Here I make a distinction between two real categories (morality, ethics) that are solutions to different problems, and in future writing will attempt to discuss how political processes conflate and distort these labels.
Intuitively, morality strikes me as (almost by definition) always and everywhere an economic proposition. Morality is ‘always and everywhere’ a way for institutions to scale their memetic presence onto human minds. Whenever someone asserts a moral frame: something is ‘making bank’, look for it. Morality is often confused with ethics; and ethics, with morality. I suspect it is worth decoupling the two.
Ethics is distinct from morality in the sense that it asserts that the individual should come into the foreground with a decision theory over any given crossroads in his/her values, using his/her own conscience. Ethics has always been a threat to the existing order, as it is impossible to scale, nor can you make universal rules around ones own conscience.
If morality is an unreflective set of constraints and demands over large groups of people, ethics is a reflective one. Individual ethics, done with a sound mind, is the way to understand oneself and conscience.
Morality begins with a favored mimetic, and is then spread by an interest group, which needs the stability of the particular moral in order to maintain its position. Priests are related to ethical decision makers, but, in practice this is not based on high-quality ethical thought, more accurately a morality: necessarily entailing the family unit, combined with ‘original sin’, where they cast the shadow of their moral valence at full mast. As a simple example, monogamy and marriage creates a stable middle-class. Probably nothing wrong with it, if it works well for you. Opinions vary. This moral norm is also indeed easier for government sovereigns to count household output, predict annual income and productivity metrics, and to take census of households for various forms of financial control.
One could argue, that the only legitimate example of applied morality are the practiced norms during times of global stress, to prevent human extinction and mass suffering, such as during a pandemic. For instance, I am perfectly happy not fighting for my ‘right’ to avoid masking at the peak of such a crisis. This is a real moral restraint, because it actually effects the lives of others, such that applying pretty much universal behavioral norms help everyone.
What’s the problem with ethics? It isn’t with ethics per-say, rather with its undeveloped interpretations. For example, in 1924 in the criminal case of Leopold and Loeb, two male children, particularly the older lad of the young friend duo, argued within their ethical orientation, whose interiority might only be gleaned by them, to take the life of another boy their age. This is an example of an unsound/undeveloped mind using ethics incorrectly and one that power anticipates. A sound ethics would never entail egregious harms to others, because a decision to take a life, would leave out many things, ones relationship to others, the existing order, and subsequent consequences. The case of Gavrilo Princip is also relevant.
By now you may have heard of the concept of a “tradwife“. It is an opportunistic position where a woman who is adjacent to the ‘aristocracy’ (the new monied class) in America, gets to invoke an old morality of marriage in order to be cared for by one well-off partner. While this is a fine sexual strategy, and frankly, surely even admirable to want to caretake ones own growing tribe, the newly termed notion doesn’t address the real question of what women might really want and need. In other words, true revealed preferences, in the absence of society’s manufactured artificial scarcity. The scarcity mindset in women, one that marriage casts over women in the first place. Its claims are to find someone to tether your assets to, and thereby to be “secure”.
Getting a career might not be the answer either for most women, to be sure. The point is women do need to have access to socio-economic capacity, but that can never come from a single partner alone. This requires a culture that provides a kind of universal basic income to not have to rely on one person in the first place, but not from directly the government i.e. one that cannot be easily ‘”rent seeked” away with the market fixing higher prices targeted to them, due to such inheritance of capital.
Women need various positive inputs to production, and also it’s possible to interfere with their access to physical resources or help in various ways, and patriarchal societies are structured to attack anyone who’s not in some kind of formal enclosure. But the territorial claim “women need security” itself is not really part of the means of production here, it’s just a defense against specific kinds of interference, which we might defend against, evade, or attack in other ways.
For the average or below average man, marriage levels the playing field, by making this reflexive moral norm a scarcity issue to women. Ensuring that women continue to offer their productive livelihood to someone who is just good enough, without reflecting sensibly on the abundance of her own diversification and comparative advantages: reinforced within networks of trust and communities, which are perfectly able to provide financial and emotional support for oneself and ones children, alongside the support of ones mate (or mates) of choice. This should be better incentivized (or indeed, incentivized at all) by the state. Of course every now and then slaves (“the domesticated”) convince masters (“the domesticating”) to join in their norms and the masters themselves get confused. In a mixed culture, there’s a spectrum of people living together, from the more domestic to the more feral. The feral get confused when things aren’t quite as satisfactory as advertised.
I would be appropriate to admit a social need for increasingly more conscientious ethical reflection, with respect to how to mitigate shame from female sexual strategies that differ from the nuclear family, including but not limited to legal and tax recognition for diversified mate choice. Women are ready for new tax legislation aimed at alternative agreements on family support, ones that represent material diversification and arrangements between multiple people, romantically involved or not, who raise the children. After all, it takes a village.
Such a social reckoning would entail a focus on taking steps against the cultural shaming of women, particularly by women themselves, who are in a variety of life situations. It is a spectrum. Women with higher time preference for money, for instance prostitutes over a single day, and those women with a lower time preference: one-off mate selection, i.e. the marriage contract, which points at least on paper to a lasting arrangement for decades, is currently the only arrangement that is incentivized by the state.