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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
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And playing chess relies on your opponent also following the rules of chess, so aren't we free to play chess either? (Or will the police arrest me if I castle while my king is in check?)
Chess can rely on reputation since games are short and someone who refuses to play by the rules will find no one to play against (also the stakes are small). (And in high states games, e.g., tournaments you will at least be escorted out for refusing to play by the rules.) Note, that since monogamy assumes someone will only have one spouse ever, reputation is less useful.
A better example is, are we free to engage in commerce if the police refuse to enforce either non-payment or non-delivery? (Especially if they do enforce anti-violence and anti-theft laws against people attempting to take matters into their own hands in cases of non-payment or non-delivery). Another example, would you say companies are free to provide employee pensions if the law says that companies can cancel pensions anytime (even after retirement) and employees (or former employees) have no recourse if a company does cancel it?
There are many cases where the law doesn't require specific performance. If you hire someone to work for you, they can refuse to come to work. You can fire them, but you can't force them to work for you. If you offer to fix someone's sink in exchange for them fixing your car, one of you could fail to do the work. The other could sue and get paid some money, but the law won't enforce specific performance and you can't actually force another person to fix a sink or a car.
By your reasoning we are not "free to hire someone to do work" or "free to exchange sink fixing for car fixing".
And even in the chess example, you can't force someone to play chess, and if you exclude them from playing because of their reputation, they still are not playing chess with you. Soi by your reasoning, we are not free to "play chess with person X", even if you argue that we are free to play chess provided we aren't picky about partners.
It's true that someone cannot gain a reputation for being honest in monogamy, but they can get a reputation for cheating. It only requires the "can have a reputation for cheating" half in order for reputation to be useful. It still lets them cheat the first time, but they can always cheat the first time in a chess game as well.
Could whoever modded me down please explain why they modded me down? I must have lost around 20 karma in the past few days because I am getting constantly modded down for almost anything I post.
Abuse of the karma system is a well-known problem on LessWrong, <strike>which the admins appear to have decided not to do anything about.</strike>
Update: actually, it appears Eliezer has looked into this and not been able to find any evidence of mass-downvoting.
It's happened to me again. At one point I lost about 20 karma in a few hours. Now it seems everything I post gets voted down. At an estimated loss of 30 karma per week, I'll end up being forced off the site by August.
Hmmm. Your past 30 days karma is positive. Either you're saying it was formerly a lot more positive, or any downvoting isn't having nearly the effect you suggest.
I tried actually counting them. My past 80 comments (not counting recent ones just now) have all been modded down at least once. There are some that are at 0, but only because another person modded them up as well.
(I tried counting before and found the 54th comment was not modded down but I can't seem to find that comment again, for some reason.)
This covers well over the whole month. I'm still at positive for the month because I have enough upvotes on my comments that voting each one down by 1 still leaves me at positive.
My karma was over 600 and it's now down to 571.
And this only seems to have happened recently, so the first weeks of the month were enough to make the total positive anyway.
If a post older than thirty days is downvoted, it doesn't appear in the past 30 days karma.
I occasionally downvote a few (3-5) of your comments in a row, based on merits, not anything else, but I haven't done it recently, so someone else might be expecting you to post low-quality comments and, after stumbling over one, goes through a bunch. I wouldn't sweat it, though. I think I dropped 10-12 karma in the last couple hours, probably for similar reasons. Just do your best to make useful and measured comments and the forum readers will appreciate it.
As Salemicus mentioned in the other thread, the in the analogous case with marriage, the law won't even do that.
We are indeed. One will just have to handle counterparty risk by other means, such as only dealing with people you know well, private enforcement, meeting for simultaneous performance, etc. This is readily observable in the real world everywhere that the legal system is weak, corrupt, or absent.
BTW, and this is just a nitpick, in Western countries where the legal system is reliable, the police do indeed refuse to enforce contracts, because it isn't part of their job. Instead, it is up to a wronged party to bring a civil action to the courts. The police have no role in the matter. Contract rights are not property rights.
As another has already pointed out, the enforcement carried out by the courts almost invariably consists of awarding monetary compensation, not specific performance, which happens only in certain exceptional cases. In the UK, these exceptional cases do not include personal services.
You are trying to put your conclusion into the premise of an absurd hypothetical of Cloud Cuckoo Land. A pension contract that was terminable at will by the pension provider is a pension contract no-one would sign up to. A law saying that all pension arrangements are terminable at will is not going to be passed; if passed, people would find ways to structure their retirement plans that avoid whatever legal definition of "pension contract" was present in such an absurd law. Hey, suppose there was a law that when you buy something online, the supplier has no obligation to supply what you ordered? Well, go ahead and suppose it.
You are presumably trying to draw an analogy with the current state of marriage law. It would be more productive to talk about marriage law directly. Adultery is usually grounds for divorce. That looks like contract enforcement to me -- the sort of enforcement that contracts are subject to in the real world, rather than the fantasy S&M version in which the police drag the disobedient partner back in handcuffs. Time was when the guilty party would be sent away from the severed marriage without a penny (at least, if the guilty party was the woman), but that generally does not happen today. If you think the courts should regard adultery more sternly when deciding the division of the common property, go ahead and argue that, rather than claiming that no-one can be monogamous these days because the police won't "enforce" the marriage contract.
If I make a contract with Amazon, you're right that I can't make them deliver the goods. But I can get damages for their failure to do so, that would put me in the same position as if they had in fact delivered the TV (of course I have to mitigate my loss, etc). I am glad to hear that you think that general contractual concepts should apply to marriage contracts, but you are surely aware that they do not, and this is exactly what is being complained of.
You do not (at least in the UK) get damages for breach of a marriage contract. This strikes me as extremely unfair. Adultery is a fundamental breach of the marriage contract, so yes this is grounds for termination of the contract, but the innocent party doesn't get any proper remedy. No-one is saying that people have to be dragged back in handcuffs. But it is not just or equitable that, to continue your analogy to contract law, a breach of the contract by one party leads to a kind of rescission, rather than damages payable.
What would you or Eugine Nier consider a proper remedy? For better or worse, adultery is generally looked on more lightly nowadays than it was in times past. The courts practice accordingly when ruling on a contested divorce. The guilty party is no longer cut off without a penny, still less forced to wear a scarlet letter, horsewhipped or stoned. If that is a problem, it is not a problem with the law, but of those general attitudes. O tempora! O mores!
Those who prefer a different standard are as free as they always have been to find like-minded partners, arrange things between themselves, keep their own agreements, and find their own social support for them, just as those who would engage in trade in the absence of reliable contract law must create their own arrangements.
I can't speak for Eugine, but I already told you the remedy I think appropriate - ordinary contractual damages. And this would be true not only for adultery, but for any fundamental breach. Of course, parties should be able to specify their own terms as needed in these cases (e.g. liquidated damages). And this needn't even be the default; but the key thing is that at present, if parties want their marriage contract to be meaningful, they are unable to make it so, as the courts will simply disregard any such terms as contrary to public policy. Fortunately the wind is blowing in the right direction (prenuptial agreements) but much too slowly.
You are right that people are able to trade in the absence of government. But government sometimes helps! Despite this, people like yourself have reduced marriage to a kind of Somalia, where people are unable to form enforceable contracts. People who prefer a different standard as you so strangely put it, should be free to form their own contracts.
However,
I am disinclined to continue a conversation with someone as lacking in basic manners as you.
Prenups as currently practiced are mostly concerned with how to arrange matters if and when the marriage breaks down, not how the marriage itself shall be conducted. This is hardly a support for the institution of marriage.
I don't know what you mean by that. I didn't draw up any of these laws, neither have I agitated for them. But nor have I agitated against them -- are you counting all who do not actively evangelise for your views as your enemy?
Huh? It's up to you (and your future spouse) to define a marriage contract -- they are commonly called pre-nups.
If you want to enter a marriage under conditions that adultery leads to remedies like money paid, sure, just write up such a contract and get it signed. However I see no reasons to impose such a contract on everyone.
Traditionally, of course, a marriage is not a contract at all.
As solipsist notes, pre-nuptial agreements are not binding in the UK, although the courts can take them into account. I referred to this in my post above. However, their scope is much less than what you suggest. A pre-nuptial agreement that specified damages to be paid in the event of fundamental breach would be void as contrary to public policy, at least in the UK. I believe the same is true in most US states, but obviously, marriage laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
To be clear:
Not exactly. You want people to be able to irrevocably bind their future selves. That is rarely a good idea.
I am also curious whether your fundamental view of marriage is one of a contract between two parties. If so, well, that leads to interesting consequences. If not so, why do you want to treat marriage as a contract?
This is generally currently possible subject to the normal limits on contracts that the society imposes. There are a lot of those (e.g. you can't contract to be a slave) and I don't see what makes marriage special.
I would like to see some supporting evidence for that claim.
Not so, and this is an outrageous reading of what I have said. People will still be able to get divorces, just they will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault. I didn't irrevocably bind my future self when I rented my house, but if I break the lease I'll have to pay compensation to the landlord.
Your comments above suggest that perhaps you don't understand the state of law, at least in the UK.
No it isn't, at least in the UK. All I want is for marriage to be subject to normal limits on contracts, not the special limits on contracts that apply only in the case of marriage. I say "damages in the case of breach" and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It's so strange.
Look at the following graph of divorce over time.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons
Note the sharp discontinuity after 1969. What happened then? Oh yes, the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, meaning you no longer had to prove fault to get a divorce (and divorce settlements were also not based on fault).
Now look at the marriage rate:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/resources/gmr_tcm77-258471.png
Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn't enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
I don't think that's the whole story. Marriage rates were declining in the 1970s and 1980s even in countries where divorce wasn't introduced until later, such as Ireland or Malta.
(And intuitively, I'd be less reluctant to do something if it was easier to undo it, though YMMV.)
There is no sharp discontinuity around 1969. If you smooth out the weird peak around ww2 (which we expect was caused by ww2), the plot of divorces follows a fairly smooth exponential trend (which we expect due to population growth), until the late 70s (the tapering in the 80s is due to both declining marriage rates and a stabilizing divorce rate).
Marriage rates really don't start collapsing until the early 80s (they don't drop below 1930s levels until 1981).
I would think for the story you want to tell, you'd want to compare divorce rates to the marriage rate, but it doesn't hold up. Divorce rates were stable all through the 90s, but the marriage rate continued to plummet.
Except population growth has been trivial over this period compared to the rise in divorces.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44549000/gif/_44549854_uk_pop_226.gif
No. In my grandparents time, people were inculcated with the morality that divorce was awful and shameful. Hence when they started to liberalise divorce, few took advantage of it; social pressure was enough. But over time that social pressure weakened because informal mechanisms are weak compared to formal ones. Hence that social pressure gets harder and harder to maintain, and divorce looks more and more acceptable to the new generations. I think we have now bottomed out of that vicious cycle, but unfortunately it has meant a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire.
Everyone? Or do you just want enforcement of pre-nups?
I am still interested in your view on the basic nature of marriage. Is it, in its essence, a contract between two parties? To point to an obvious divergent view, Catholics view marriage rather differently.
You voluntarily signed a contract to that effect. If there is no such contract (or no such clause in the contract), would you still owe compensation to the landlord?
Well then, let's avoid fuzzy generalities and get down to brass tacks.
Alice and Bob are thinking of getting married. However Alice believes that men are philandering bastards who tend to screw everything that moves so she would like to protect herself against the possibility of Bob turning out to be precisely such a bastard.
In the world which you would consider just and fair, what would Alice and Bob do and what would the legal system have to accept?
It seems that you have in mind an enforceable contract whereby Alice and Bob agree that if any of them gets caught in the wrong bed, he or she will pay the other party <Austin Powers> ONE! MILLION! DOLLARS! </Austin Powers> or some other sufficiently painful sum.
I don't see anything horrible about such a contract, but I'm curious what you think the contract-less default should be (Eve and Dick just got married without any specific contracts, Eve got drunk at a party and slept with her boss, what's next?). I am also interested in the motivations of Alice in insisting upon such a contract -- is it incentive or punishment?
Sure, but I don't see why that is "extremely unfair" and "leads to widespread suffering". I see nothing wrong with low marriage rates.
If you like, call it a pre-nup. In your terms, I want: * enforcement of pre-nups * Pre-nups to be valid over a much wider variety of terms.
And I still don't find this level of analysis helpful. Marriage means different things to different people, and has developed over millenia. I don't think it makes sense to talk about its basic nature.
I would propose that, for now, the contract-less default should be the status quo, because I feel like otherwise you would be upsetting fixed expectations by the back door. But of course existing married couples should be free to alter their marriage terms. After a while I think almost everyone will want a contract that makes the party at fault pay compensation; once that happens, it would make sense to switch the default, but not until then.
It is very hard for the rest of us to speculate as to the motivations of a fictional character you have created. But even if you disapprove of Alice's motivations, it seems to me that you should respect her right to form a contract.
The marriage rate collapsing isn't "unfair." Denying people the ability to form voluntary contracts is the unfair part. The marriage rate collapsing leads to widespread suffering because people want to get married, but feel they can't because the institution is too unstable due to lack of precommitment. And hence you get soaring illegitimacy. The whole thing is a disaster.
What gives the game away is that I am talking about giving people more freedom, and I get this vitriolic pushback, and find myself constantly being strawmanned. I note that certain people viscerally hate the idea of discipline, stability, order, hard work and bourgeois values generally, and view long-lasting marriages as awful patriarchy. This is what's lurking beneath it all.
Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion? Because it has always been among my biggest gripes with the conservative account of why divorce is so bad. It just doesn't seem plausible, especially given how over-optimistic most people are about the prospects of their marriage! And frankly, I'd be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty. It might be rational in the abstract, but signals many troubling things about the individual, such as low trust and an instinctively transactional view of relationships. (Marriages for economic reasons probably need a whole different set of norms, such as a historically seen unspoken tolerance for adultery.)
I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women's education and economic independence. Now, reasonable people who think those are great things can disagree whether the decline of traditional marriage is a cost or a neutral consequence, but I've never had time for people who seek to pin the blame on deliberate and direct political subversion.
Sure, I don't like how some liberals attempt to be contrarian and claim that all the changes in this sphere have actually been unreservedly wonderful and a worthwhile goal from the start.... but that's a general problem of people wanting policies to have no downsides, and the other side's logical leap from calling out the downside to denying the problem is always baffling. Liberals cheering for something as a triumph for the Wonderful Nice Liberal Agenda might be less evidence that it's a triumph for the Degenerate Corrupt Liberal Agenda and more evidence that liberals like cheering. This should not inform one's analysis of the material/economic factors.
So, it seems to me that there is a terrible disconnect between property-splitting during a divorce and the existence of no-fault divorce, making marriage a tremendously costly move for the wealthier of the two parties (especially if they're male). If in order for Bob to marry Alice, he has to give her the unilateral option to take half of his things and leave, then marriage seems unwise.
In the era of fault divorce, Bob is safer- he needs to either break the contract, or can end the contract if Alice breaks it without having to transfer to her the same share of his possessions.
(I think that the collapse in marriage rates is seen at too coarse a level. If you look at marriage rates by class, you notice that the upper class is still living in the 50s and the lower class has collapsed. An explanation, that I buy, is that we no longer try to promote good citizenship and good living, and so unsurprisingly people answer the call of the short term, to their long term detriment.)
This reads like a status assertion to me, along the lines of "follow your dreams" being code for "I'm awesome enough that I can get ahead by following my dreams" or "I'm awesome enough that I get to set my job parameters." Not caring about loyalty is code for "I'm going to be awesome forever, so it'll always be in their interests to stay with me," but far better to have insurance in case of worse, poorer, or sickness.
If so, then why are the educated women marrying more than uneducated women? [src]
Well, perhaps I should start by saying that I don't like distinction you draw between "affection and companionship" and "economic reasons." The two are implicitly entwined. I will attempt to flesh out my position.
You don't need marriage for "affection and companionship," at least in the short term. You can just hang out. But most people want more than that. They want to build a life together. That involves making costly investments that will only bear fruit over time (e.g. buying a house, raising children, pension plans, etc). That involves making irreversible compromises - e.g. a shared circle of friends means you will have to be friends with people you wouldn't otherwise be friends with, and not friends with people you would otherwise like to be; same goes with shared hobbies, etc. That involves specialization - perhaps one spouse will give up paid employment, or only work part-time. And so on.
But the problem with all these decisions is that they can lead to time-incompatible incentives. If Alice gives up work for a while to raise children while Bob focuses on his career, then ten years later Alice will be less pretty, less employable, and more dependent on Bob. Bob, meanwhile, can much more easily walk out on the marriage and start again. What's to stop Bob reaping the benefits of Alice's sacrifices, then checking out of the marriage?
And realistic people know that they won't necessarily be thrilled with each other for every moment of their marriage. They will have rows, they will have disagreements, there will be times when the grass seems greener elsewhere. So you may find my attitude creepy, but I find your attitude evil - I think it's quite wrong to go into a marriage without thinking about how to make sure it lasts. It's partly about Alice making sure that Bob stays loyal to her, otherwise she's wasting her time building a life with him. But it's also about Bob(wedding) making sure that Bob(10 years later) stays loyal to Alice, otherwise he's wasting his time. And vice versa.
So when you put the two sides of the problem together, you see it's quite tricky. But at the same time, it's super-rewarding if you can pull it off. Some people try to work around it to make the incentives less time-incompatible (e.g. women having children later) but this itself has its costs. The best solution is if Alice and Bob can bind their future selves to the marriage like Odysseus binding himself to the mast; that way they can both truly commit to the marriage, secure in the knowledge that the other party will too. And that will, paradoxically, mean that they create the best shared life together, and so will have least reason to leave the marriage.
But if, instead, Alice and Bob can't bind their future self, then they can't trust each other. Maybe Alice can trust Bob(wedding), but Bob(10 years later) is a different person - yes, people change during marriage, but not necessarily in ways their partner can control or predict. So because they can't commit to the marriage securely, they won't make the same kind of costly investments in their shared life. Which means their marriage will be worse, which means they will be more tempted to divorce, and so on in a vicious circle.
BTW, the total marriage rate by year is a metric that can be easily confounded by tempo effects: if in a country all people born until 1950 married at 20 and all people born since 1951 married at 30, the marriage rate between 1971 to 1980 would be exactly 0 but (neglecting the mortality of twentysomething) no cohort would be any less likely to ever get married than another.
The entire concept of marriage is that the relationship between the individuals is a contract, even if not all conceptions of marriage have this contract as a literal legal contract enforced by the state. There's good reason to believe that marriages throughout history have more often been about economics and/or politics than not, and that the norm that marriage is primarily about the sexual/emotional relationship but nonetheless falls under this contractual paradigm is a rather new one. I agree with your impression that this transactional model of relationships is a little creepy, and see this as an argument against maintaining this social norm.
Pattern-matching is often rational in politics just because it's so cheap, as long as the pattern makes sense in the first place. I'm sorry, but the pattern of reactionary rhetoric about marriage has these very deliberate connotations. People who discuss this tend to discuss punishing sinners (vicariously so), not holding rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts.
So what are you supposed to say if you want to hold rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts?
I see that as evidence that marriage, as currently implemented, is not a particularly appealing contract to as many people as it once was. Whether this is because of no-fault divorce is irrelevant to whether this constitutes "widespread suffering."
I reject the a priori assumptions that are often made in these discussions and that you seem to be making, namely, that more marriage is good, more divorce is bad, and therefore that policy should strive to upregulate marriage and downregulate divorce. If this is simply a disparity of utility functions (if yours includes a specific term for number of marriages and mine doesn't, or similar) then this is perhaps an impasse, but if you're arguing that there's some correlation, presumably negative, between number of marriages and some other, less marriage-specific form of disutility (i.e. "widespread suffering"), I'd like to know what your evidence or reasoning for that is.
I'm not sure what point are you trying to make with these graphs.
If people were allowed to make binding pre-nup agreements that penalized adultery would there be more marriages? Less divorces? More happiness?
None of these things seem obvious to me.
Again, this reasoning would equally suggest that I am not free to hire you to work for me, since you can stop working (stop being monogamous) and I have no recourse other than to fire you (terminate the marriage).
You aren't permitted to bind yourself to work for someone in the future either.
At least under English law, you are allowed to bind yourself to work for someone in the future. The employer will not get specific performance awarded, but you can be forced to pay damages, observe a restrictive covenant, etc.
Most employment in the US is at will, and you can fire someone any time and they can walk out any time. So even if binding yourself is legal (I have no idea) and you count that, that reasoning has the same problem as the one about vegetarianism: It really doesn't matter whether you can make a contract for such things because pretty much nobody ever does so. In practice there's no difference--you're not going to be making a contract for either one, and the penalty for breaking an actual job agreement will just be reputation, like breaking an actual marriage agreement..
Furthermore, this argument requires that you believe that in states where such an agreement is illegal (and I suspect, considering the restrictions on non-compete clauses, that there are such states) you're not free to hire someone for a job.
As I understand it, in states where employment is "at will", you can form a written agreement with your employer, but most arrangements are at will by the mutual choice of the parties. It might work out like that in marriage too, if you gave people the choice - maybe people would stick with the current system because that's what they like! Of course, the fact that you're unwilling to give people the choice suggests that you're not too confident of that result.
It is certainly true that there are a large number of unconscionable restrictions in the labour market, from rent-seeking credentialism to bogus cartelization and onwards. It is perhaps hyperbole to say that you're not free to hire someone for a job, because at least some terms will be enforceable, but I would certainly understand where someone was coming from if they said that.
Wikipedia article on prenups:
On the other hand, pre-nups are enforceable in the US and most of continental Europe.
And if you're afraid the court won't enforce your pre-nup you can put assets in escrow, for example :-)
In any case, I'm not sure what the underlying argument is. I tend to see it as expressing the wish that the society enforce a very particular notion of marriage on everyone regardless of what they think about it.
The underlying argument is exactly the opposite of what you see it as.
Society is currently enforcing a very particular notion of marriage on everyone regardless of what they think about it. Specifically, removing any notion of fault from the termination.
I would like people to be able to credibly commit as to their future behaviour if they so wish. I would like to give people that choice, which the likes of Kennaway would deny them. If you want to stick with the current arrangements, you should be able to.
I do wonder about so wilful a misreading of the discussion here.
I feel there is a bunch of anchoring going on here.
Why do you think the termination of the relationship naturally has an actionable fault of one party that is being removed?
By the way, do you feel that this fault has to be sexual? Can this actionable fault be ill temper, or snoring, or flatulence, or lack of humor, or insufficient performance in bed, or earning not enough money?
I don't think so. Putting on a wedding ring looks like a credible commitment to me. What you want is to punish people for breaking their commitments and so far I haven't seen a good reason to do so in the context of marriages.
Informally, a marriage contract can be seen as a type of contract (hence the name), but legally it generally has a rather different nature, with some similarities and some differences to ordinary contracts. For example, the state decrees what does and what does not constitute a marriage in the eyes of the law. In contrast, Amazon declares its own terms and conditions. When a marriage is recognised, that has various implications for taxation of the partners, rights in a deceased partner's estate, etc. that would not be present in ordinary contracts. It is called a marriage contract, but that does not imply that all of ordinary contract law does, can, or should apply.
Considered as a contract, what are its terms? It is not drawn up by the parties to it, but lies scattered across the books of the law. As those laws change, so the contract changes.
Is the complaint that the courts are no longer enforcing its terms, or is the reality that the terms themselves have changed? Time was when conjugal rights were a thing, a legal thing. The time has changed, and now, rape within marriage is a thing, a criminal thing, however objectionable the likes of James A. Donald may find that, and however much he may pontificate that when rape within marriage is a thing, marriage is no longer a thing.
If you were drawing up an actual contract of marriage, a uniform contract to define what marriage shall be throughout a state, what would it say?
That's not what I meant by monogamy -- I wouldn't call my relationship non-monogamous just because my girlfriend had sex with someone else years before I even met her, any more than I would call someone who used to eat meat but no longer does a non-vegetarian.
I agree that monogamy in your sense of the word would depend on something guaranteeing that enough people stay virgin until old enough to find a lifetime partner.
(I'm assuming you're not talking about contraband, since police will not only refuse to enforce non-payment or non-delivery but also bust your balls if they catch you in a complete transaction.) Reputation can work for commerce too -- ever looked at the feedback on eBay sellers or at TripAdvisor reviews of restaurants?
I don't know whether I'd call it a pension, but I'd say you're certainly free to give me a given amount of money every month as long as you feel like it and then stop. (Of course it'd be foolish for me to rely on that money alone for their maintenance, but that's another issue.)
That's my point.
This, however, makes it harder for me to promise you a pension as part of employment negotiations.