, without addressing the need for young men to find themselves a job that allows them to support a wife before getting married. Indeed, the "living wage for married men" idea positively guarantees that the single young man won't be able to do this, and as long as the increased wage for the married man is kept ad hoc and informal (which I certainly think it should), the problem of planning for marriage and male responsible foresight would remain.

Zippy,
Hospitals, for example, don't hire fathers or mothers. They hire doctors, nurses, administrators, and technicians -- who might or might not be fathers or mothers. The hospital staff are paid for the job they do, not for the children they have or don't have at home. The employer does not support the kids at home; the worker who is a parent does so. If the children are not well cared for, the parents are responsible, not, say, the board of directors at the hospital. The board's job is to run an excellent hospital and to keep it going well. Their obligation is not to put someone else's kids through college, or to pay for soccer camp. That's the parents' obligation.

In other words, you are overlooking not only the division of labor, but the division of responsibility and of obligation. And you are treating employers like things -- in this case an ATM. After all, employers have children to support and bills to pay. Their obligation is to take good care of them; your obligation is to take good care of your own. Don't treat your employer as a thing, an impersonal money source to which you can go in order to have it meet your domestic obligations. Furthermore, not to put the domestic obligation where it belongs is to treat employees as things, not as real persons with real obligations before both God and man. Your solution to the alleged impersonalization of employment is itself an impersonalization.


If you have children, YOU take care of them. If you don't make enough money to support them properly, then you need to work more hours, get more training, or get a different job. The obligation is yours, not someone else's. If you have not acquired a highly marketable skill, one that others will pay you well to exercise, the fault lies with you, not your employer. And that's where the solution lies as well. Real persons recognize, and meet, their obligations.

Michael Bauman
www.michaelbauman.com

I largely agree except I think government and corporations are not able to make fine distinctions so I would just increase the minimum wage to a family wage and excempt proprietorships from having to pay it. It isn't like what Zippy is saying is something we don't know to be true. If anyone was running a small shop with a few employees and a guy with 5 children sought employment and you knew that such a man couldn't support himself with that wage, you would rightly ask him why he was seeking a job there. I think the movie 9-5 even had a boss saying that he had to pay a guy more because he had to support a wife and kids. We don't have to go that far into our history to see the obligation was real before all this feminist nonsense.

As a moral case, one should receive equal pay for equal work. The Vatican has affirmed this many times. This does not preclude us from saying however that x% of all jobs are paying an immoral wage because they expect a man with wife and children to support his family on a substandard salary.

Lydia: those are all good points. I don't think the notion of a "living wage" can make sense as something independent of how diligently a man works. I think if a particular family man whom one as hired turns out to be a slacker there isn't anything inherently wrong with firing him. On the other hand accomodating him as a father does not appear to me to be morally optional as long as he is an employee: if I am going to hire him and take up the bulk of his wage-earning time, I'd better (as a moral matter) be willing to pay him enough to support his family to at least a very basic level. If I hire a single mother, my moral obligations are different if she is a widower attempting to raise her family on her own vs. if she is never married with a revolving bedroom door, and I have some moral obligation as an employer to know what I am doing in this regard: to deal with my employees as persons, not as interchangeable cogs in a machine.

As for the plight of the single man, well, I see that as something of a bonus or at least as mixed. Anything that makes both men and women take more seriously the decision to marry, and spend more continent time preparing the way for that eventuality, is a good thing. A lot of that is beyond the scope of the present subject though.

The way things are set up now doing the right thing is highly illegal, of course. My objection isn't so much that the government doesn't force everyone to do the right thing here; it is that the law forbids everyone from doing the right thing here. "Living wage" is to my way of thinking a moral category, and while the government is incapable of resolving every moral issue with a policy it should at the least refrain from rendering right action impossible. That doesn't mean I would be strictly laissez-faire on the matter: I would for example seriously consider taxing corporate profits at a lower rate based on the number of children who are supported by employee income, and I would at least consider imposing significant penalties on companies which are clearly avoiding hiring fathers because of economic considerations, thus through economic penalties disadvantaging immoral corporate behavior. Instead of an Equal EOC I might well have an Unequal EOC for enforcement in egregious cases.

Hospitals, for example, don't hire fathers or mothers. They hire doctors, nurses, administrators, and technicians -- who might or might not be fathers or mothers. The hospital staff are paid for the job they do, not for the children they have or don't have at home.

Right, I understand, and it is precisely that to which I object. What I am suggesting is that hiring 'functional units' as opposed to human beings is immoral.

"As for the plight of the single man, well, I see that as something of a bonus or at least as mixed." I'm not sure I really get that, practically speaking. Can you give an example of what you are picturing? For example, imagine your sort of ideal society in this regard. Some guy is a really good guy, and has met a great girl, and they'd like to get married. He can find a job, or he has a job, but as long as he's single, he'll be paid a "single wage." Maybe this single wage requires him to have a couple of working guy roommates to pay the rent of one apartment. Now how, in that circumstance, are they supposed to have reason to believe that they can responsibly get married? How is this not saying to them, "Just take the plunge and get married on faith, and hope the employer pays the guy more, or else don't get married ever. Tough luck"? The problem I see is that people seem to be being given the choice of being irresponsible or never getting married. Or is the idea just that paying a "living wage" gets so widespread that they can use induction and expect that the guy will get a raise after the wedding? Or that he can work this out by a conversation with his employer ahead of time before he puts an engagement ring on her finger? Or what?

Instead of an Equal EOC I might well have an Unequal EOC for enforcement in egregious cases.

That's why we love Zippy. He states flatly the most gratuitous defiance of Liberalism.

Sorry, Zippy, but you can't produce a solid reply to an objection simply by reiterating your position. There are numerous arguments to refute -- or else a position to recant.

Yes, we know you think that the marketplace treats persons as "functional units." I showed how what you said was false, how what you advocated was an immoral evasion of obligation, and how it committed the very error you were trying to avoid - both with regard to the employer and to the employee. Mere reiteration does not cut it.

To expand on my initial remarks, I do think there is a moral case for equal wages. Of course we are talking about menial labor when discussing the family wage. It would be silly to argue that the male ob-gyn needs more than the $150,000 a female ob-gyn makes due to the disparity of his obligations. Do I think we need a two tier system for waiters and waitresses? No. I also don't think it is unreasonable to say waiting tables is not a family wage job. I do have a problem with people trying to excuse places like Wal-Mart who in many cases are the largest employers in various counties from having to pay family wages.

Now how, in that circumstance, are they supposed to have reason to believe that they can responsibly get married?

I'm puzzled why that is a problem. A man doesn't (ordinarily) go from unmarried to having five kids to feed in a matter of months, and I see no reason why adjustments wouldn't be gradual here as in most things. If adjustments to changing states of life are gradual, and part of the ordinary course of things in this idealized society is that financial remuneration adjusts not merely with productive function but with one's place in life and within the social scheme of things as a human being, why is there a problem? Granted it seems distant from where we are now with such things being explicitly illegal; but I'm trying to focus on what is good, not on what happens to be the case.

I showed how what you said was false, ...

I must have missed that part. You stated I think correctly how things are presently seen -- that hospitals don't hire whole persons in context but out-of-human-context functional units. However, stating that that is how things are presently seen doesn't imply that how things are presently seen is morally just.

You are quite right that I'm basically just stating what I see to be the truth about the justice of the matter, and that I haven't in this blog post developed a lengthy argument or set of authoritative citations. It is just a blog post.

I do think there is a moral case for equal wages.

That depends on what we mean. If what we mean is that two fathers of four kids exactly the same ages, who are the same in terms of reliability, productivity, years of employment, etc working side-by-side in the quarry doing exactly the same work for exactly the same hours, well... maybe. But I'd probably have to see the argument. Paying one person less than another with no reason whatsoever, or perhaps just because you can get away with it in the case of the one guy but not the other, is probably wrong. But by the time we've properly qualified the matter I'm not sure "equal" is the most accurate description. It isn't that saying "unequal pay is morally wrong" is incorrect under every possible interpretation. It just isn't a particularly useful thing to say unless it summarizes a detailed set of qualifications which are already preestablished; and when those qualifications are already preestablished it doesn't really add anything to them.

You could go from being unmarried and living with two other guys in an apartment to having a single income and a pregnant wife in a matter of months, and still, of course, needing the apartment for the three of you! Obviously you would not have the two other single guys with their incomes living with you. That would make a fairly large difference in the income needed for the new family, and the wife might never have had a job in the first place. In fact, if we're really going to be staunch traditionalists, the young couple shouldn't have started out by assuming they would have her income for an indefinite period. And if they have made that assumption, they're going to be out of luck when she gets pregnant, because somebody should stay home with the baby. I assume we're not advocating that they intend to send the child to daycare.

So actually, the change could be _relatively_ abrupt, and the guy and the girl would need to know that they could handle it. So should the employer promise the raise in advance, or give it to the guy in advance because he says he wants to get engaged, or what?

So actually, the change could be _relatively_ abrupt, and the guy and the girl would need to know that they could handle it. So should the employer promise the raise in advance, or give it to the guy in advance because he says he wants to get engaged, or what?

It depends. If the job was "mowing lawns in the neighborhood" then the betrothed needs to find a job appropriate to raising a family before getting married, and the employer needs to tell him that. If the job is "journeyman programmer" then maybe he doesn't need to do that.

We can construct scenarios to make it look as abrupt as possible, of course, but I really don't see what that buys the counterargument (which seems to be an argument from impracticality). If anything this encourages a man to develop additional excess personal productivity before marrying. That is a good thing. If it is abrupt it can only be because he is choosing for it to be abrupt: he can and should postpone marriage until he is ready.

I have to say I am really puzzled by this particular objection. Yeah, he needs to work things out before he gets married. Yeah, guys who have been married a while have financial advantages (and also greater expenses and responsibilities) than him. So what? How does social support for married breadwinners constitute an insurmountable barrier to entry in becoming a married breadwinner?

Well, I don't want to be sneaky. To me this objection is a sort of rubber-meets-the-road implication of the responsibility objection. The employee should be, as you are admitting, responsible for what he makes and what responsibilities he takes on--like a wife. But the living wage idea seems to imply that it's the _employer_ who is responsible. The interesting thing to note is that this may have the unintended consequence that nobody can responsibly get married, because the employer is knocking himself out financially supporting the already-married guys, even in better jobs.

I suppose the practical difficulty will be greater or less depending on *how great* you envisage the gap as being between the single and the married man. For example, if the gap is so great that a single college professor still needs income-earning roommates to afford to rent an apartment, and he can't get paid more until he has a marriage license in hand, then he won't be able to "develop excess personal productivity before marrying." All or most of the excess money in the economy will be going to support the men who were already married before the system kicked in. It would be sort of like the high bride prices in African countries, which serve to perpetuate polygamy, where the older men can buy more and more wives while the younger, poorer men have a terrible time breaking into the system in the first place and affording even one wife.

I'm gathering you aren't advocating a married-single gap as radical as that, though.

Lydia, you have claimed that the employer does not have an obligation outside of a contract with his employee. This seems to be the more outrageous claim. We are perfectly consonant with the State interfering with this relationship to protect the employees health and safety. Even slavery had obligations.

The sad thing about your argumentation is that in the end you end up enabling that which you detest, the welfare state. If someone accepts the argument that employers can pay wages that aren't enought to feed Little Timmy, then there will be a demand for the intervention of the welfare state. People will not tolerate the consequences of a radical liberterian state.

Michael Baumann seems to me quite correct. Zippy simpy shifts the burden of moral responsibility for taking care of children from parents to their employers.

The only hint of an argument we get for this shift in responsibility is an invocation of the Kantian categorical imperative: employers, it seems, are supposed to treat their employees as ends in themselves, rather than as means to the employers' economic goals.

But Baumann's reply is, I think, absolutely crushing: isn't Zippy just proposing that *employees* treat their *employers* as means to the *employees'* goals? But if Zippy thinks it is wrong to treat others as means rather than ends, how can he possibly justify this?

The underlying presumption seems to be that there is something inherently better and purer and nobler about the status of being an employee than about the status of being an employer, so that it is perfecly alright for the former to treat the latter as sacrificial animals. This has, of course, long been a widely held prejudice - on the left. But since when did it become acceptable among conservatives?

With apologies to Oscar Wilde, any polity that would treat employers like this would not deserve to have any.

The implicit moral judgment regarding employers and employees, insofar as I grasp it, would seem to be that those to whom more is given bear a heavier burden of responsibility - a principle defensible both on theological and natural law grounds.

Lydia:
The employee should be, as you are admitting, responsible for what he makes and what responsibilities he takes on--like a wife. But the living wage idea seems to imply that it's the _employer_ who is responsible.

Can we say "both/and" rather than "either/or"? Also, it is certainly the case that the responsibility is more primary in the case of the father, since the father's relationship to his children is not conditional. I wouldn't for a moment suggest otherwise. What I suggest is that it is morally wrong for an employer to treat an employee as nothing but a unit of productivity bought at a particular price, specifically independent of the fact that he is a man working to support a family. An employer has a responsiblity, not a totalizing comprehensive responsibility.

Steve:
The underlying presumption seems to be that there is something inherently better and purer and nobler about the status of being an employee than about the status of being an employer, so that it is perfecly alright for the former to treat the latter as sacrificial animals.

I hope not. I've had many employees in the past decade and a half, and I've been nobody's employee in that time (except very briefly for a few months during a transitional period with one of my ventures). And while it is true that I am at times given to self-deprecation, the reality is that I don't view myself as nothing but a source of wages for the people I've employed.

It would certainly be wrong for an employee to treat his employer as nothing but a means to squeeze out wages, independent of that employer's role in the world, etc. I have as little use for the equality/fungibility principle applied by employees to employers as vice versa. A disloyal and exploitative employee is every bit as in the wrong morally as a disloyal and exploitative employer.

It would certainly be wrong for an employee to treat his employer as nothing but a means to squeeze out wages, independent of that employer's role in the world, etc.

This strikes me as dubious.

It strikes me as dubious that it would be wrong that is.

I would object to being defined by by social commitments. My subjectivity is not defined as "brother" or "son" or "husband" - any more than I am defined by Kantian universality.

This strikes me as dubious.

Truly?

Suppose that we have employers A and B. The job at each place is IT support, virtually identical, and employer B pays a great deal more, enough to make the difference between a more dignified existence for the man's children and virtual impoverishment. (Say we are talking about a data center in India).

Lakshmikantha has to decide who to work for. Can we say that it is fine for him to work for employer B rather than employer A, independent of the human context of the role those employers play in the world?

The answer, it seems to me, is obviously not. Suppose employer B is hardcoreporn.com, and employer A is indiaprolife.org.

I don't think I even need to say the punch line out loud.

Many other scenarios can be devised. I think it could be wrong for (say) a single guy to quit the machinist shop in order to go to the beach, knowing that working two more days would make all the difference in his employer's livelihood and ability to support his family.

It definitely cuts both ways, and I do have Steve and Michael to thank for drawing that out in the discussion. It is an important point.

I would object to being defined by by social commitments.

Lots of people have their objections to reality. I sympathize, but sympathy won't turn lead into gold.

Your example is a contractual obligation. One's ability to fullfill that obligation is quite independent of the employer. It is the matter. Similiarly, it is not immoral to be a soldier of the United States government. It may however not be moral to act as a soldier for the U.S. in a particular war.

Your last example is a better example. Since not all law is written, by custom the machinist has an ordinary obligation to give his employer sufficient notice. In return, the employer has an obligation to give his employee sufficient notice before termination - the latter being increasingly absent in today's world. Barring the custom, the machinist should feel free to terminate his services. That is the definition of at-will employment.

Your example is a contractual obligation.

No it isn't. There was no contract in it, and no contemplation of any explicit one: just a contemplation of employment. Stipulate for the sake of argument that the country we are talking about has no employment law whatsoever: the point is not a legal one, but a moral one. The purpose of the examples is merely to illustrate the general point to which you objected, that (as I said before) [i]t would certainly be wrong for an employee to treat his employer as nothing but a means to squeeze out wages, independent of that employer's role in the world, etc.

Are you taking the position that it is definitely OK for Lakshmi to work for the pornographer, even though (by the design of the scenario) he can scrape by in an undignified manner otherwise?

It would certainly be wrong for an employee to treat his employer as nothing but a means to squeeze out wages, independent of that employer's role in the world, etc.

It seems to me to be the case that very few of us work for an "employer," meaning by the word, a human being. Most of us work for some kind of corporate entity, be it large or small. That being the case, how an employee is treated by his "employer" is pretty much dictated by the configuration of the corporation, rather than by "human-to-human" considerations. Corporations exist to promote their own survival and growth, and any of their "moving parts" is expendable, if necessary to that survival and growth.
Your problem, Zippy, is that you suffer from nostalgia for the plantation. Back then they had it all--patriarchy, aristocracy, Sir Walter Scott, ladies with the vapors; it was heaven on earth.

Actually, the example of employee loyalty makes me more sympathetic to something in the neighborhood of Zippy's position than I ever have been. If there is a "grey area" where the employee's moral obligation goes beyond his contractual one, without being separable out as some sort of "charitable" obligation, then I suppose I have to allow that there could be a similar "grey area" in employer obligation to employee. And I do understand employee loyalty.

Suppose Jane knows that her employer depends on her, that no one else knows how to do her job, and that her employer is a really nice and good guy who has always been loyal to her. (When she was sick, he gave her time off and didn't dock her pay, or whatever.) So she, in turn, feels obligated to stay at the job--even though she wants to retire, or wants to move to be near her grandkids, or whatever-- for several months to train in a replacement so she doesn't leave the employer in the lurch. Now, that sort of loyalty makes sense to me, and I wouldn't be inclined to say, "Well, if it goes beyond what is written in her contract as the period of notice she has to give him, she's just being charitable." So, by the same token, I can see that the employer should also say, "Jane works hard, she's a good lady, she has kids to support since her husband ran off on her. She's sick. I'm going to give her paid sick days even though that wasn't something I offered her initially as part of the job set-up."

Good post, Zippy. The fact of the matter is that morality in employment is like orthodoxy in religion: first it becomes optional, then it becomes illegal or proscribed. In the corporate world today there is a defacto preference for women and singles. Young singles, in particular, are much more flexible, more willing to travel, more willing to relocate, more willing to accept lower wages, and better able to assimilate rapid changes in the workplace. Current employment law was enacted precisely to overturn the traditional preference for married male breadwinners, and this motive is never far from the surface. Employers prove their "equal opportunity" credentials by proving that they do not give preference to middle-aged men: that is enough.

I'm taking the postition that it is wrong for Lakshmi to participate in pornography independent of employment considerations.

Apropos of Jeff's remarks, it ought never be forgotten that the Republican party, historically the custodian and embodiment of the interests of the corporate class, had advocated the entrance of women into the workforce as early as the waning years of the Nineteenth Century, supported all of the equal-opportunity-employment legislation of the mid-Twentieth Century, and, prior to the marginalization of the Rockefeller establishment within the party, supported the Equal Rights Amendment. Their reasons, of course, were never so high-minded as even misguided notions of human rights, but were purely pecuniary.

To go back to my earlier question, do you guys at least agree that for this idea to be even marginally workable, without encouraging employee irresponsibility, there must be a way for single males to ascertain that they will be able to support a wife before they actually have one? And that this may require employers to be willing to make commitments to single males about what they will do after marriage?

To go back to my earlier question, do you guys at least agree that for this idea to be even marginally workable, without encouraging employee irresponsibility, there must be a way for single males to ascertain that they will be able to support a wife before they actually have one?

In a healthy system - and a culture of marriage - this would not be any more of a problem than it is presently. Most single men are potentially married men: both employers and their single male employees will have this in mind. One corollary of an employer preference for married male breadwinners in particular is an employer preference for male employees in general (for jobs which pay a family wage). Thus, single men will be selected for such work with a married future in mind.

I don't think such preferences should be legislated: I would rely, instead, upon societal expectations. There are obviously a multitude of valid considerations in play when it comes to employment. The need for competent employees is obviously important, and maintaining a competent workforce could mean subordinating other criteria. But if I understand Zippy's point, he is saying that employers have a moral duty to consider, at least, the human and social implications of their decisions along with economic success and profitability.

And that this may require employers to be willing to make commitments to single males about what they will do after marriage?

Yes, perhaps - but I don't think those "commitments" need to be explicit or contractual. It will simply be expected.

Actually, it's a pretty big problem now. Most guys expect their wives to work. This is worrisome to the mothers of daughters. But at least as things presently stand, one can look out and say, "Okay, but if he gets such-and-such a type of job, one can expect that he'd make about such-and-such an amount, and they should be able to make ends meet." One potential problem of a strict distinction between single and married male workers, especially if the gap is large, is that that "at least" would no longer obtain. Your daughter's beau could get such-and-such a type of job and still make a pittance, because he was single. I suppose if the social expectation of a "married raise" were strong enough, induction would allow the young couple and their families to plan with that as a given, but that would have to be an awfully strong social expectation.

It seems to me that these effects could be mitigated a lot if the difference were not very great between the married and single male wage. In effect, it seems to me that the proposal here is most workable and least pragmatically outrageous (if I can put it that way) if there is a relatively narrow range of probable wages for some given job, if at the lower end of the range a young couple can still scrape by, even if a baby comes along, but if the married guy usually gets bumped up to the higher end of the range. That way, even if worse come to worst, they can still expect to scrape by.

Whether that's going to result in a "living wage" for all married males will likely depend on economic factors beyond anyone's control. I myself am rather skeptical.

Here, of course, I'm just talking practicality and leaving aside the question of worth. When Jeff Culbreath and I went at a related issue before, Jeff seemed willing even in a rather important field (like academics) to sacrifice quite a bit of ability in order to employ a married male. That seems troublesome to me in principle as I think getting the job done well should be a very high priority. In practice, I happen to think males are often meritocratically better anyway at the jobs I'm most concerned about, so I'm not sure how often the problem would arise.

If it makes you feel better Lydia, you and I practically aren't that far apart. I don't think there is a married/single differential for the doctor or the professor. Where we differ is that I think the corporate sector has proved incapable of not leeching off the rest of society when they hire for menial jobs - broadly defined as anything less than a living wage. My remedy is to raise the minimum wage to the living wage level for the corporates.

My remedy is to raise the minimum wage to the living wage level for the corporates.

Yes -- a remedy that no doubt would also result in promoting inflation as well.

It seems to me to be the case that very few of us work for an "employer," meaning by the word, a human being.

Most employees don't have a human being for a boss? Who do you work for, Zoltar of Sirius Five? (Don't answer that. I'm not sure I'd like the answer).

Your problem, Zippy, is that you suffer from nostalgia for the plantation.

Heh. You haven't seen the corporate version of the Night of the Long Knives unless you've been CEO of a company in the middle of being acquired. Funny thing though, everyone involved puts their pants on one leg at a time: cut-them-and-they-bleed humans beings, to the last man.

Yes -- a remedy that no doubt would also result in promoting inflation as well.

And the suppression of wages is doing wonders for our present inflation situation. Oil at $100/bbl, gold over $800/oz, but inflation under 3%. Continue quaking before our corporate masters.

Although I hate even to appear to agree with Rodak about anything, one effect of the sheer largeness of various employing "entities" is that your boss--the actual human being who knows you and to some extent controls your destiny--is often himself an underling under other underlings under...and may have little discretion in these matters. Hence, the person you can be loyal to and who can be loyal to you, as a person, the person who actually knows you, may have little to say about how much you get paid. I see this particularly in a university, where the chairman of the department is nominally and on a day-to-day basis the boss of his faculty, his secretary, etc. This means that he can fire people and can decide on their workloads and specific teaching jobs to a large extent, but he can't give a single one of them a raise, even if he wants to.

With respect to Lydia's concern that single men have some economic or financial status before getting married, I think we need to be realistic here. A healthy culture is one in which 18-22 y/o men can marry and support a family. An 18-22 y/o man is not going to have much work experience at any wage. It follows that (non-slacker) men, in general, need to be paid a family wage for full-time work - period.

Today's economy doesn't come anywhere close to supporting this. People think I'm crazy for saying this, but here it goes: there is too much work being done in the economy. Much of our GNP consists of garbage, pure garbage. This garbage is produced by a surplus of low-wage workers, which is available because women are now positively expected to work, which depresses wages overall, which means that most men do not earn a family wage.

I recently paid for a $10.00 haircut. My 72 y/o barber told me that he raised a family, paid for his home, and put his kids through college cutting hair. That's impossible today (in California anyway). Today's crisis is simply this: ordinary jobs for ordinary men no longer pay a family wage. Cutting hair, turning wrench, driving a truck, selling shoes, cleaning carpets, managing an office, dispatching, etc., - the kind of work that is within the reach of ordinary men with ordinary intelligence and ordinary talents - is now considered menial work and pays accordingly. Men who aspire to support a family on one income, and to raise their children in a relatively safe environment, must now have an extraordinary competitive edge in the workforce. Most just don't have it.

MZ Forrest,

And just what sort of monetary control would the Fed be exercising in the case of when they hike up the rates in an effort to control monetary flow when, all the while, such attempts are but done in vain if we, on the other hand, are increasing the wages of others all for the sake of this sort of 'communist' equality you seem to be advocating?

I tend myself to think the presence of so many women in the workplace is inflating prices, too. I don't know whether it is depressing wages as well.

To my mind much of this could be solved _by_ laissez faire without the moral imperatives Zippy is arguing for. Let's face it--a guy is not likely to quit his job to get married. He's certainly not likely to quit when he becomes a new father. Life events that sometimes make women less stable employees make guys work harder. What is the "glass ceiling" (if it's not a myth, which it may be) if not the last final vestiges of the employer's taking into consideration such issues as dependability, drive, commitment, etc., which *tend to track gender*? What is the regulatory burden of the guaranteed three-months' maternity leave if not an attempt to make employers accommodate women while weirdly and simultaneously ignoring the plausible consequence of their being women--their quitting after the three months that their job has been held for them? I have _known_ women who have exploited this fact, and doing so is wrong, in my opinion. And yet there are people who would like to make such mandatory leave longer, and make it paid! (Such are the Europeans among us.)

Is laissez-faire itself a moral system or ideal, such that there is no necessity of tempering it, in certain respects, by means of moral judgments?

This is a position common to classical liberals and libertarians, among others, which quite literally induces in me a state of stupefaction - there is a sphere of human activity within which all processes operate so as to obviate the necessity of moral judgment, save, perhaps, concerning what is produced (ie., not pornography)? The system itself automatically yields moral outputs? The system itself legitimates the discrete acts by which it is constituted?

Frankly, I think this a sort of conjuration.

Additionally, purely as a matter of honouring the actual historical record, the notion that a simple repeal of equal-opportunity legislation will suffice to achieve most of the objectives of Zippy's (and my) ideal polity will not pass muster. In point of fact, the economic establishment advocated the entry of women into the labour force, and, subsequently, the adoption of anti-discrimination legislation, at a time when there obtained a demonstrable preference for male employees, a time when the advantages of a principally male workforce should have been appreciated. The establishment supported the abolition of that workforce precisely because the costs, as they reckoned them, of less-stable and committed female employees were outweighed by the advantages of wage suppression and the stimulation of patterns of consumption. It was a simple, utilitarian calculation, and it reaped dividends for those who endorsed it, or acquiesced in it; in other words, it was eminently rational, given the logic of a utilitarian, fungible-productivity-units approach to economic policy. The corporate establishment did not elect to lose money merely because they felt some sort of guilty affinity for feminism.

To my mind much of this could be solved _by_ laissez faire without the moral imperatives Zippy is arguing for.

But the moral imperatives simply exist. Today, we are legally prevented from acting upon them. The first thing is to remove the obstacles to right action. And on the level of government policy - duly observing the principles of subsidiarity - the possibility of incentivizing right action should also be considered.

Life events that sometimes make women less stable employees make guys work harder. What is the "glass ceiling" (if it's not a myth, which it may be) if not the last final vestiges of the employer's taking into consideration such issues as dependability, drive, commitment, etc., which *tend to track gender*?

The glass ceiling isn't a myth, but I don't believe it is created by employers. Most men today are only too happy to invite women into the boardroom. The glass ceiling exists everywhere because human hierarchy exists everywhere, and in the business world a very small percentage of men far exceed the rest of the population in talent, ambition, and often enough, ruthlessness. The glass ceiling exists for most men as well.

What is the regulatory burden of the guaranteed three-months' maternity leave if not an attempt to make employers accommodate women while weirdly and simultaneously ignoring the plausible consequence of their being women--their quitting after the three months that their job has been held for them?

You're absolutely right about the inherent contradictions and craziness of it all. But in an economy where women are expected to work, I don't have a problem with maternity leaves so long as small businesses are exempt. It's nice to see the system bow to realities of sex differences in some way.

Maximos, you sometimes talk as if we are all ruled directly by Bill Gates from his office chair. I don't buy it. Did the corporate execs phone up Lyndon B. Johnson and tell him to include women in the Civil Rights Acts? And I suppose he and Congress did this for reasons that had nothing to do with feminism? I cannot believe that you really think feminism has had nothing to do with the EEOC inclusion of women in all of this. The do-gooders passed this stuff because they were feminists. It's one of the many reasons why do-gooders are more dangerous than profiteers.

Huh? Who said anything about Bill Gates ruling the world from his office chair?

No, all I stated was that the corporate establishment desired these changes in employment policy, and that for decades before they were enacted, for reasons quite other than those of orthodox feminism. One can argue that it was the emergence of that same feminism that pushed those objectives 'over the top' politically, securing their enactment; but it is simply untrue that feminism itself was the fons et origo of the notions that women should enter the labour force, and that men had no claim to preference over women.

The notion, seemingly implicit in some of these criticisms, of an immaculately-conceived laissez-faire order, which underwent its Fall with the introduction of feminism and affirmative action, has got to go.

"But in an economy where women are expected to work, I don't have a problem with maternity leaves so long as small businesses are exempt. It's nice to see the system bow to realities of sex differences in some way."

There, Jeff (Culbreath), I can't agree. Ultimately, the costs of such unfunded mandates are borne by the consumer, and the single-income family has less money to pay them. The traditionalist family that (in some cases) painfully tightens its belt to pay for what is needed pays indirectly for the benefit to the working woman of having her job held open for three months instead of training in a replacement. For the government to require this is de facto for the government to further encourage women's entry into the workplace.

A thought experiment: Imagine someone's making the same argument about government-paid 10-month maternity leave, such as we sometimes hear advocated. "Well, it's nice to see the system bow to realities of sex differences." But there is a cost to such bowing, and in essence such attempts to have it both ways--to keep women in the workforce while paying to accommodate them--merely amount to encouraging women and putting increased financial and social pressure on women to enter the workplace. In Europe where women often get very long paid maternity leaves, this is exactly the opposite of traditionalism. There is something like an iron expectation that the child will be placed in daycare at the age of _two_ and the mother return to work. I have known a Christian missionary family in Hungary that went along with this even though they were receiving their financial support from America. Such was the social expectation. The child wasn't required to leave the home and go to school until she was 5 (young enough!), but they put her in "avoda"--daycare--at two. Everyone does it there. It's part of life.

There, Jeff (Culbreath), I can't agree. Ultimately, the costs of such unfunded mandates are borne by the consumer, and the single-income family has less money to pay them.

That's true - but where are all of these single-income families? The reality is that a tiny number of single-income families, most of whom are already middle or upper-middle-class, may pay a little more for certain things, but a very large number of working women in all classes will be able to be mothers to their children at a very crucial time. If they do, in fact, end up leave the workforce because of this experience, then I count that as a bonus.

...one effect of the sheer largeness of various employing "entities" is that your boss--the actual human being who knows you and to some extent controls your destiny--is often himself an underling under other underlings under...and may have little discretion in these matters. Hence, the person you can be loyal to and who can be loyal to you, as a person, the person who actually knows you, may have little to say about how much you get paid.

That is true, but all of the people you refer to are also human beings, and when the human being who decides what to pay - whomever that is - makes his decision about what to pay, that decision is subject not solely to economic constraints but also to moral constraints.

The concept of a “family wage” guided public policy for the first 65 years of the 20th Century. It was bolstered by a cultural that encouraged open job discrimination in order to foster breadwinning dads and stay at home moms.
During the New Deal the largest relief program—the Works Progress Administration—was limited to one breadwinner per family: 85 percent of the 4.5 million enrollees were men. Women in the program found themselves assigned to classes in childcare, home health, and cooking. The Social Security Amendments of 1939 gave to working men, not working women family-oriented benefits with an extra pension for homemaking wives. Survivors benefits went to widows, not widowers and their children.

Business interests and feminists were always hostile to the family wage. In 1904, the National Association of Manufacturers adopted resolutions such as: “No limitation should be placed upon the opportunities of any person to learn any trade to which he or she may be adapted.” The National Woman’s Party formed in 1917, pushed for equal work and equal pay for women outside the home and when this group proposed the first Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 it was National Association of Manufacturers, plus Republicans who supported it in the House and Senate.

With the Civil Rights Act, feminists gained their "equality". Now, children pray that Mom isn't killed in combat in a foreign land, or doesn't get home too late from the office. Our captains of industry get their wage deflation and dalliances with their female colleagues.

Ain't progress grand?

Now, children pray that Mom isn't killed in combat in a foreign land, or doesn't get home too late from the office.

Wild exagerations don't help your cause.
Did Mom join the military under threat of a jail term?
Did police escorted her to the office and forced her to work there?


Did Mom join the military under threat of a jail term?

Did Kevin say she had? I'm trying to see the connection between his post and your reply, and there doesn't seem to be one.

A cultural consensus for the family wage was legislatively shattered by 2 powerful interest groups. The flattening of real income acts as a powerful incentive for moms to remain in the work-force outside the home. Who needs state compulsion when economic coercion coupled with the cult of "Self-fulfillment"will do the trick?

Zippy,
Am I right to conclude that the following assumptions underly your post?

1. Men and women should marry and then have children.
2. Women should be the primary caregiver.
3. Men should be the primary earner.

And finally
4. It is somehow immoral for a couple to deviate from _any_ of the above assumptions?

It seems to me that if a married couple decide that the father is better-suited to raising children, that's a reasonable and legitimate decision which shouldn't be undermined by rigid social standards.

Phil, I wouldn't be quite so categorical, though one of my premeses is categorical. Some qualifications:

1. Men and women categorically should not intentionally have sexual relations or raise children outside of marriage, and categorically should not use artificial birth control. Society should strongly support these norms, both formally and informally. Given this, most men and women will choose to marry and have children, though nobody should be pressured to do so.

2 and 3 I would leave mostly unqualified, as long as "should" doesn't mean intoleration of exceptions. Society has a duty to support the normative situation, but that isn't a license for society to ruthlessly and uncharitably stamp out exceptions. On the other hand people who choose a non-normative path must bear the burden of that choice; indeed even those who do not choose a non-normative path must still bear the burden of their own personal non-normativity (more in a moment on that). So obviously it follows that I reject (4) as stated: it isn't immoral to deviate if one has good reasons to do so and as long as one is willing to bear the burden of it and not attempt to undermine the authority of the normative case. IOW, be different within reason if you need to be different, but don't make a fuss about the unfairness of it all. Accept the abnormality as abnormality, don't attempt to impose it as an alternative normality.

The ultimate expression of the attempt to impose a less-than-ideal abnormality as an alternative normality is so-called "deaf culture". Deafness is a privation of a natural good. Being deaf carries no moral implications with respect to the deaf person, other than that we recognize that the person carries a burden which most of us do not share, with all that that implies. But the attempt to impose deafness as a legitimate alternative lifestyle, which in some cases has meant attempts to deliberately breed congenitally deaf children, is disfunctional.

Flexibility and yes tolerance is important in dealing with real people and life as it is actually lived; but it doesn't follow that norms, and societal support of those norms, should be abolished. That abolishment is what our present legal regime with respect to employment, and the social/moral presumptions behind it, attempts.

"...be different within reason if you need to be different, but don't make a fuss about the unfairness of it all. Accept the abnormality as abnormality, don't attempt to impose it as an alternative normality."

Amen. So many people do not get this in the U.S., esp. w.r.t. women working, children in daycare, and so forth. We suffer from a combination of making a virtue out of necessity and not realizing that hard cases make bad law.

Actually, single people should be paid more because they have the hours to actually devote to their jobs instead of running off to pick up Junior at school or leaving promptly at 5:00 or staying home with a sick kid.

beloml's perspective shows the influence of umpety years so far of women in the workforce. If a family has traditional gender roles, there will be far less of that sort of thing for the working member of the family, though of course fathers need to watch the "workaholic thing," too. But having one family member devoted full-time to the children makes for less work interruption for the other member. This is a sheerly pragmatic fact.

IOW, be different within reason if you need to be different, but don't make a fuss about the unfairness of it all. Accept the abnormality as abnormality, don't attempt to impose it as an alternative normality.

Wouldn't it make more sense for you, Zippy, to say that "Single people and parents who don't support families should receive less pay for equivalent work?" I realize this isn't a board where the term "sexist" holds a lot of water, but you're fooling yourself if you think that you're treating people as "real people." You're treating people as pre-fab cogs in a social baby-raising machine, and the evidence of this is the disdain in your initial post for any individual variance from your perception of the perfect family structure.

You criticize a system that treats people as things, but I don't see evidence that you're concerned about people as human beings at all. You might contend that you're concerned about children, but that doesn't appear to be the case, either. What you're proposing is a carrot-and-stick system: society should support families by making it easier to have a normative family structure, and also by making it harder to deviate from the norm.

For example, you write: "If I hire a single mother, my moral obligations are different if she is a widower attempting to raise her family on her own vs. if she is never married with a revolving bedroom door" -- but the children of that mother have the same material needs in either case. You're not suggesting she be dealt with as a person, but that she (and her children) be punished for her sexual indiscretion for the greater good. That is cold and rational, not personal.

Maximos writes: "The implicit moral judgment regarding employers and employees, insofar as I grasp it, would seem to be that those to whom more is given bear a heavier burden of responsibility..."

But even granting that employers, on average, have more stuff then their employees do, I think it's flat out wrong to assume that this is because more has been "given" to them.

The assumption seems to be that employers are, in general, children of privilege - top-hatted "plutocrats" who got where they are through luck and connections, whereas employees are, in general, the salt of the Earth: hard working and long suffering.

But I see no reason to believe that this is true. In my own experience, the employers have been, on average, far harder working and far more deserving of what they've got then the employees, on average - all too many of whom are worthless spongers.

That's anecdotal, of course - but the point is that you can't simply *assume* that employers, qua employers, can legitimately be described as "those to whom more is given." This requires defense.

If an employer pays a wage sufficient to raise a family, and that employer can choose to either pay a working father more or give him more time off, which is the moral choice?

Assuming that current legal strictures do not apply, I'd think that giving time off is preferable, so the father has more time to devote to his children. Thoughts?

Maximos (again) asks: "Is laissez-faire itself a moral system or ideal, such that there is no necessity of tempering it, in certain respects, by means of moral judgments?"

He goes on to claim that "This is a position common to classical liberals and libertarians, among others, which quite literally induces in me a state of stupefaction - there is a sphere of human activity within which all processes operate so as to obviate the necessity of moral judgment...The system itself automatically yields moral outputs? The system itself legitimates the discrete acts by which it is constituted?"

Well. Let's take this a step at a time.

"Is laissez-faire itself a moral system?"

No.

"...or ideal?"

Possibly.

"...such that there is no necessity of tempering it, in certain respects, by means of moral judgments"

What tempering? What respects? What judgments? This is too vague.

"This is a position common to classical liberals and libertarians, among others..."

No, it isn't. I know lots of people who consider themselves classical liberals and libertarians, and not one of them would characterize his position as you do.

"...there is a sphere of human activity within which all processes operate so as to obviate the necessity of moral judgment..."

In the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher, "No, no, no!" Nobody claims this. I hope that nobody even thinks this.

"The system itself automatically yields moral outputs? The system itself legitimates the discrete acts by which it is constituted?"

Ditto.

I suppose those statements by Maximos were in response to me. I was making merely the specific claim *in this instance* that married men with children would probably end up making more money for the same work in many fields than at least women (I'm not as sure about single men) if laissez faire were allowed to operate freely. I conjecture this because of the way that gender differences often play out in terms of job commitment and drive, the opposite effects of the same life events on productivity, the fact that men do not require some of the safety and other physical accommodations that women require in dangerous or physically difficult jobs, etc., not to mention other specific gender advantages to men in specific intellectual fields. All of this our present feminized political set-up requires employers to ignore, even though it is legitimately relevant to doing the job well, productively, and with a minimum of requests for special treatment.

In point of fact, I think that it is surprising how often the free market _does_ produce incentives to do the right thing or will produce morally desirable outcomes, but I would never claim that this is invariably true. It's also true that the specific counterexamples that I'm most likely to acknowledge unqualifiedly concern "what is made" (as Maximos mentions), but so what? Such matters do have to be treated and debated on a case-by-case basis.

"You're not suggesting she be dealt with as a person, but that she (and her children) be punished for her sexual indiscretion for the greater good. That is cold and rational, not personal."

Focusing on "hard cases" was a ploy used to pave the way for the institution of legalized abortion,so maybe it is not a surprise to see it surface here. A lot of evil has been done in the name of the "greater good", but it would be hard to categorize an economic system designed to foster and sustain traditional families as evil simply because it is not perfect in every situation.

What is also striking is your assumption that a punitive measure is cold and impersonal, when as many parents can tell you, it is love that usually motivates such behavior. If you believe the family is the one indispensable unit for forming a sane and just social order, and if you have worked with, coached or mentored teenage males from broken homes, then surely the case for a family wage must be pretty evident.

The term "given" in the first comment to which Steve objects was merely an allusion to a Biblical saying, the import of which is simply that those possessed of greater endowments, whatever they may be, and whatever may be their means of acquisition, are subject to a correspondingly higher degree of responsibility. A greater endowment will entail greater authority, of whatever form is particular to the domain in question, and often entails greater power, and therefore the utilization of such endowments, and the resources that they may command, is of especial importance; the transgressions of a priest, for example, are of greater moment than, say, mine, for example.

For all I was concerned to demonstrate in that comment, the overwhelming majority of businessmen could well have been 'given' their success through the agency of the Almighty's inscrutable providence, rewarding their assiduous labours. In fact, I believe something very much like this, with or without the reference to divine providence, accurately describes the situation; all this means, in the case at hand, is that the businessman is responsible in some ways in which his employees are not. Both must refrain from conducting themselves, or formulating policies, as though the other is merely a fungible productivity/salary-provision unit; but the businessman, on my understanding, is responsible in additional ways, such as being morally obligated to privilege the family man.

In other words, my use of 'givenness' says nothing about the instrumentalities involved.

As regards the remainder of it, my comment was originally intended as a response to Lydia, who has argued that the market often creates and enforces incentives towards morally praiseworthy - that is to say, just - conduct. With this I agree. Where I disagree is in maintaining that this is, often enough, insufficient to secure just outcomes. Those incentives, say, to privilege the family man have always, more or less, obtained, but they were not sufficient to motivate the corporate establishment to perpetuate them; that establishment agitated for decades to secure their weakening and ultimate removal, and that on quite utilitarian grounds. It would be true to observe that it was the advent of feminism and associated expressions of liberationist sentiment that 'pushed the issue over the top', in a manner of speaking - well, feminism, technological progress, suburbanization, and a host of sociological factors - but what that demonstrates - among many other interesting things - is that those natural market incentives often underdetermine actual practices. In fact, market incentives also create countervailing incentives, for which the establishment, in fact, opted.

If, therefore, virtuous market incentives underdetermine practice, the market system requires some degree of tempering, whether by custom, suasion, social pressure, religious scruples, legislation, or what-have-you. This, of course, presupposes the correctness of Zippy's formulation - something I'm perfectly content to do, inasmuch as I've no quarrel with Catholic social doctrine; the teaching of the Orthodox Church is no different, so far as I've determined, and natural law imparts the same message, that the family is both microcosm and foundation of society, and should therefore be privileged over processes that in their specificity are less foundational to social order.

More generally, though classical liberals and libertarians would not typically describe their philosophies in this manner - though the historical record of political economy is replete with arguments, apologetics, and actual theodicies to this effect - the liberal tradition in economic analysis essentially sunders corrective justice, the justice of discrete economic transactions, from distributive justice, or reduces the latter to a function of the former; hence, if, according to the operations of the market - supply, demand, and so forth - a married man is remunerated no more substantially than a woman or a single man, solely according to his productivity, then this is deemed a just outcome, because it is the outcome dictated by the logic of economic 'laws'. There is no necessity of moral judgment in this specific matter of economic outcomes because, provided that the man is compensated in accordance with market rate for his labour, he has been rendered his desert - what the market will pay for his productivity, considered as an abstract unit of production.

Now, of course few people actually think this way, or have thought this way; otherwise, the actual history of our economic practices and laws would be incomprehensible: we are always structuring economic practice in accordance with innumerable moral strictures and judgments, and cannot really do otherwise, even if we engage in this judgment on an ad hoc or even unconscious basis. What is problematic is that we often invoke moral judgment selectively, or discard it selectively, and deceive ourselves that we are performing other acts entirely, by means of invocations of an abstract ideal of The Market, of a utilitarian system which maximizes aggregate material well-being precisely by rationalizing human inputs in this manner. We are culturally schizophrenic, oscillating between passing moral judgments concerning economic practices and appealing to an abstract economic ideal in which the principal - perhaps singular - moral consideration is whether each agent is compensated according to his productivity as defined by the market itself. But, of course, there is no way of carrying this through with any consistency. In reality, we are only debating the nature and contents of the set of moral criteria to be instantiated, occasionally throwing the proceedings into chaos and old night by wavering over the moral categorization (moral? neutral and indifferent? etc.) of an economic ideal.

I'm a lot more sympathetic to the notion of loyalty as Zippy expressed it than to the notion of securing "just" outcomes in the aggregate. The latter gives me the heebie-jeebies. I can just barely have some sympathy for the idea that "Joe is married and has a couple of kids" should be _one factor_ that Joe's employer ought to take into account in deciding Joe's wages--which might be outweighed by other factors like "Joe is a shiftless sponger." I have pretty close to zero sympathy for the idea that we should look at big picture trends and ask whether we're getting the outcome we want in the country as a whole in terms of "married men" making "enough" considered as a class.

You're not suggesting she be dealt with as a person, but that she (and her children) be punished for her sexual indiscretion for the greater good. That is cold and rational, not personal.

It seems to me that between treating her as (A) a person who is a moral agent responsible for her actions and their consequences, versus (B) a meat-sack engaging in Newtonian copulatory motions as the result of deterministic physical processes, (A) treats her like a person and (B) does not.

As for her children, what can be done for them within reason without rewarding and encouraging her immoral self- and socially-destructive behavior should be done, to be sure. But I'm afraid there are few remedies for having bad parents, and, such as they are, they tend to be blunt instruments which often do more harm than good as far as the particular children themselves are concerned.

It sure is nice to have a woman in comments who admits the difficulties caused by too many women in the workforce. Most ladies of my acquaintance would spit green-pea soup if I even broached the topic.

It seems to me that between treating her as (A) a person who is a moral agent responsible for her actions and their consequences

...?

You can justify any treatment that you choose to mete out to someone by saying that it was a consequence of their actions. An employer could fire a married woman because she refuses sex with him and say that it's the "consequence" of her actions (or her inaction.) That argument is not a moral defense; it's posturing.

(Now, you can claim that decreased emotional stability for the woman and her children, and all of the ill effects that come from not having a second parent, etc., are among the "consequences" of her actions. It does not follow that it's somehow good and just for an employer to _add_ to those consequences by paying a child-rearing woman less than her widowed counterpart because she has sex that he deems illicit.)

That argument is not a moral defense; it's posturing.

If you say so. It seems to me that whether something is (or should be, for that matter) a consequence of a person's wrong action or not is a question of fact. If someone were to argue that there is nothing morally wrong with promiscuity and having children out of wedlock that would at least be a disputation over the moral facts of the matter; but that someone doesn't agree about the moral facts of the matter doesn't imply that the woman is being treated as an object or nothing but a means to some end, rather than as a person morally responsible for her actions. If you don't agree that promiscuity is morally wrong by all means just say so. But the claim that I'm "... not suggesting she be dealt with as a person ..." is nonsense.

If we were discussing something that you agree to be unambiguously immoral I have little doubt that you would see things differently. Say we were discussing someone who put up a 30 foot billboard saying "God hates Jews and fags and they should all die" in her front yard. Would you think that the suggestion that employers not offer that person a job, or that a natural consequence of that behavior would be difficulty making ends meet economically, is "not suggesting she be dealt with as a person?"

Lots of people have their objections to reality. I sympathize, but sympathy won't turn lead into gold.

Ah, the usual mix of arrogance and a lack of intellectual curiosity. Carry on.

Zippy,
I really only think that behavior that actually affects the way a person can perform the duties of their job description should impact the compensation they receive (or their employment.) In the giant-billboard scenario that you suggest, it's possible that for some jobs, the woman's effectiveness would be compromised (a grade school teacher, perhaps, or a rabbi at a synagogue. You could also forward the argument that proclaiming that certain of your coworkers should die constitutes a threat to them, reducing the overall effectiveness of the workplace.

But my point still holds: if I react to your behavior, and call it a consequence of your action, that justifies any reaction on my part, whether it be valid or not. If my reaction was clearly a choice, and I wasn't compelled to do it, then I'm the one responsible for it.

Thus, a defense of the reaction can only rest on the rightness or wrongness of what I did. If it is wrong to try to punish the children of a single mother because I find her sexual proclivities immoral, then it's wrong, whether she "had it coming" or not. It's not her action that caused my choice to reduce her pay; it's mine.

And I'm willing to assert that punishing third parties for the action of a parent is wrong.

Isn't the key word there, though, "punishing," Phil? For example, suppose you were having a party for various families to which parents as well as children were customarily invited. And suppose this woman were terribly nasty and unpleasant, as you might expect from her billboard. Then you might well just not invite her, even if that meant that her kids wouldn't have the fun of coming to the party, either. This isn't "punishing" the kids. There are just all sorts of decisions by the mother that are going to have impact on the kids in terms of social interaction and so forth. It would seem to me that employment might well be one of these.

Can we say that it is fine for him to work for employer B rather than employer A, independent of the human context of the role those employers play in the world?

What's interesting about this, although it may be off-topic, is that one could contend that the majority of employers make the world worse in some way. Hard-core porn may be visibly out-there, but I can't say that a candy company buying chocolate harvested by child slaves is any morally superior to a pornographer. Does that mean that all Nestle employees have a moral obligation to quit their jobs?

Perhaps it does.

Phil: that you apparently think that (1) being a notorious tramp doesn't actually affect how one performs one's duties in context, and (2) that refusing to pay a notorious tramp as much as one pays a model citizen constitutes punishing her children -- that you think those things doesn't make them true, or even remotely plausible.

We probably don't even agree about this:
...a defense of the reaction can only rest on the rightness or wrongness of what I did.

That isn't by any stretch the only thing upon which refusing to hire someone or setting her rate of pay can legitimately rest.

Lydia,
You're right. And, in some ways, I guess I still advocate "punishing" the woman's children. For example, I'd say it's fine to fire her if she isn't doing her job well, even though that could impact her children.

...but I'm the liberal who's treating people like fungible productivity equivalents. Zippy maintains that his system treats people like people, but I think it's semantics. I think an employer shows greater respect to a person by giving highest concern to the social contract between employer and employee--that is, the specifics of the job. Zippy appears to think that an employer shows greater respect to a person by giving highest concern to that person's other social contracts. To me, that's not more personal or more respectful.

Zippy appears to think that an employer shows greater respect to a person by giving highest concern to that person's other social contracts.

It really isn't about contracts at all for me. It is about persons as persons, not as mere units of productivity bought at a price.

Does that mean that all Nestle employees have a moral obligation to quit their jobs?

That depends a great deal on the specifics of how much material cooperation with evil is involved in a given job, and how proximate or remote that cooperation is. I think modern people are very presumptuous in this regard: that without doubt a significant number of people work in jobs in which they ought not work on moral grounds. So I wouldn't say that all Nestle employees have a moral obligation to quit their jobs, but I would suggest that most people in the modern economy ought to be at least considering and prudentially evaluating on an ongoing basis whether, as a moral matter, they should continue in the jobs they have or take a particular job.

I would suggest that most people in the modern economy ought to be at least considering and prudentially evaluating on an ongoing basis whether, as a moral matter, they should continue in the jobs they have or take a particular job.

Unemployment rate in Zippyland: 50%

Would you think that the suggestion that employers not offer that person a job, or that a natural consequence of that behavior would be difficulty making ends meet economically, is "not suggesting she be dealt with as a person?"

The right to free speech is protected by law with only a few limitations (the example given may exceed those limitations for all I know), and my interference in their occupation would be a strong form of reciprocity as a private individual. Which is not to say that I would rule it out, but it is probably not as justified as I imagine it is. The right to promiscuous sex is not protected by law, so that type of economic shunning has more justification than the first example. I am not aware of any legal restrictions to implement it as an overt policy, but it would have to be applied equally to both genders of course. The main question for me is whether other employees would want to remain with the company or customers would want to do business with someone who is that meddlesome in people's private lives.

The main question for me is whether other employees would want to remain with the company or customers would want to do business...

Ah, see, for me that is not the main question, and indeed barely registers in relevance. What registers with me is what people should do in general, not what some random cross-section of modern people would do if immediately faced with some precisely defined situation.

I'm not particularly meddlesome though. This whole line of discussion is actually a sidetrack from the post, since in this line of discussion we are dealing with exceptions to the norm - widows with children (who should inter alia be compensated more than married men) and tramps(who shouldn't) - rather than with the norm. Taking what I would do if a particular exceptional circumstance imposed itself upon me and recasting that as me being meddlesome is a wee bit of a reversal, methinks.

I'm not particularly meddlesome though.

The entire thrust of your initial post was that a person's family life should a relevant factor (it seems, one of the most important factors) in determining that person's rate of pay.

While widows and promiscuous women may be the "exception to the norm" (and I'm not really certain that's the case--it seems at least half of adult American women would fit your definition of promiscuous at some point in their lives), all persons have a family life. If I run the risk of making a lower rate of pay if I don't wish to reveal my family life to my employer, that is "meddlesome."

You may feel that adds a moral, human touch to the workforce, caring so much about an employee that you actively try to influence even the most personal aspects of his or her life. I disagree.

The entire thrust of your initial post was that a person's family life should a relevant factor (it seems, one of the most important factors) in determining that person's rate of pay.

Indeed, it should be a relevant factor, and perhaps more to the point should not be comprehensively stamped out of existence as a naturally relevant factor. Referring to the original post, I said:

Deliberate institutionalization of inhumanity is a moral evil, so the institutionalization of equal pay for equal work is immoral. ... But as some kind of categorical employment imperative backed by the force of law, the concept of equal pay for equal work is fundamentally inhuman and immoral.
If rejecting today's comprehensive bureaucratic legal regime which requires across the board that important aspects of persons as persons must be treated as nonexistent, in favor of a conception of persons as fungible units of productivity exchanged for a price - if rejecting that comprehensive meddlesomeness is meddlesome - then by all means put me down as meddlesome.

If this:

Human beings being what they are, exceptional circumstances are common and varied, judgement of individual circumstances is always required, and few things are more inhuman than "zero tolerance" categorical rules about the nuts and bolts of everyday life as actually lived.
... is meddlesome, then by all means put me down as meddlesome.

Would you say that arguing that aspects of someone's personal life should be "left to that person" is the same as saying that they are nonexistent?

To me, where you see employers ignoring family dynamics as virtuous, I see it as respectful. Do you think employers have a right to know the makeup of a person's family, even if that person doesn't want to reveal such information to the employer? That definitely would put you in the meddlesome category, and not the quasi-sarcastic "put me down as meddlesome" kind, but the "you meet the generally accepted definition" kind.

Do you think employers have a right to know the makeup of a person's family, even if that person doesn't want to reveal such information to the employer?

I don't think there are categorical rules which cover the morality of every single case, so the answer is "it depends". I've talked in this thread about simplified cases as already-known facts which the person herself has made an issue: the notorious tramp, the bereaved widow.

An employer could certainly do wrong (and shoot himself in the foot as a practical matter) on the side of meddlesomeness, in requiring loyalty oaths, in digging into matters which are none of his business, that sort of thing. I don't like the ambiguity of rights-talk in general, so any time someone starts talking about this person's (implicitly plenary?) right and that person's (implicitly plenary?) right I tend to disagree with that phrasing of things. An employer doesn't have a plenary right to know anything he wants about an employee: far from it. But I think an employer has some level of duty to understand the situations of his employees enough to know what he is materially cooperating with, just as an employee has such an obligation w.r.t. an employer. An employer also does -qua employer- have an obligation to formally cooperate with the maintainance of essential institutions like the family, and to avoid engaging in proximate material cooperation with evil on the part of employees in their lives outside of work.

The notion that the only possibilites are a totalitarian regime of 'equal opportunity' fungibility on the one hand or a totalitarian regime of employees living and working in cubicles in the panopticon on the other is a false dichotomy. It should be perfectly fine for an employer to fire the notorious unrepentant womanizer on grounds of moral turpitude outside work, and indeed he probably should. But it would be wrong for an employer to hire spies to follow employees around to keep tabs on them 24/7 (barring some compelling reason, e.g. suspected industrial espionage or whatever).

In summary, I reject the notion that I have to choose between one kind of totalitarianism or another. I don't, and I won't.

...but I can't say that a candy company buying chocolate harvested by child slaves is any morally superior...

"Child Slaves"?

In earlier American history, there were farms in the majority of lands wherein children were expected to perform labor.

Were they also child slaves?

I find it risible that simply because a child in a third world country is working; suddenly, they are labelled with such perjorative terms all for the sake of some third party's agenda.

Between factory work and prostitution, which are among the narrow options for the impoverished children of such countries, which is the better?

My God, man, first understand the circumstances of which you speak prior to making these statements here!

It should be perfectly fine for an employer to fire the notorious unrepentant womanizer on grounds of moral turpitude outside work...

And there again goes any right to privacy which, as already is the case, but a candle flickering in already hostile breezes!

And there again goes any right to privacy ...

If it is notorious and unrepentant, it is - by definition - not private.

I find it risible that simply because a child in a third world country is working; suddenly, they are labelled with such perjorative terms all for the sake of some third party's agenda.

On what do you base the assumptions underlying that statement, Aristocles? In parts of Africa, including the Ivory Coast, there are chocolate plantations where children who have been, in some cases, kidnapped or outright purchased from their parents work in the fields. Perhaps some of them are really nice places to work, but the news stories I read tend to focus on the beatings administered to the children, and the fact that they are beaten or mutilated if they try to escape.

Is that not slavery enough for you?

Here's a link to a BBC article, but if you google it, you can find myriad web pages devoted to the topic.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2042474.stm

Nestle and other large candy companies do not deny the existence of child slaves in the industry; the last official statement I read from Nestle was, essentially, that they buy too many cocoa beans to check the origin of all of their chocolate.

I consider Nestle to be at least partly complicit in exploiting children. You may disagree, but I brought the example up as just one way of illustrating that many employers, if we're not talking about small, local nonprofits, could be viewed as making the world a worse place.

Phil: I certainly would respect someone who refused to work for Nestle on that basis; though even in Nestle's case it is material not formal cooperation with the evil of those slavers/farmers. That is a consideration, but it doesn't necessarily let them off the hook. This is much like the Internet pornographer case: that is, suppose the job offer was to work for an IT shop that hosts for pornographers and claims that it cannot police content because it has so many customers. That _might_ be a reasonable claim, and it might not; and if it isn't, then there is a reasonable case for saying that it is immoral to take the job.

"It should be perfectly fine for an employer to fire the notorious unrepentant womanizer on grounds of moral turpitude outside work..."

I agree with Zippy on that one, absolutely.

Look, Phil: Suppose the employer is making big bucks for the business at which he employs you, and you find out that he's spending the profits he's making (partly through your voluntary and skilled labor) to purchase sex slaves from Russia whom he keeps locked up somewhere offshore. Wouldn't you feel like you were cooperating with evil in working for him and helping him make the profits he spends that way?

I don't want to sound mystical, but human lives really are intertwined quite a bit, and employees and employers do benefit one another and do use the benefits they gain for various things, good and bad. It just isn't so far-fetched to me for the employer or the employee to consider that what the other one does out of hours, using money gained partly through his cooperation, might in some cases be "his business" if he doesn't want to be cooperating with that usage.

Lydia: You make an interesting case, but if a business owner were purchasing sex slaves and locking them up, I'd consider that my business whether I'm employed by that person or not. I'm complicit in the act as soon as I'm aware of it, and have an obligation to try to stop it. (This obligation is affected by many factors, but it's certainly real.)

I don't believe the same is true of a business owner who decides to shack up with his girlfriend before marrying her, unless of course, he kidnapped her in order to do so.

Phil: again, the difference of opinion seems to boil down to what you do and do not consider to be grossly immoral and destructive of society. We've agreed upon what we are, and are arguing over the price.

Zippy- well phrased. I imagine that you do agree that anyone keeping sex slaves should be stopped by anyone who can, whether the "rescuer" has a connection to the crime or not. But...are you really saying that you also think that anyone having sex outside of marriage should be stopped by anyone who can do it? Earlier, you seemed to indicate that there was a moral obligation not to assist in the sin; does your moral philosophy also compel you to take action against those individuals, wherever you may find them? (Or, if we're being hypothetical, is that the way you think the world ought to work?)

I'm not trying to drag the discussion out. I'm just not clear where you're drawing the bright line that you see between us. I absolutely support the notion that a moral person should, if she is able, break into a private residence and, with violence if necessary, prevent a single incident of sex slavery/rape/murder/child molestation. I don't think the same is true for all instances of premarital sex--nor do I think that ought to be our status quo. Do you agree with me?

I was trying to imagine a case where the evil the employer was doing couldn't be stopped by you, the employee, by any direct action--hence my reference to "offshore" keeping of his slaves. He might not be doing anything illegal by U.S. law so long as he was doing it elsewhere. But if it were horrible enough, I think the employee could *at least* say, "I don't want to have anything to do with this guy. I don't want in any way to cooperate with him." Even if all you could do would be passively to disassociate yourself, it would be fine to do at least that.

I think Zippy's proximate point is that other forms of immorality might be such that either employer or employee would also want passively to disassociae himself from them.

To go back to the main point of the post, though, it could of course be pointed out that being single or female is not a moral failing or evil, which brings us to the larger issue of what can or should be "taken into account" by the employer, and how.

Phil:
[...] anyone keeping sex slaves should be stopped by anyone who can, whether the "rescuer" has a connection to the crime or not.

Then you'd best get to it.

I don't divide the world into moral wrongs I simply must personally remedy no matter where in the world they are occurring (do I have an obligation to hire mercenaries to free some of the enslaved chocolate-farmhands? There is little doubt that I _could_ do that, if doing so was morally compulsory) and those I do not have to, where everything which falls into the latter category is something I have moral license to personally fund as long as the employee carrying it out does something useful for me.

Directly paying for a love nest for an adulterer is something I shouldn't do, just as directly paying for someone to kidnap children to work the chocolate fields is something I shouldn't do. Again, we just disagree about particular moral wrongs and their gravity: you don't appear to disagree with me on general principles, but rather on the gravity of particular moral wrongs.

Phil: suppose a guy is a known racist. He is careful not to talk about it at work (unlike the sales guy who brags about his adulterous affairs at the water cooler); but when he is out of the office he regularly refers to blacks as niggers, etc. There is no ambiguity here: he is clearly, despicably racist.

If you were not personally writing this guy's paycheck, would you feel obligated to go vigilante and lock him up? I wouldn't.

If you were personally writing his paycheck, and this came to light, would you (presuming legality) fire him? I would, in less than a heartbeat.

The same goes for adulterers, etc.

The basic difference appears to be that you (I presume) view racism as gravely morally wrong, and adultery as not gravely morally wrong.

Zippy,
Actually, I'm not so sure I would fire such a man, unless his position was something where his decision-making may be affected by those opinions enough to worry me (caretaker of my children, perhaps, or director of race relations for my multinational corporation.)

Or, perhaps I would, but that doesn't mean I ought to.

But other than that, I think you understand my general position as it contrasts with yours. (Is that a good way to phrase it? I feel like there should be some "sign-off" on message boards so that parties involved in a discussion feel comfortable ending the discussion.)

Thanks for the discussion, Phil.

A modest improvement on this proposal: Give out a bounty for giving birth. Say giving birth gives a $3000 bounty paid for by taxpayers. Combine that with the tax credit/deductions you get for having kids. The father who stays with the mother who bears him 5 kids will be able to partake in the bounty. Likewise as he raises his kids the deduction aids him. The single mother too benefits and the woman who chooses adoption rather than abortion also would benefit from the bounty.

Taxpayers do have to pay for this but they would pay a lot more under the original idea where the economy will grind to a halt. Since mothers and fathers are not only helping their offspring but helping all of society by having and raising kids it seems somewhat proper that everyone else pay a little bit more to help them out.

... under the original idea where the economy will grind to a halt.

The original idea is just a moral proposition about how employers ought to behave, as well as an objection that current law makes right behavior illegal. I haven't proposed any particular manner (if any) of institutionalizing that moral principle, other than getting rid of the laws which make it illegal and perhaps makjing tertiary adjustments to corporate taxes to encourage right behavior and encourage wrong behavior. It is difficult to see how as a result "...the economy will grind to a halt".

Zippy,

Your whole post fails to take into consideration the fact that the primary reason why fathers are having a harder time supporting their families is a surplus of female labor. If all married women who could reasonably afford to do so would stop working, the average male wage would go up due to the law of supply and demand.

I would not work for a company, even when I become a father, that pays men more by virtue of being fathers. This is not only contrary to basic capitalist principles, but the Bible. The Bible commands us to not have "two weights" in dealing with the marketplace. A policy of discrimination against non-fathers amounts to having dishonest weights because it would have to be conducted in secret because few would naturally stand for it. Single men especially would not, as they are already on average expected to work longer and harder for their wages then established men with families. Are you now going to tell them that they have to work longer, harder AND for less pay than they're worth?

Zippy,

The reason the economy would grind to a halt is because you are seperating compensation from productivity. What incentive is there, for example, to learn a new skill if your wages go up simply because you have more kids? Likewise why should an employer hire a father of five when a single person would be paid less. Certainly the employer will have a hard time getting his customers to pay more because he makes a habit of hiring people who have more 'responsibilities'.

True if you only push this idea a little bit the economy will only grind to a halt a little bit...but then what have you accomplished since the purpose of this little experiment was supposedly to help out the lot of those who have taken on a large amount of responsibility by raising families and such?

If you come in on the back end, though, you can accomplish what you want without harming the economy. Let people be paid for what they generate but then supplement their income with assistance. That's the idea behind the Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, which allows low income workers to stay in the labor force but prevents them from falling into poverty while they work full time jobs. A bit higher up on the income scale we do something similiar with deductions and credits for children and dependents but I'm sure the system can be cleaned up a bit and made simplier.

Your whole post fails to take into consideration the fact that the primary reason why fathers are having a harder time supporting their families is a surplus of female labor.

You are right in the sense that that isn't something my post addresses; nor did I intend my post to address it. One cannot talk about everything all at once. My post addresses whether there is a moral obligation on the part of employers to treat employees as whole persons rather than as interchangeable productivity units, from which it would follow that certain kinds of discriminatory outcomes should be expected. I think there is such an obligation, and that therefore such discriminatory outcomes should be expected and indeed welcomed.

A policy of discrimination against non-fathers amounts to having dishonest weights because it would have to be conducted in secret because few would naturally stand for it.

Oh, it by no means should be a secret in my view (and as was pointed out by another commenter this was the expected norm not all that long ago). Business in my understanding has a moral obligation to openly discriminate in favor of fundamental social institutions like the family, and against hostile-to-the-common-good aberrations like divorce and adultery. That few would stand for it is an indictment of the disordered consciences of the many. If it goes against capitalism so much the worse for capitalism. If it goes against some person's interpretation of the Bible then so much the worse for that person's interpretation of the Bible.

The reason the economy would grind to a halt is because you are seperating compensation from productivity.

No I am not. Saying that productivity should not be the only factor in employment and compensation isn't the same as saying that productivity should not be a factor at all in employment and compensation. The third paragraph of the post addresses this directly. There is quite a lot of space between "productivity is all that it is allowable to consider" and "productivity is irrelevant". Indeed as a matter of praxis every actual economic arrangement acts within that space, and not at either extreme. So in summary my position is that we should (1) face reality as it actually is, we should (2) view how reality is (that is, discriminatory along a great many attributes) as a good and natural thing not a bad thing to be stamped out of existence by statute, and we should (3) consider that that social reality should operate (like all social realities) under moral norms. Not all discrimination is bad, some discrimination is even obligatory, and our moral challenge isn't to stamp out discrimination but rather to be able to discern and act upon the difference.

Oh, it by no means should be a secret in my view (and as was pointed out by another commenter this was the expected norm not all that long ago). Business in my understanding has a moral obligation to openly discriminate in favor of fundamental social institutions like the family, and against hostile-to-the-common-good aberrations like divorce and adultery. That few would stand for it is an indictment of the disordered consciences of the many. If it goes against capitalism so much the worse for capitalism. If it goes against some person's interpretation of the Bible then so much the worse for that person's interpretation of the Bible.

I should have quoted as well from Colossians 3 and 4. Admittedly it is about slavery, and not free employment, but I suppose it cuts close enough to the heart of the matter to be useful as a guide.

22Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. 23Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, 24since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. 25Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favoritism. Colossians 4

1Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

This is "my understanding." Replace "slave" with employee and "master" with "employer" and the verse still stands. It is right for an employer to provide reasonable help to an employee who is struggling to provide for his or her family, but it is not their obligation to pay far more than the fair value for their labor because the father has a lot of mouths to feed. It is also not fair to a single man to be paid less than his due for his labor. You can pay him what his labor is worth, but you cannot fairly take part of what he is owed and give it to a man who is a father. That is dishonest behavior, something that is sinful in the sight of God.

Here's one for you to consider: the example of the Pharisees. Your extra-biblical arguments about moral mandates and rules for having a good conscience remind me of the extra burden they imposed on top of, and sometimes supreme over the Mosaic Law. Naturally, I will take that back if you can cite chapter and verse supporting your claims.

Just to clarify something, I was referring to the idea of taking part of the value of a single man's labor and giving it in a discriminatory way to a man who is a father because he is a father, not because he was wronged by the single man.

Just to clarify something, I was referring to the idea of taking part of the value of a single man's labor and giving it in a discriminatory way to a man who is a father because he is a father, not because he was wronged by the single man.

Replace "slave" with employee and "master" with "employer" and the verse still stands.

I've got to respect the creative novelty of invoking the "slaves obey your masters" verse in a defense of modern notions of equal opportunity employment.

Naturally, I will take that back if you can cite chapter and verse supporting your claims.

I've never claimed explicit scriptural mandate for any of this, but rather natural law mandate. Indeed I'm Roman Catholic, and I view sola scriptura as (not to put too fine a point on it) a pernicious heresy, and indeed as outright idolatry in its original Wycliffite/Lollard form; so appeals to sola scriptura aren't the kind of thing you'll find in my writing.

FWIW, for Catholics at least the Catechism reference for this is here:

2434 A just wage is the legitimate fruit of work. To refuse or withhold it can be a grave injustice. In determining fair pay both the needs and the contributions of each person must be taken into account. "Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level, taking into account the role and the productivity of each, the state of the business, and the common good." Agreement between the parties is not sufficient to justify morally the amount to be received in wages.
(Emphasis mine).

"the concept of equal pay for equal work is fundamentally inhuman and immoral"

You're off your G-damn rocker. Do you have any idea how easily this can be distorted to an advantage for employers?

Do you think for a second that if they knew they'd have to pay people more money just because they have kids or are married - you think they'll hire someone who's married w/kids or someone who's single? They'll hire the single person every time. Just like companies are moving to employ more and more part time employees (UPS, Home Depot) at the expense of full timers to KEEP COSTS DOWN (part timers don't have the same benefits). They'll start inquiring about your home life on your job application? How many kids do you have? 3? Too many! NEXT! Just like Ford used to do in the early 20th century, companies will start investigating your family life - how many kids do you have? Planning to have more? Gee, maybe you'll miss out on that promotion. What's that? Bob got divorced? Let's move him into management, he'll have more time on his hands and we can pay him less than married Tom over there!

My current employer is too cheap to hire people who are experienced - they keep hiring kids right out of college so they can keep payroll costs down. Does it affect the company? Sure does! Keeps experienced people like me running around making sure the new guys are doing things right half the time. Does management care? NO! The payroll number is low, that's all they care about! So if they are placed in a situation where they'd have to pay someone more if they're married w/kids - forget it! NEXT! Hire the unmarried kid out of college!

An better way to support families is to lower the tax burden on families - greater tax breaks for those with dependents - not place the burden on employers. You should know better than to trust the world of ENRON and its like to think of families first.

Insomniac:

Do you think that employers behaving in the way you describe are behaving morally, or immorally?

Keep in mind that the central thesis of the post is that a comprehensive system of equal pay for equivalent work is immoral. That is either true, or it isn't true. Whether that is or isn't true is a distinct question from what follows from it, what should or shouldn't be done about it, etc.

No I am not. Saying that productivity should not be the only factor in employment and compensation isn't the same as saying that productivity should not be a factor at all in employment and compensation.

In other words instead of destroying the economy you'd only go part way and slow it down a bit. By definition any break in the link between prices and productivity will make the economy less efficient and ultimately it is an efficient market economy that will do the best job providing a decent living for as many people as possible, which I think is your goal here. Europe struggled for over a thousand years plus of abject poverty under 'just wages' set by guilds and the like. It doesn't work.

Needless to say the principle of subsidy should also be called in here. The employer is rarely in a position to fairly judge families.

Forgive me if I take your question to Insomniac

Do you think that employers behaving in the way you describe are behaving morally, or immorally?

Moral, kids gotta work somewhere so what if one company hires all the kids and likewise deals with all the problems of supervising kids but also has the benefit of paying kids less.

Keep in mind that the central thesis of the post is that a comprehensive system of equal pay for equivalent work is immoral.

It is indeed moral. As you pointed out in your passage from Cathecism, "Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level, taking into account the role and the productivity of each, the state of the business, and the common good." Assuming 'man' here is used in the inclusive sense, then equal remuneration for equal work is moral. What may be immoral is remuneration that is not enough for one to provide a 'dignified livelihood'.

But what if one is unable to be productive enough to provide a 'dignified livelihood'? Obviously in order to get paid enough someone else is going to have to chip in. Is it fair that only the employer chip in while the other employer who doesn't hire the unproductive fellow pays nothing nor do the consumers who opt for the cheaper business? This is where the better policy is along the lines of the Earned Income Tax Credit & similiar 'negative income tax' measures. They allow someone who honestly works hard to have an income to provide for a dignified life without demanding the employer who hires them bear all the cost.

By definition any break in the link between prices and productivity will make the economy less efficient and ultimately it is an efficient market economy that will do the best job providing a decent living for as many people as possible,...

Trust me, any real economy, including ours, is not a definition.

There are lots of rule changes we could make in order to make the economy more efficient according to some quantitative measure (say GDP). Not all of those possible rule changes are prudent or morally permissable, however.

For example, the Daily Telegraph reported that in China there is a gray market for eating aborted fetuses. Apparently (goes the story) there is a belief that eating aborted fetuses keeps people youthful. Outlawing the eating of aborted fetuses, and outlawing work in the aborted-fetus culinary market, reduces the efficiency of the economy: it breaks the link between price and productivity. But it doesn't follow that therefore the law should permit the eating of aborted fetuses, or that we should permit the export of aborted fetuses to China in the interest of maximizing economic efficiency.

... which I think is your goal here.

No, at least not understood in isolation. My precedent goal is first and foremost right moral action. Material prosperity, while important, is subordinate to right moral action and the common good understood more generally. If we are making our economic rules solely on the basis of material efficiency, independent of any moral constraints, we will necessarily end up making immoral rules.

[Note: comment updated to improve accuracy of the China thing - Z]

But it doesn't follow that therefore the law should permit the eating of aborted fetuses, or that we should permit the export of aborted fetuses to China in the interest of maximizing economic efficiency.

Yes because we value 'not eating aborted fetuses' more than the efficiency lost in not allowing abortion clinics to sell their fetuses to people with the belief that eating them will is good.

But here you are talking about the making sure people can live dignified lives and that takes material which takes material prosperity. So if we are to sacrifice material prosperity we must ask what is the good we are gaining by giving up that amount of prosperity...even if it is only a small amount.

I'm a bit disappointed you didn't pick up on my 'who bears the burden' point. Again if Joe has 5 kids but is just an unproductive person (or let's just say not as productive) you're saying his heavy responsibilities must be taken into account. Not a problem but who bears the burden for those responsibilities? Your way seems to be the schmuck of an employer who hires him and tries to pay him a bit more because of his needs. All the rewards go to the employers who are not so nice and the customers who seek the lowest price possibile. My way would make everyone share some of that responsibility. Of course the bulk of it still falls on Joe. It will always be more work to have 5 kids than 1 or 2 and it should be. But all of society should recognize a shared duty to help Joe out....in a reasonable way.

I'll also say that my position is likewise a deviation from the 'pure market' ideal but it's a less harmful deviation that is also more just or moral IMO.

So if we are to sacrifice material prosperity we must ask what is the good we are gaining by giving up that amount of prosperity...even if it is only a small amount.

Well, I don't know that we must ask this, at least in this form. If my choice is between (1) achieving greater material prosperity by acting unjustly and (2) achieving less material prosperity, then we can say that in a sense the 'good I am gaining' is that I am not acting unjustly. But that is a good I am always under an obligation to gain: I am always morally required to act justly, independent of how that impacts my material prosperity.

(That doesn't settle the moral question of whether a just employer takes into account the common good and the particular needs of his employees - and not merely what they produce in isolation from those things - in setting compensation, mind you. But if that is the case, then we should expect on average greater compensation for married fathers than for women and singles to result).

All the rewards go to the employers who are not so nice and the customers who seek the lowest price possibile.

There is certainly a sense in which those who are willing to act unjustly (as employer, worker, or consumer) receive material rewards for doing so. This has always been and will ever be the case, though society mitigates these things to some extent through both formal and informal sanction. A worker who slacks off is unjustly receiving a reward for his slack work in contrast to the diligent worker also. At some point of course vice becomes its own punishment, but I don't make excuses for a worker who slacks any more than I make excuses for the employer who fails to feed the families he takes on, or for that matter fails to take on the families he should.

But all of society should recognize a shared duty to help Joe out....in a reasonable way.

We agree about that. What we seem to disagree about is the particular obligations and implications which arise from that, most specifically when it comes to compensation for work.

You're assuming your own conclusion Zippy. Essentially you're saying the employer who hires a worker with extra responsibility suddenly incurrs an extra cost. The result of that reasoning is simple. The worker with 'extra responsibility' sits on the unemployment line while responsibility lite workers get snapped up in the market for less pay.

And in the meantime everyone else gets to shrug off their own responsibility.

The other method, though, works all around for everyone.

I've never claimed explicit scriptural mandate for any of this, but rather natural law mandate. Indeed I'm Roman Catholic, and I view sola scriptura as (not to put too fine a point on it) a pernicious heresy, and indeed as outright idolatry in its original Wycliffite/Lollard form; so appeals to sola scriptura aren't the kind of thing you'll find in my writing

I've always found the Roman Catholic teaching that sola scriptura is heretical to be transparently self-serving because sola scriptura is a common sense doctrine which aims to limit church teachings to what God has actually revealed through a Holy Spirit-inspired prophet. Common sense, really, as to bring in other sources for church doctrine opens the gates to false teachings and outright demonic doctrines.

You have no scriptural mandate, thus I would freely say to any brother or sister in Christ to ignore your moral mandates unless they feel personally convicted to follow them. Jesus' yoke truly is that light.

There is certainly a sense in which those who are willing to act unjustly (as employer, worker, or consumer) receive material rewards for doing so. This has always been and will ever be the case, though society mitigates these things to some extent through both formal and informal sanction.

Actually this is untrue for the most part. Adam Smith amply demonstrated that when things are set up correctly, following material rewards will not cause one to act unjustly.

This is important because there's no objective measure to act otherwise in your proposal. It is hard enough to figure out proper pay just by looking at productivity, how do you really do it under your proposal? Is it really anything more than a play for the heartstrings? Joe has five kids, that's rough, I'll give him a bonus of 5% this year. But is this really fair and objective? How does one really measure what Joe's needs are? Does he have a wealthy and supportive extended family? If so then perhaps the single mother who has no one to help her should get that 5% bonus. This seems to quickly descend into favoritism and just mix with cultural bias and you got a receipe for rampant discrimination (will the boss be able to 'see' the needs of the black single mother on the payroll or will Joe who looks more like him be more visible as will his 'needs'?)

By removing the laws but not giving us any guidance you've just punted the question off to many people who are ill equiped to properly answer the question. This is why I am hounding you on the obvious answer which is policies like the EITC. Everyone shares the cost of such policies and such policies ensure that those working can lead a decent life. They do not guarantee great material prosperity but as you said that's not your goal anyway.

Essentially you're saying the employer who hires a worker with extra responsibility suddenly incurrs an extra cost.

That is exactly right.

The result of that reasoning is simple. The worker with 'extra responsibility' sits on the unemployment line while responsibility lite workers get snapped up in the market for less pay.

In a society like ours which does not acknowledge this responsibility of employers to breadwinners - and this is a radical change from how our own society was mere decades ago, so the protestations of inevitability are risible - that is true. What is implied is that our society needs to recover the moral priority it has lost. A good start would be to repeal the laws which presently make right action on the part of a virtuous employer illegal.

You have no scriptural mandate, thus I would freely say to any brother or sister in Christ to ignore your moral mandates unless they feel personally convicted to follow them.

I appreciate the perspective, but this thread isn't really about sola scriptura. As I said before, someone who takes a sola scriptura view of moral norms - that if the Bible doesn't explicitly forbid X, X is permissable - is not going to get much from my writing in general.

By removing the laws but not giving us any guidance you've just punted the question off to many people who are ill equiped to properly answer the question.

I don't doubt that that is true. On the other hand, having laws which forbid acting justly toward employees is problemmatic in itself and should be opposed in itself, even if I don't propose a comprehensive system we can impose to solve every other peripheral and related problem.

I appreciate the perspective, but this thread isn't really about sola scriptura. As I said before, someone who takes a sola scriptura view of moral norms - that if the Bible doesn't explicitly forbid X, X is permissable - is not going to get much from my writing in general.

I never said it was about sola scriptura. However, if you are a Christian, then you should be able to base your philosophy of moral imperatives on scripture at some point. Catechism is fine as a starting point, but ultimately scripture must supercede Roman Catholic catechism when you speak forcefully about a moral mandate--as a Christian.

You have said that you base your argument ultimately on natural law, but natural law is little more than a philosopher's trick to turn his own opinions into universal truths. How do you know for a legal fact what natural law is, Zippy? Do you have a revelation that I lack? Or do you simply intuit what it must be from a hodgepodge of sources, most of which are definitely not inspired by the Holy Spirit?

Between the lack of scriptural support, the flimsy natural law argument, and the lack of a strong empirical secular argument, I can't take your side. I am in favor of employers being generous to parents where they can, and where there is actual need. However, your original post does not successfully argue either the immorality of hiring people just to fill a specific role, or why it is just to discriminate on whether or not an employee is a father.

As I said to you originally, none of the reasons you cite have much bearing on the pay of most fathers. The real factor is that the labor market has been greatly expanded in the past sixty years, and the law of supply and demand has undermined male wages. Something as simple and non-coercive as all married women who husbands make a decent living, leaving work when they have their first child would be enough to send most fathers' paychecks back up to the point that they could easily afford to support their family on one income.

I never said it was about sola scriptura. However, if you are a Christian, then you should be able to base your philosophy of moral imperatives on scripture at some point.

...which is to say, you base your criticism on a kind of sola scriptura, if I take you to mean that the specific putative moral norm under consideration is no moral norm at all unless there is express support for it in scripture.

The Roman Catholic understanding of moral norms / natural law (and indeed the understanding of many kinds of protestants) is that morality is accessible to reason. And again, this thread isn't about sola scriptura.

I am in favor of employers being generous to parents where they can, and where there is actual need.

Then it appears that we merely disagree about whether this is ever morally normative, or if it is always strictly optional at the arbitrary whim of the employer. (Note that current employment law expressly prohibits being generous in compensation to - which is to say, discriminating in favor of - someone who is married -qua- married, so at present your sentiment - like mine - is illegal to put into practice).

I wrote:
Then it appears that we merely disagree about whether this is ever morally normative, or if it is always strictly optional at the arbitrary whim of the employer.

And, if you want to tie this back to scripture I can point out that scripturally, charity toward one's neighbor isn't morally optional. "Love your neighbor as yourself" and all that. I almost pointed this out before, but I had my doubts as to whether it was the kind of scriptural mandate you are looking for. Still, if you agree that as a matter of charity it is good to treat fathers/families preferentially where there is need, and that charity isn't as a moral matter a pure option of the arbitrary will ("love thy neighbor" etc), it follows that treating fathers/families preferentially where there is need isn't optional.

I'd be the first to concede that there are specific cases where a single person with particular burdens should be treated even more preferentially still - that is, should be discriminated in favor of - on account of that particular need. I gave the example of a widow with children somewhere in the comments above.

So again, when it comes down to it there doesn't seem to be disagreement on what would in fact be charitable. Where there seems to be disagreement is on whether charity is morally optional: on whether one may morally "opt out" from charity. If one may not morally opt out from charity then discrimination in employment - discrimination of a sort which is in some cases prohibited by law - is morally required, and "equal opportunity employment" is inhuman and immoral.

I don't doubt that that is true. On the other hand, having laws which forbid acting justly toward employees is problemmatic in itself and should be opposed in itself, even if I don't propose a comprehensive system we can impose to solve every other peripheral and related problem.

But of course you couldn't abolish such laws since you only support employers recognizing someone for being a breadwinner. You would still oppose discrimination. If Joe gets the 5% bonus because he's white and the boss feels he has more in common with him than the black single mother you would be opposed to that. Yet with complete abolishment of the law the boss could cover his tracks by rationalizing his action by saying Joe has more responsibility (5 kids and a stay at home wife!).

Just as the boss is left by you with no intelligable guidance (even if we accept your theory that 'breadwinners should earn more') the law is likewise left with nothing to guide it in telling the difference between unjust discrimination and 'supporting' breadwinners.

Again I'll harp on the EITC. The laws do not prohibit 'just action' if they are accompanied by other laws that provide for meeting the collective responsibility we all have. Speaking of which, I wonder what you think about 'living wage' laws some cities are trying to enact that require full-time jobs provide some minimal amount of income and benefits (usually along the lines of a min. wage between $10-$15). Your logic would seem to lead you directly into their camp too.

If one may not morally opt out from charity then discrimination in employment - discrimination of a sort which is in some cases prohibited by law - is morally required,

Ahhh but why is discrimination in employment morally required? Why couldn't the obligation for charity be satisfied in some other way such as...say actually giving some of the organizations profits to charity? Especially considering that you're promoting a position that you admit will actually harm breadwinners. What's your out here?

In a society like ours which does not acknowledge this responsibility of employers to breadwinners - and this is a radical change from how our own society was mere decades ago,

In other words back in fairy tale time wages were 'fair' and people did not respond to incentives. Wrong. The head of a household has a moral duty to use the house's resources as efficiently as possible. Hence when she goes to the store she finds the lowest price for a given level of quality. The lowest price is provided by the firm that employs workers for a wage that matches their productivity. The mass influx of women in the workforce was not created by 'equal pay for equal work' laws but created because the economy found highly productive things to do with the labor that women could provide. I think you'll find that the mythic era when men were the sole breadwinners was also an era where becaue of the nature of technology and capital it was more produtive for a household to send men out to work (and invest in them going to work). Yes I'm sure some bosses gave bonuses when a man got married or had a kid but the fact remains if married men made more in 1890 than single men or working women the fact remains it was almost certainly due to higher productivity on their part and not about employers trying to take on the domestic responsibilities of their employees.

While discrimination laws were and are important for addressing specific cases the fact remains society drives law more often than the reverse. The discrimination laws were enacted as our society shifted its understanding of what was just and what was not. As you recognized, real life markets are not as smooth as the idealized textbook market so sometimes a company can get away with doing something inefficient like discriminating against the better candidate. The laws of economics, though, can only be defied briefly before reality sets in. You cannot seriously propose a social policy whose premise depends on people suddenly choosing to behave in an economically irrational way on a mass scale for a prolonged time.

Why couldn't the obligation for charity be satisfied in some other way such as...say actually giving some of the organizations profits to charity?

The term "charity" here may be part of the problem. The point is that the employer has a moral obligation (charity) to the particular employee who happens to be a breadwinning father who needs to support his family, qua breadwinning father. Giving money to some third party organization which helps families is all well and good, and having favorable tax treatment for breadwinning fathers is also all well and good, but giving money to third-party organizations or channeling money through taxes doesn't discharge particular obligations.

You cannot seriously propose a social policy whose premise depends on people suddenly choosing to behave in an economically irrational way on a mass scale for a prolonged time.

I've already said a number of times that I am not proposing social policy, I am discussing moral principles. The former is subordinate to the latter and meaningless without it. We can't even talk about what social policy ought to be until we agree about what moral principles ought to govern it, since the 'oughts' in our social policy discussion derive their meaning from governing moral principles.

Let me answer this more unequivocally:

You cannot seriously propose a social policy whose premise depends on people suddenly choosing to behave in an economically irrational way on a mass scale for a prolonged time.

I'm not even entirely sure that this means. It might mean that I cannot seriously expect people to act subject to legal and moral constraints in matters of economics. If that is what it means then it is nonsense. I do expect, and indeed every sane person expects, people not to ignore legal and ethical constraints in the pursuit of economic self-interest. We may disagree about what moral constraints are in fact governing and what positive law constaints should govern, but the idea that it is irrational for constraints to govern - that it is irrational to reduce the permutation space of all possible self-interested economic acts to a subset of legally and morally permissable economic acts - is itself a notion which cannot be taken seriously.

Ok, so let's think for a moment

The term "charity" here may be part of the problem. The point is that the employer has a moral obligation (charity) to the particular employee who happens to be a breadwinning father who needs to support his family, qua breadwinning father.

Why the employer? Historical quirk? Why can't the breadmaker charge the breadwinning father less for bread? Exactly what about being a breadwinning father confers a responsibility to an employer but not other people like retailers, service providers etc.?

If you told me the father of five has an obligation on him because of his five kids I'd agree. If you told me everyone else also has a real but smaller obligation because someone made 5 kids, I'd also agree. What you do seem to be saying, though, is that one particular person gets an additional obligation that person is the employer. But you've presented nothing to really support that fact. Why not the seller? Why not everone else.

Giving money to some third party organization which helps families is all well and good, and having favorable tax treatment for breadwinning fathers is also all well and good, but giving money to third-party organizations or channeling money through taxes doesn't discharge particular obligations.

Why not? Seriously suppose the gov't gave every father $10,000 per year. Is the employer still obligated to short the min. wage single person to give the married person a bonus not justified by productivity? Notice the Catechism passage quoted says:

Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level,

It sounds like if the married person (or anyone else) is already receiving money sufficient to provide a dignified livelihood then the responsibility has been meet (whether by employer, 3rd party, gov't or whatnot). It's like an obligation to feed your kids. If you kids eat a meal at their friends house you aren't supposed to force a second meal down their throats because....darn it!...YOU and only YOU are responsible for feeding them.

In regards to not understanding my question about economics. It is immoral to disconnect your policy ideas from the reality of human nature. If your policy idea, for example, harms people because it will provide bad incentives then that is a mark against that idea. No, saying, "I think people should ignore incentives that promote bad behavior" doesn't help. If your idea decreases material prosperity (which is needed to provided people with the 'dingified lives' you support) without helping anyone in offset then your idea likewise fails.

To be honest I think you're more interested in getting women out of the working world. You think you found the perfect way to do that by essentially taxing single people and working wives to support breadwinning husbands. The bare bones of your agenda, though, isn't going to fly so you're dressing it up as some type of moral obligation with very strained reasoning.

Why the employer? Historical quirk? Why can't the breadmaker charge the breadwinning father less for bread? Exactly what about being a breadwinning father confers a responsibility to an employer but not other people like retailers, service providers etc.?

I think that there is a moral obligation not to gouge people on price, and that this moral obligation does discriminate in its particular manifestations based on need. That I am focusing on a particular economic moral obligation doesn't imply that no other economic moral obligations exist.

To be honest I think you're more interested in getting women out of the working world. [...] The bare bones of your agenda, though, isn't going to fly so you're dressing it up as some type of moral obligation with very strained reasoning.

I always enjoy watching clairvoyance in action.

So let's continue to explore this if you're willing. The breadmaker then should charge the breadwinner (and I assume his spouse) a discount because of their need. This is all well and good but you also say this obligation is independent of acts by 3rd parties. So say the breadwinner gets food stamps because despite his income it isn't enough to feed 5 kids. He walks into the bakery with a stamp for $10 and bread is $2 a loaf. If the baker gives him 5 loaves then he has failed to fulfill his responsibility because even though Jim got 5 loaves (for his 5 kids), it came out of the taxpayers wallet and not the breadmaker. Now does the breadmaker have to give Jim cash? A free loaf? Keep this up and 'breadwinner' is going to turn into a cozy little racket.

But there is a limit to this racket. Note again:

Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level,

Once Jim has the opportunity to do all these good things that's it, he isn't entitled to any more handouts. It's a finite responsibility and once it is meet there's no obligation to keep it going so everyone 'feels the pain'. You and I may have an obligation to feed the hungry and cloth naked but if you get to them first I'm not obligated to give them a second layer of unneeded clothes.

If because of economic prosperity everyone happily has enough material to have a 'dignified livelihood' then there is no additional responsibility to keep cutting people a break because they fit a demographic you happen to feel is more important and pay should be linked to productivity.

I know you don't want to go along with my theory of your real motives but let me ask you why should women be paid less? If the idea here is that a worker who bears more responsibilities should get more pay then Jim's wife should equally get a bump in pay. It isn't relevant that you happen to call Jim 'breadwinner'. In reality both Jim and Judy (his wife) divide between themselves all the taskes necessary to handle 5 kids. Some of these tasks involve commerce with the outside world (working to bring in money, shopping to bring in materials and services) and some internal efforts (cleaning, cooking, fixing, etc.). How we today (and in the recent past) declare some to be 'breadwinning' is completely arbitrary. A carpenter from 2,000 years ago, for example, may find it laughable that a society could consider 'mans work' to involve going into a building and sitting at a desk for hours on end.

In other words, a raise to Jim is a raise to Jim&Judy and a raise to Judy is likewise a raise to Jim&Judy. So if you give Jim the raise because he's married but shift Racheal because she's likewise married you haven't done anything to fulfill these 'responsibilities' you say we have on us. You've simply taken from one deserving person and given to another deserving person.

The Roman Catholic understanding of moral norms / natural law (and indeed the understanding of many kinds of protestants) is that morality is accessible to reason. And again, this thread isn't about sola scriptura.

It is accessible to reason to some extent, but it is not defined by reason. We can extrapolate reasonable conclusions from revealed moral mandates, but you cannot universally apply a wholecloth creation of a moral imperative. That's where most Protestants would disagree with you. They'd regard your position, lacking any scriptural support, as a wholecloth creation similar to what the Pharisees were guilty of doing to the Mosaic Law. I am curious as to what branches of Protestant theology you are referring to here. I don't know of any Reformed Protestant denomination that believes in natural law, unless you mean the revelations of the prophets, Jesus Christ and the apostles.

Now what appeals do you have besides to ephemeral natural law and the Roman Catholic catechism? There are two reasons I asked you for scriptural support:

1) It is something that is shared by all Christian denominations, so you as a Roman Catholic can point to revelation to support your position to Protestants.

2) Natural law arguments depend on the views of the person arguing them. Classical liberals would probably have many disagreements with you on Roman Catholic notions of natural law. The reason I came to reject the existence of traditional versions of natural law is that there is no objective truth about the boundaries of, and statutes of natural law.

Boonton:
I know you don't want to go along with my theory of your real motives but ...

It is more that I'm not particularly interested in carrying on a discussion where it is assumed that I have hidden motives so what I say needn't be taken seriously. Such discussions are usually unproductive in my experience. People who ask me straight questions tend to get straight answers (though I don't always get to every question I'm ever asked, I am sure). People who say that they know my "real motives", etc tend to get ignored.

MikeT:
I am curious as to what branches of Protestant theology you are referring to here.

Mostly I had in mind high church Anglicans like the Radical Orthodoxy movement, since I'm somewhat familiar with their theology. But I expect you might find that even among protestants who adhere to some form of sola scriptura with respect to theological doctrines like the Trinity and the virgin birth there are quite a few who believe in natural law/natural right, or in some understanding of morality which is not scripturally verificationist. Indeed many of the American founders come to mind as believers in natural law/natural right.

Natural law arguments depend on the views of the person arguing them.

I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but if it means that there is no objective truth to moral norms as understood through right reason then we simply disagree. People disagree about physics and mathematics too, and about the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science. The fact of subjective disagreement among different people doesn't banish objective truth and reduce all claims to the perfect equal meaninglessness of relativism though.

I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but if it means that there is no objective truth to moral norms as understood through right reason then we simply disagree. People disagree about physics and mathematics too, and about the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science. The fact of subjective disagreement among different people doesn't banish objective truth and reduce all claims to the perfect equal meaninglessness of relativism though.

To clarify further, natural law is in the eye of the one arguing it. As I said, a classical liberal from a protestant background might see things quite differently than you, as a Catholic. Their notions of what natural law dictates might often be nearly polar opposite on subjects like the one in your original post. Who is right here?

I don't deny that there is a universal law, however, I believe that natural law has been revealed to us in the duality of the Torah and the Gospel. As Christians, we see the Torah in the light of the Gospel, and the Torah provides us a context to know what true universal law looks like before God. So perhaps I was a bit hasty in saying that natural law doesn't exist, as I was referring to the way that philosophers use it. God's laws in the Torah and their later refinements in the Gospel are natural, universal law given to us by God.

The problem here is that objective truth on such matters depends on God's revelation to make it universal and objective. God had to ordain morality's existence, then define it before we could know what it means. This will naturally not be convincing to people who aren't from a Judao-Christian background. In my opinion, it is nonsensical to argue with people who reject the fundamental premise of God, the prophets and Jesus Christ's authority (let alone existence) about a universal legal code that is divinely ordained.

So, if we all have different philosophies, how can we argue natural law? We are then just arguing what we suppose it to be, since we are not starting from a place of authority and consistency. I have often thought that the critical and common error here is that people look to nature, not God's will, as a guide for how natural law might be. Nature holds few lessons for us. There are animals that eat their young, that kill for pleasure, that rape, plenty that steal, you get the idea. Nature is more a repudiation of God's laws than an affirmation of them.

You're absolutely right that we can rely on reason alone to intuit objective truth in math and science. I think God intended this to be the case so that we could grow and explore without Him having to do everything for us. However I don't think you can rely on reason for morality because morality is a spiritual matter since it ultimately comes back to sin and righteousness, both of which are fundamentally spiritual characteristics.

MikeT,

It appears you are not quite versed on the matter of Natural Law as you mightthink; which is quite evident by your above comments.

The moral law imprinted on the hearts of men (i.e., natural law) is what is alluded to here.

Romans 2:14-15

"For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:
Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;"


To some extent, I can see your point about how Christian morality (being that it is revelation from God), transcends Natural Law as it provides understanding beyond what is already there.

For example, while natural law may well tell all of us that human life is important and should not be relegated to the status of an instrument or means to an end, *why* that is is important in understanding what we mean by human, and that may well be grounded in Christian morality rather than natural law as such.

The problem here is that objective truth on such matters [morality] depends on God's revelation to make it universal and objective.

That is basically a rejection of natural law though, which seems to be the impasse. (Which is fine: it doesn't mean we can't have a beer some time, it just means we can't have the rest of the discussion on terms that we both accept). Someone who holds to a natural law view believes that (say) North American natives in 400 AD could know by the light of their own reason that murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, etc. Divine revelation certainly clarifies and strengthens our understanding of objective moral truth, (and adds juridical truths - things we must do out of obedience, such as e.g. confessing faith in the Gospel); but understanding of objective moral truth is not (to the natural law theorist, e.g. me) per se impossible absent particular divine revelation.

That is basically a rejection of natural law though, which seems to be the impasse. (Which is fine: it doesn't mean we can't have a beer some time, it just means we can't have the rest of the discussion on terms that we both accept). Someone who holds to a natural law view believes that (say) North American natives in 400 AD could know by the light of their own reason that murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, etc. Divine revelation certainly clarifies and strengthens our understanding of objective moral truth, (and adds juridical truths - things we must do out of obedience, such as e.g. confessing faith in the Gospel); but understanding of objective moral truth is not (to the natural law theorist, e.g. me) per se impossible absent particular divine revelation.

Morality must explain why it is wrong as well. That is where reason falls apart. They may arrive at the right conclusion, but they didn't get there for the right reasons. Imagine science if we got the right answers, but often didn't get there for the right reasons. It would be chaos, and that is where sin easily creeps into non-revealed morality.

Aristocles,

I am well aware of those verses. They do support a vague notion of natural law, but within the confines of a form of revelation. Paul was referring to the Mosaic Law, and that poses a problem for many proponents of natural law. Since the Mosaic Law is defined clearly, and minces few words, it leaves precious little room for people to reason through things like Zippy's claims in the original post. Since the Mosaic Law does not, to my knowledge, condemn these things, they're not moral mandates under the law that Paul was referring to. Do not forget that a respectable chunk of Jesus' ministry was ripping apart the Pharisees' "reasoned" extensions to the Mosaic Law.

It all comes down to the fact that God has revealed to us the universal moral truths we need to know. God may give an employer a personal revelation to be generous, but that doesn't make it a mandate onevery other employer.

Zippy

Tsk tsk, I'm sorry I hurt your feelings by saying that I think the real motive here is just to reverse womens' place in the labor market. It's not an unreasonable thing to ask. It seems like your reasoning bends over backwards to reject alternative ideas that would work even better to help breadwinners but would have no impact on women in the working world. It also seems like you ignore any attempt to apply your logic anywhere outside this limited policy or even to actually apply this policy other than to simply remove the laws against discriminatory pay.

A shame because it is an interesting discussion

I'm sorry I hurt your feelings by saying that I think the real motive here is just to ...

LOL! It doesn't 'hurt my feelings' when interlocutors tell me they know my 'real motives' which I'm refusing to divulge, it just signals that further discussion with that particular person is highly unlikely to be worthwhile.

Very well then, let me rephrase my assertion. The only impact I see of your proposal would be to push women out of the workplace. I cannot see any positive impact for breadwinners, I do not see 'responsibilities' being fulfilled and your moral arguments do not seem to make sense. I'll withdraw my charge that you have a secret agenda or hidden motive.

Given that the 'real motive' charge is now off the table, perhaps you could address the questions that have gone unanswered. I'll give you a brief summary:

1. If the employee already has the material necessary for a 'dignified life', how can an employer incur an additional responsibility to the employee?

2. Why do you differentiate men with families versus women with families, if all income flows to the family unit?

3. How can it be moral to ignore the rather predictable incentives created by a proposed policy? For example, if the policy proposal makes it more difficult for 'breadwinners' to find employment then must not one consider the morality of implementing something that will ultimately harm families?

If I can add:

4. Why are all other transactions in the economy seemingly ignored (i.e. bread makers charging less to the family with 5 kids versus the family with 2)?

5. How can discrimination laws that you would keep possibly be able to function if discrimination could be rationalized away with appeals to 'responsibilities' or 'needs'?

6. By what logic is this responsibility created? Mr Five Kids is responsible for his five kids. If you buy some baseball cards off of him in an ebay auction, he is still responsible. If you meet him for lunch you are not required to divide the tab 70-30 because he has more needs at home. Only if you happen to hire him does his five kids suddenly become partially your five kids. How does that make any sense?

And not covered by my posts but intersting nonetheless....

7. If this is a moral duty of the employer why is it voluntary? Certainly you wouldn't tolerate an employer who bounced paychecks on his hard pressed workers.

The only impact I see of your proposal would be ...

That is a curious way to put it, because I am not making a proposal in the sense that that appears to imply. I'm saying that there is a moral obligation to favor fathers of families in economic matters, and particularly in employment. Now I could be wrong: if there is no such moral obligation, there is no such moral obligation. But if there is such an obligation then that is a bare fact not a 'proposal'.

If the employee already has the material necessary for a 'dignified life', how can an employer incur an additional responsibility to the employee?

I think as a matter of tautology that the employer doesn't have additional responsibility under the principle I am discussing here, though he might have obligations in justice under other principles.

Why do you differentiate men with families versus women with families, ...

Because men are by nature the providers, women the nurturers, and society has an obligation to support those natural roles without becoming so dogmatic about the natural division of labor in families as to create extraordinary hardship for exceptional cases.

How can it be moral to ignore the rather predictable incentives created by a proposed policy?

Since I am not proposing a policy this question really doesn't apply. Any policy discussion is downstream from a discussion of what is morally right. For example if there is dispute over whether or not abortion is morally licit, resolution of that dispute is prior to any policy considerations. The only policy-related notion I am advocating is that it shouldn't be illegal to do the right thing.

Why are all other transactions in the economy seemingly ignored...

Because I am talking about this kind. (Indeed, the whole attitude that in order to talk about one thing I have to talk about everything is related to positivism, which is a metaphysic I regularly criticize).

How can discrimination laws that you would keep ...

I haven't said anything about keeping discrimination laws. If I were to go through the tedium of digging into the nuts and bolts of statutory regulation I would probably completely rewrite it, purging it of all invocations of 'discrimination' as a moral evil and instead framing things in terms of justice. Most of it would likely get tossed over the side. But that is all beyond the scope of the current moral thesis.

By what logic is this responsibility created?

It isn't 'created' by anything, much less a 'logic'. When you hire someone to do things for you it is incumbent upon you to treat him as a human being. Man is a social animal with responsibilities and attributes which precede him and cannot be reduced to choice, and the moral obligations we each have to each other arise in that kind of complex, heirarchical, social context predicated on human nature. Certain institutions are crucial for the health and very survival of civilization; the family is chief among these. Thus everyone - including employers in this context and many other moral actors in many other contexts - has a duty to support the family as an institution. This will necessarily manifest itself in the economic domain as a bias in favor of breadwinning fathers, since breadwinning fathers are the primary economic actors in any healthy human society.

If this is a moral duty of the employer why is it voluntary? Certainly you wouldn't tolerate an employer who bounced paychecks on his hard pressed workers.

I don't know what you mean by "voluntary". The duty not to bounce checks is (loosely) categorical, which is to say that it applies in virtually every situation. Bouncing checks is a specific kind of act which is to be avoided; favoring breadwinning fathers in economic matters isn't a specific kind of act, it is a positive obligation of a very general kind. That positive moral obligations admit of different degrees of categoricity, have different weights, are subject to prudential evaluation based on circumstances, etc is not new.

I think at this point I've addressed the questions about as comprehensively as blog comments allow. If there is something truly new that someone wants to add or ask by all means do, but I think at this point I'm mostly re-wording and repeating things I've already said. Thanks to everyone who participated for an interesting discussion.


I think as a matter of tautology that the employer doesn't have additional responsibility under the principle I am discussing here, though he might have obligations in justice under other principles.

I think this is dodging the question. The Catechism you quoted said that workers should have the opportunity to have a dignified life. That's a finite amount of materialism required for each person. To see what I'm talking about, think about the obligation to cloth the naked. It ends when the naked person has something to wear. If I'm the only naked person in the US, I don't get 300 million outfits because each person has a responsibility to give me one.

Likewise, if the employee has the material needed then the obligation has been meet (either by gov't, charity, or whatnot). Then there's no more. YOur idea may apply in a situation where you have very low wage workers and little in the way of social safety nets. What might be a noble idea in that situation becomes shallow if we are, say, talking about a law firm trying to decide how to divide the bonus pool among their six figure partners.

Because men are by nature the providers, women the nurturers, and society has an obligation to support those natural roles without becoming so dogmatic about the natural division of labor in families as to create extraordinary hardship for exceptional cases.

Providers? Nurturers? There are a number of tasks required to be done for a family to survive in any culture. The principle of subsidy would say that the family itself is the best unit to decide how to best divide those tasks between its members. By that logic if the employer has a married woman on his payroll and a married man (not to each other), he must assume that family judged it best that the woman workes for wages. He cannot put his judgement in the family's place and assume the woman is working for 'extra spending money' while the man is working to provide bread.

If you're correct then nature will manifest itself in men (on average) investing in more serious careers while women (on average) do not and wages will follow. I am always amused by people who try to use nature to justify writing their preferences into law. If something is natural you don't need a law or policy to reinforce it. There's no anti-Mary Poppins law about deying gravity, for example. Gravity is natural so it doesn't need any reinforcement by paying people whose feet pound the payment harder.

Because I am talking about this kind. (Indeed, the whole attitude that in order to talk about one thing I have to talk about everything is related to positivism, which is a metaphysic I regularly criticize).

Aye but you must address issues that are directly tied to the matter. If you want to pull out the center beam of a house because it doesn't fit your design theories you can't dismiss the person who says the roof will collapse by saying you're not talking about support. If all other economic transactions carry this obligation then that's a very different type of thing you're proposing than if you're just saying this one type carries the obligation. If I'm free to buy from the cheapest breadmaker, then it must be asked how the breadmaker can be expected to pay wages that deviate from productivity. If I'm not so free, then we are talking about something quite radical.

Creating the resopnsibility
When you hire someone to do things for you it is incumbent upon you to treat him as a human being.

Indeed, but when I hire someone I'm not buying him. If I brought a dog I need to provide him with his needs...food, shelter, the vet and some kindness. If I buy a used car from you I'm treating you like a human beign by assuming you are selling me your car for your own reasons and that you can take care of yourself.....the day after I take the car I don't need to give you rides to work.

Certain institutions are crucial for the health and very survival of civilization; the family is chief among these. Thus everyone - including employers in this context and many other moral actors in many other contexts - has a duty to support the family as an institution. This will necessarily manifest itself in the economic domain as a bias in favor of breadwinning fathers, since breadwinning fathers are the primary economic actors in any healthy human society.

Indeed but you've just argued for my proposal which would fall upon everyone more or less evenly rather than your plan which can best be described as "the sucker looses" (recall the guy who hires Joe has to pay him more, the guy who hires John_Childless saves money).

Certain institutions are crucial for the health and very survival of civilization; the family is chief among these. Thus everyone - including employers in this context and many other moral actors in many other contexts - has a duty to support the family as an institution. This will necessarily manifest itself in the economic domain as a bias in favor of breadwinning fathers, since breadwinning fathers are the primary economic actors in any healthy human society.

Perhaps, you've shown good endurance. I sense this thread is indeed puttering out. I'll let you take the last word with your next post if you wish (unless you get me real uppity with it :) )

Cheers

I am always amused by people who try to use nature to justify writing their preferences into law. If something is natural you don't need a law or policy to reinforce it. There's no anti-Mary Poppins law about deying gravity, for example.

You aren't using the term "nature" the way natural law theorists use it (and the vast bulk of the tradition of Western Christendom has always used it). I've found that generally speaking when people raise this kind of objection to the natural law they don't really understand what it is that they think they are objecting to. So perhaps that is the true source of your amusement.

Feel free to educate me. If women are by nature 'nurturers' and men 'providers' then (on average) both should feel more comfortable with choices that fit that mold. That would mean investing in providing skills for men, nurturing skills for women and the economics would follow.

Underpaid Joe, then, may not be underpaid by an employer neglecting his status as a provider as much as Joe is simply not doing a good job at providing. This may be Joe's fault or it may simply be that Joe has particular circumstances that make him different from the 'average'. In that case to pay Joe more simply because he is a 'provider' is actually to undermine providing just like it would undermine nurturing to give a woman who never cooks a meal for her kids a 'good homemaker' award.

It's worth bearing in mind that lots of women who would rather be at home as "nurturers" go to work because they can make better money than their husbands or simply because the family needs more money. This is at least in part a result of affirmative action laws that push employers to prefer women over men in the workplace. It's also the result of inflation in the economy, which is therefore something traditionalists should oppose. That is one of many reasons I am no friend of proposals to raise the minimum wage to help men provide for their families; I think it would exacerbate the problem. I think, too, that there are more amorphous social forces that cause men to expect that their wives will help to bring home the bacon; hence the husband "follows his dream" in some area that doesn't allow him to provide very well. My own impression is that women are more naturally nurturers than men are naturally providers. In other words, more men have to be pushed a bit to get the old provider instinct revved up than women have to be pushed to get the maternal instinct revved up. In a society where women are expected to work, then, you will find more and more women trying rather unhappily to juggle both roles, because the husband didn't make sure he could support the wife and kids before marriage and kids, and now it's too late--e.g., the kids are here, husband doesn't have the training or whatever to support the family, the kids have to be fed and clothed, and the family can't possibly afford to have the husband quit his low-level job to train for a better one. This whole cycle probably won't get turned around until a hefty majority of young women demand it by refusing premarital sex and refusing marriage until there is at least _some_ plausibility that the young family can scrape by on the husband's income. But women are also by nature a little more susceptible than men to overall social expectations, so that status quo patterns tend to get locked in with the female of the species, whether those patterns be traditional or, as they are now, so-called "progressive." This is true even of social expectations that are highly harmful to women, ranging from insanity in foreign cultures like female genital mutilation to the "hook-up" culture in our own colleges, where young women engage in promiscuous sex "willingly" but become enormously unhappy as a result.

Affirmative action is almost 100% irrelevant in the economy as a whole. Min. wage laws are likewise. Remember since the min. wage is not indexed for inflation it is actually cut in real terms every year, even with efforts to raise it that come around every 5-10 years. Inflation too is not very important to the process. Wages track inflation over the long run and even with the high inflation 1970's the US has been very inflation tame in the last 100 years when compared to, say, the Civil War period.

The reason women don't stay home is that they don't want to. Yes they would want to IF things were different. IF their husbands made more or IF things cost less but so what? I would buy a pink car with poka dots if it cost $5,000 less, but not $500 less. Others may not be willing to have such a car even if it was free! We all make choices based on the hugely complicated set of prices we are presented with.

The reason women don't stay at home is comparative advantage. Today an hour of time from a person produces more than it did 60 years ago. This is because we have more capital, more technology, more know-how etc in the economy. 60 years ago, I believe, an hour of male time produced more on average than an hour of female time. There's a lot of reasons for that. For example, 60 years ago a lot of capital was geared towards physical power which men have a natural advantage. Other issues are cultural, 60 years ago many people may not have felt comfortable with a female doctor or lawyer so they couldn't produce as much fees in an hour as their male counterpart.

Today that advantage is mostly gone, maybe even reversed in some cases. If it's writing, analyzing documents, working with spreadsheets of numbers or whatnot you're not going to avoid the fact that on average women are just as good as men at these things. Pay then is going to be about equal. You're not going to get one earner families again unless you get people to accept living on half the lifestyle they could (or you get one couple to work twice as much).

Anecdotally, Boonton, I think you are wrong about the economics. That is, I think a lot of women go to work for a far more minimal lifestyle than you seem to think they are seeking, a minimal lifestyle that would have been possible to achieve on one income twenty-five years ago but isn't possible to achieve on one income now. I don't claim to know all the reasons for this.

As for whether AA is relevant in the market as a whole, it certainly makes a difference in individual cases and especially in certain fields. A woman philosopher, for example, will be valued far beyond her actual abilities and will have an enormous competitive advantage over males who are better qualified. If one of those males happens to be her own husband, the couple will find it hard to have the woman stay at home, especially if the husband can find no job at all in that field in which he has been trained (which may well happen in the current academic market). The same is true in many academic fields. If you don't think this situation puts economic pressure on intelligent young people who would otherwise wish to follow traditional gender roles to reverse them, then you are missing the obvious.

a minimal lifestyle that would have been possible to achieve on one income twenty-five years ago but isn't possible to achieve on one income now.

This is true.

As for whether AA is relevant in the market as a whole, it certainly makes a difference in individual cases and especially in certain fields.

I don't know about the market as a whole, but in my field, education, it is hugely relevant.

Lydia,

The numbers belie your gut feeling. They do mine too but it isn't always good to trust your gut feelings. Twenty five years ago TV was essentially free, now it feels like you're lucky if you can get it for under $50 a month and to actually buy a TV itself....well...... BUT the TV I had 25 years ago is still free & I forget easily the quality of TV (black and white, rabbit ears, 40% of the channels coming in in static) while today I breeze through 60 channels in my substandard 'basic' package and if I see static for more than 5 minutes I'm on the phone demanding a tech visit my home!

I see the difference too in relatives. Without getting too personal I have an uncle-in-law whose well known for being a penny pincher and one of the symptoms of this is the fact that his house has barely changed since he inherited it from his mother in the 70's. Despite the fact that it is kept in great shape I see how dramatically different things were 'back then' compared to the many houses I see today whose insides have been done over several times by the onslaught of home equity loans in the 80's, 90's and today.

What is different is that some things are much more difficult to achieve today working jobs that are generally unskilled. Part of this is probably due to the decline of unions but most of it is due to the fact that it is easier to automate and increase the productivity of low skilled labor than higher skilled labor. If you make a robot that can weld joints on an assembly line then it takes 100 workers to run the thing instead of 1,000.

As for whether AA is relevant in the market as a whole, it certainly makes a difference in individual cases and especially in certain fields. A woman philosopher, for example, will be valued far beyond her actual abilities and will have an enormous competitive advantage over males who are better qualified.

Maybe. Leaving aside the fact that philosophers of all types have never exactly been a hot career field....I think you'll agree the comparative advantage argument still holds. There's nothing special about men on average that would make them better philosophers than women or vice versa. In fact, this might be somewhat non-PC but some have said that women have a smaller variance than men when it comes to skill. In other words men & women are equal on average but the smartest man is really smart, while the dumbest one is really dumb....for women there's more clustering around the average. That might mean you hire more men if you're trying to staff a philosophy dept. at the greatest university in the world but you could very well end up with more women accross the board in philosophy depts. than men. It's been a while since I was in college but when I was I remember feeling on average the female professors I had were good teachers, the men were either dumb (to put it a bit too harshly) or 'great men'...(meaning very good in their field and having interesting insights....I didn't have any Nobel laurettes or anything like that). Either way I don't think AA plays as much a factor here as much as you suggest.

Anyway, I wouldn't say academia is a great place to use this analysis. It is probably as insulated as you can get from market forces in a modern economy. Even with market forces, it is very difficult to judge the output of an academic (unless you're talking about just teaching, in which case you can use some measures like 'classes taught', 'student evaluations', etc.).

There's nothing special about men on average that would make them better philosophers than women or vice versa.

There is a modern-dogmatic bit of manifest untruth for you.

Boonton, I think you are definitely wrong about philosophy and academics generally in your application of the bell curve facts. Technical fields pull from the high end of the bell curve if selection is being done right. This is why there are so many more male than female physicists. Average Joe's are not great physicists, and more women than men are average. The same is, or ought to be, true of philosophy. Now, mind you, there is baloney philosophy (continental philosophy), and women can spout baloney at least as well as men. But when you are hiring for good philosophers--I speak here from having seen the inside of hiring process after hiring process, over a period of over fifteen years--the market is so much a buyer's market that even at a not-so-wonderful university a department can hire somebody excellent. Nonetheless, the pressure is enormous, and usually successful, to give preferential treatment to the females. I could tell you a number of ridiculous stories in this regard, where several obviously better men were skipped over in favor of making the offer first to the woman. And there is a kind of pathetic eagerness to hire a woman who does _decent_ philosophy (instead of the nonsense kind, to which even more women than men gravitate), so that an analytically trained woman, even if she is mediocre, will be snapped up on the market while men who are better teachers, researchers, etc., can go flip hamburgers or whatever.

Is academics a relevant field to discuss the subject? Well, it's the one I know a lot about as far as the dirty inside secrets on hiring, and it's one into which my daughters are probably most likely to marry, so I have an interest here in the question of whether or not females can face pressure to work when they would rather not or whether we can just casually say "they work because they want to." Is it insulated from market forces? In some senses, yes, but if you are implying that it's not possible to tell the difference between a better and a worse professorial employee, either before hiring or by performance after hiring, then you are definitely wrong.

Zippy

There is a modern-dogmatic bit of manifest untruth for you.

I'm actually quite un-dogmatic about it. If you have a good reason to assert that men would make better philosophers on average than women please present it and I'll evaluate your reasons as fairly as I am able.

Lydia
Technical fields pull from the high end of the bell curve if selection is being done right. This is why there are so many more male than female physicists. Average Joe's are not great physicists, and more women than men are average. The same is, or ought to be, true of philosophy.

1. The high end of the curve is a lonely place (as is the low end). The people who will be able to grab the few people in the high end will be people who are able to pay top dollar. For physicists this may mean business or top notch institutions. For philosophers the market is a bit less dramatic so they may end up all in academia with the best schools getting the men from the top and everyone else getting women & men from the middle.

2. You forget that quite often average is a fine choice. I can tell you that on average I learned more from the 'average teachers' I had than the 'great men'. The 'great man' can quite often be a pretty bad teacher since his focus may be too consumed by his own theories or contributions. To use a TV analogy, House is a great doctor and maybe a great teacher for other great doctors but I don't think he would do very well as teaching typical pre-med students.

3. YOu're making a heroic assumption. Why would philosophy be 'the same' as technnical fields? Why would even technical fields be the same? You're talking about a social science hypothetisis that is very difficult to test rigerously.

If the theory about women having tighter variance on their bell curves is true then it is women who have a comparative advantage. If you had to fill 100 slots and had to pick blindly you'd probably opt for women since you're more likely to get average quality. If you pick men blindly you may get some superstars but you're also likely to get some superduds that will end up humilating you as a manager. I would expect to see a labor force dominated slightly by women with a few men being the superstars of the field. I would NOT expect to see a field with a few men superstars and all the women go home and become housemakers.

I would add that academia is still quite a limited sample of the entire economy and even inside that I think philosophy is a pretty isolated subculture. It's pretty hard to evaluate a good philosophy teacher IMO and even harder to evaluate the work of an academic philosopher. This might make it a lot easier to implement AA type policies on the down low BUT it also makes it pretty hard to criticize them. How does someone who is not a member of the club evaluate your statement that you see substandard female philosophers being snatched up? I'm an educated man but philosophy is a rather esoteric field that feels somewhat impenetrable to outsiders. Perhaps that is why it is so small in the academic world. I doubt you would be able to find so many 'burger flipping' men in, say, the field of 'accounting teachers' or computers?

You're talking about a social science hypothetisis that is very difficult to test rigerously.

No, she is talking about something that is obvious to everyone, other than those who want it not to be obvious. (Lydia BTW is an analytic philosopher of the first order, in case you aren't aware of it).

That men on average produce superior performance in intellectual disciplines compared to women is an observation similar in kind to the observation that water is wet. People have differing theories about why that is the case, of course, but the bare observational fact is there for all to see.

If the theory about women having tighter variance on their bell curves is true then it is women who have a comparative advantage.

It would imply that women on average have a competitive advantage in disciplines which require consistent mediocrity in a large population over disciplines which select for populations exhibiting individual intellectual high performance, it seems to me. I don't think analytic philosophy is a discipline which requires a large population of consistently mediocre performers.

"It's pretty hard to evaluate a good philosophy teacher IMO and even harder to evaluate the work of an academic philosopher."

Not all that hard. Good teaching is fairly easy to recognize, and believe me--I've seen a woman who scarcely speaks English and whose lecture was uniformly hated by all the graduate students (for good reason) offered a job over several males who had interesting and lively on-campus lectures and student interaction. I also happen to know that "starving philosophers" is sort of a joke right now. It's just the way the job market is. Last year my husband's department advertised _way_ late in the usual advertising cycle and nevertheless were inundated with excellent applicants, of whom they were privileged to hire one (a male). It simply isn't true that we need more philosophers than there are good ones. Community colleges are well-placed in the present market! Of course, "high end of the bell curve" comes in various degrees--one standard dev., two standard devs., or what-not. And for sure there are high IQ people who cannot teach. But even *taking that into account*, the truth is that many women are getting way over-evaluated. Not all. There are excellent women out there, too, searching for jobs. (Whether, on my social theories, that's best for them and their babies or not.)

The phenomenon I'm talking about will still apply only to a relatively small cadre of women--those who are bright enough, (hence, probably somewhat above average) to complete a higher degree in a decent academic field, and who have to make the decision between doing that degree and going out and getting the career, perhaps leaving their husband home to take care of the kids, even if he is better qualified than they are, and on the other hand setting that aside and praying their husband gets a good job, gets tenure, etc. My point is simply that the AA dynamic puts an economic pressure on such women that is not taken into account by the glib pronouncement that every woman who works does so because she wants to.

Interestingly, it seems to me that your admission that low-end-of-the-spectrum jobs don't pay as much as they used to in absolute terms may have a similar effect on that end. Women married to men who are qualified only for such a job as that may end up having to choose between working to supplement their husbands' incomes and an extremely lousy life for their families--by which I do not mean living in a house with 1970's decor and only black and white television!

That men on average produce superior performance in intellectual disciplines compared to women is an observation similar in kind to the observation that water is wet. People have differing theories about why that is the case, of course, but the bare observational fact is there for all to see.

All intellectual disciplines? Evidence please?

It would imply that women on average have a competitive advantage in disciplines which require consistent mediocrity in a large population over disciplines which select for populations exhibiting individual intellectual high performance, it seems to me. I don't think analytic philosophy is a discipline which requires a large population of consistently mediocre performers.

The meaning of competitive advantage is being missed here, which is understandable because it often trips up many people including economists. Every field has 'average'....even if your field is genises. To use a simple example, take typing teachers.


Now the world's fastest typist is no doubt very impressive but you hardly need her (or him) to teach a HS class in keyboarding. Nor in today's world is there a great demand for fast typists. The advantage of being the best typist rather than an average one is slight. Likewise, a horrible typist can be a real pain to put up with. Imagine dealing with a 'hunt and peck' type that was really, really slow.

So take two populations whose average type speed is 40 wpm. One has a high standard deviation and the other has a small one. That would mean the high population may include the world's fastest but also includes the worst of the crop. The low one, on the other hand, will be 'mediocre' meaning average but will not include the extremes as much.

If you're hiring 100 people you are probably going to choose the second population. Because they will fit your needs.

On the other hand, if you're a record company or movie producer you're probably going to pull from the first population because you would value highly discovering one superstar. Being a superstar in those fields offers a competitive advantage to being a superstar in the typing field.


Now like it or not the fact is for most of the work that we need to get done there's a lot more to be said for the low deviation group than the high deviation one. Yes a company may want a Nobel prize winning chemist on its R&D team but to process, say, thousands of diagnostic tests every day it needs a team of chemists who will have predictable skill. This isn't anything new, Henry Ford discovered the same thing at work when he realized he could do better hiring unskilled labor and set it up in an assembly line than using skilled craftsmen.

Also you're forgetting that we are talking about two populations with the same average. The high deviation one is not smarter, it is just as smart as the low one. Yes the Nobel prize winner is more likely to be in the high deviation population but then again so is the dunce who will blow up your lab with his idiocy.

Lydia

Not all that hard. Good teaching is fairly easy to recognize, and believe me--I've seen a woman who scarcely speaks English and whose lecture was uniformly hated by all the graduate students (for good reason) offered a job over several males who had interesting and lively on-campus lectures and student interaction.

This is pet peeve of mine, there's a huge difference between good teaching and being good at a subject. Remember the old addage, "those who do do and those who can't teach". Not to be too harsh but you don't have to be a great musician to be a great music teacher. In fact, a great musician may be a really bad music teacher. A good teacher has to have only an average understanding of the subject and a great understanding of communication. You know your field much better than I ever will but I can see how I'd rather hire a teacher who can see her class just isn't getting existentialism and knows she needs to circle back and cover it again rather than one who has all the cutting edge knowledge but is deaf to the needs of his students.

Perhaps you remember that scene in A Beautiful Mind when John Nash storms into the classroom...angry that he is being made to actually teach one class as a professor....throws an equation up on the board and tells the students they may spend the rest of their lives figuring it out and never get it right. Great mathetician perhaps but if the local hs is looking for a calculus teacher I would understand it if they passed up his application. This also conforms with my personal experience, ancedotal it is, that the women I had as teachers did a better job on average than the men. That would also align with Zippys assertion that women are more nurturers.

In your case it seems like a more confused situation because philosophy professors can be hired on the basis of either their teaching or their work as philosophers. Which one is it that women are getting too much credit in? How do you objectively measure it? Despite Zippy's assurances, I know it's a wickedly tough thing to test experimentally.

If you're hiring 100 people you are probably going to choose the second population. Because they will fit your needs.

What does the resume of a "population" look like?

Businessmen don't hire "populations".

Despite Zippy's assurances, I know it's a wickedly tough thing to test experimentally.

If everything we know reduced to the results of carefully designed experiments that might be a telling point. As it is, it merely conversationally flags the fact that the person discussing the subject thinks that knowledge reduces to the results of experiments.

What does the resume of a "population" look like?

The typists, pleny of "40 wpm". Very few "1999 Guiness Book of World's Record: World's fastest typist"

If everything we know reduced to the results of carefully designed experiments that might be a telling point.

Very well, how exactly do we know "That men on average produce superior performance in intellectual disciplines compared to women is an observation similar in kind to the observation that water is wet" again?

"Which one is it that women are getting too much credit in?"

Both. By a margin.

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