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gjm comments on Rational approach to finding life partners - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm not Mirzhan_Irkegulov, but my reaction to the two is very similar: both are correct, and in general no one has an obligation to have sex with anyone else and no one has an obligation to employ anyone else.
I'll guess that you're thinking about anti-discrimination laws, according to which in some circumstances an employer can get into trouble for not employing someone. But those are quite special circumstances that very rarely apply to sex (it might apply to prostitution, and I can kinda see a case for forbidding prostitutes to refuse clients on the basis of race etc., but also prostitution can be really dangerous and it's therefore probably better to say that prostitutes should have absolute discretion to refuse clients).
(The other obvious kind of case in which such obligations might exist is where a relationship is already in existence. You might reasonably be aggrieved if your spouse suddenly starts refusing to have sex, or if your employer fires you. But I don't think either side of this comparison is what anyone in the thread had in mind.)
Anyway. Apparently you consider that there should be harmony between one's answers to those questions. I'm pretty sure you don't think that employers should ever be obliged to employ particular employees. Do you think that women commonly have a duty to provide sex to men? In contexts other than existing long-term sexual relationships?
No, I'm thinking about the fact that politicians and pundits routinely talk about lowering unemployment, and this is universally agreed to be a desirable goal and not something creepy for implying that every worker 'deserves' a job, heck the "right to a job" is frequently listed in lists of "second generation human rights". Contrast this with the reaction advancedatheist got for suggesting men deserve a sexual relationship with women.
Oh, OK. So in that case, again, I think I think more or less the same in the two cases.
I don't know to what extent this resembles the opinions of the politicians and pundits you have in mind. I would expect that most agree about jobs but many disagree about sex (on account of not thinking as I do that in general more sex is a good thing).
One way in which I would expect politicians and pundits to treat those two cases differently: if we think it good for more people to have jobs, it's socially and politically acceptable to suggest that incentives be put in place to encourage people to employ them; but if we think it good for more people to have sex, it's not so acceptable to suggest incentives for that. I think that shows that sex is a sensitive topic; I'm not sure it indicates anything worse.
The reaction advancedatheist got, so far as I can tell, was founded on the idea that he thinks women have an obligation to have sex with men. I don't know whether he actually does think that, but it's explicitly what Mirzhan_Irkegulov says he thinks advancedatheist thinks: "your belief that women as a group should be encouraged to have sex with men against their will".
However, it is generally understood that society as a whole is obliged to arrange things so that everyone who wants a job can find one. Furthermore, a lot of people don't seem to agree with your claim that "no one in particular is obliged to give them a job", at the every least they seem to think this is someone's duty even if they're not clear on whose.
Except sex used to be an even more sensitive topic in the past, and it was taken for granted the society had a duty to arrange for people to have the opportunity to get married.
The statement "women have an obligation to have sex with men" is ambiguous. However, Mirzhan_Irkegulov presumed that it was meant in a creepy way and is thus unacceptable. By contrast consider Part III, Article 6 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:
Notice that it is also vague on just who is obliged to provide the employment but carries no such presumption of creepiness.
Okay, it seems to me that people use the word "right" with at least different meanings, and misunderstand each other as a result.
As a EU citizen, I have a right to travel to other EU countries in the sense that, if by mutual consent between me and an airline I buy a plane ticket and take a plane to Poland, I must not be stopped by the police or anybody else. (By comparison, I don't have a right to travel to Pakistan unless I get a visa first.) But it sounds like there are people using the word "right" with a narrower sense, according to whom I have no right to go to Poland because if I can't afford a plane ticket there's nobody who must take me there anyway.
Do we all agree that people should have a right to have a job in the former sense but not in the latter sense, and that people should have a right to have sex in the former sense but not in the latter sense?
(Well, maybe there is an intermediate sense whereby I have a right to fly to Poland iff there are no market failures preventing me from flying to Poland a non-negligible fraction of the times I would be able to do so in a perfectly efficient market. But I hope we all agree that 1. EU citizens probably don't all have a right to fly to Poland in this sense, but 2. it would be a good thing if they did, so long as the cost of correcting said market failures aren't excessive, though 3. requiring airlines to take EU citizens to Poland whenever the latter want whether the former want it or not wouldn't be anywhere remotely near a good way of achieving that; and 4. the same things applies to employment and to sex, except that the kinds of market failures that there exist are different in each case.)
So would you agree to the analogous thing for relationships, because advancedatheist's point is that there is a huge 'market failure' there right now?
Yes, though I disagree that the availability of inferior substitutes (buses to Poland in my analogy? flights to Moldova?) would make the market failure worse, and possibly (I'm not sure what exactly advancedatheist is thinking) also about how much of a market failure there actually is vs how much certain men are just actually less sexually attractive to women than others (much like I guess you'd agree certain workers are just actually less productive than others) and would stay so even in a hypothetical perfect efficient market.
More like, the 'powers that be' doesn't actually want to fix the market failure, and thinks offering inferior substitutes will at least cause the poeple complaning about it to shut up.
Well, the market failure was a lot less in the recent past.
I wouldn't agree that this is an explanation for a rise in unemployment.
Remind me, why are you calling the inability of some to find sex a "market failure"? It might well be that the "market" does not think the package they are offering in exchange is good enough.
The fact that I can't acquire a superyacht is not a market failure.
Instead, the basic complaint looks much more like the classic entitlement narrative of "I have a right, I couldn't exercise this right, so I'm a victim, somebody make sure I can exercise my rights!"
Let, me translate that into the unemployment analogy for you:
Consider what the reaction would be to someone who made the above statement. Heck, I'm not even sure Donald Trump could survive making it.
Except have you seen any other instance of the entitlement narrative get the same kind of reaction.
I think the implication is that the sexual marketplace is inefficient (with an implied dig at the idea that employment is a right in the sense that you describe). Given roughly equal numbers of men and women who want sex and/or relationships, and treating men and women as fungible, there is an inefficiency if everybody isn't satisfied, as partners can be rearranged to produce a greater number of satisfied people.
On the down side for this view, people aren't in fact fungible. On the up side for this view, there are some obvious inefficiencies in the sexual marketplace, such as the distribution of genders across cities. On the "whatever" side for this view, I'm inclined to say that the root of the problem is that value on the sexual marketplace has greater variance for men than women, so the tails on both ends are dominated by men whose preferences cannot be satisfied, and the middle of the distribution has more women than there are men available to satisfy their preferences.
How do you know it's not the past which had a market failure making women have more sex with unattractive men than they would have had ideally?
Plus one point for treating women as consumers, rather than products, in the sexual marketplace. Minus one point for treating men as inferior products, rather than unsatisfied consumers, in the sexual marketplace.
No society on earth that I know of has ever achieved this, and I'm pretty sure it's usually felt that one can't have an obligation to do something impossible. I think the actual sentiment is the one I already expressed: if someone wants to have a job, it is better if they can get one.
(On the face of it, the International Covenant thing you linked to contradicts that, but I'm pretty sure it's (1) intended aspirationally, as if it were proclaiming a right to happiness or a right to good health rather than a right to work, and (2) primarily aimed at measures whereby people try to stop one another working -- e.g., discrimination where some racial or cultural group is systematically unable to find jobs.)
Anyway, it's not clear to me what your actual argument is. Do you think that someone in this discussion (Mirzhan_Irkegulov, me, the United Nations General Assembly, I dunno) holds inconsistent opinions? If so, what inconsistent positions? Because all I'm seeing so far is that sex and jobs are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and my opinions on them are kinda-sorta a bit similar but not the same, and I don't see what the problem's meant to be.
Ok, now you're not even trying to argue in good faith. In fact I'm pretty sure that if the sexual analogy had never been brought up, you'd be arguing some variant of "just because things will never be perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make them as good as possible".
So how is this relevant to the argument at hand? I'm sure advencedatheist's comments were also aspirational in this sense.
Sort of like how low status nerds are systematically unable to find sexual relationships?
This is at least the second time you have thrown such an accusation at me [EDITED to clarify: the other time was in a different discussion; I'm not saying you've done it twice in this thread]. I promise it's wrong, at least as far as my conscious purposes go (who knows what might be going on underneath?). It would be good to debug what's going wrong here -- am I missing something that's so obvious to you that you can't imagine someone could honestly miss it? are you completely misinterpreting me? etc. so could you please explain in more detail how you get from what I wrote to "you're not even trying to argue in good faith"? Thanks.
(My best guess is that we have divergent understandings of what we are arguing about. I think we are arguing about whether it's a bad thing to say that women have an obligation to provide men with sex. Perhaps you think we are arguing about whether Mirzhan_Irkegulov was correct to accuse advancedatheist of thinking that women should be coerced into providing men with sex, or something like that. Or perhaps you think I am offering some kind of justification of everything said by Mirzhan_Irkegulov, which I am not.)
Yes, I endorse that principle. You obviously think I've been saying something inconsistent with it here, but I'm not sure what.
(The greater the extent to which people who want satisfying sexual relationships have such relationships, the better. The greater the extent to which people who want jobs have jobs, the better. Neither of those implies that anyone should be forced to provide sexual relationships or jobs. Encouraging or, worse, forcing people to have sexual relationships is creepier than encouraging or, worse, forcing people to give other jobs, and not being in a sexual relationship is generally less devastating than not having a job; these are important disanalogies between the two cases. I do not know whether advancedatheist is, as Mirzhan_Irkegulov claims, actually arguing for women to be somehow required to have sex with people they don't want to have sex with. If he is then he is saying something horrible. If he isn't then Mirzhan_Irkegulov is making a nasty incorrect accusation. Does any of that help to clarify anything?)
I honestly don't know what your argument is; see my last paragraph above. If you would care to answer the questions I ask there, we may be able to have a more fruitful discussion. But: it's relevant because I made a claim (no one thinks there's an obligation to provide everyone with a job) that on the face of it is inconsistent with something you cited (the International Covenant) and it seemed worth explaining why I don't think there is such an inconsistency.
Yes, sort of. Again: if you think you have found an inconsistency between my opinions about sex and my opinions about jobs, please tell me what inconsistency you think you have found so that I can actually address it, rather than just insinuating that there is one.
I'm not VoiceOfRa, but I'd like to throw a little twist into this comparison. Let's change from "no woman owes sex" : "no boss owes a job" to "a women has the right to withdraw consent to sex at any time" : "a boss has the right to fire anyone at any time". Still very similar?
As I said in my third paragraph, I think that particular question is some way removed from the points originally at issue in this discussion. But to both of those my reaction is "well, kinda". In more detail (reluctantly because I think it's a big digression):
I don't see any inconsistency in the above; my positions on the two questions aren't identical, for reasons tightly bound up with the ways in which the two questions themselves aren't identical.
I'm not attacking your position :-) It's just that I expect that my reformulation will bring a different set of responses from some people than the original one.
In the US that's already the case and even the people who don't think that wives should be allowed to refuse sex from husbands seem to see nothing wrong with that. Well, except when someone is fired is for saying something factually correct but offensive.
No it isn't. You can fire unprotected classes of people, for unprotected reasons.
As OrphanWilde already pointed out, no, it's not. Even other than protected classes of people and protected reasons, trade union jobs and many public sector jobs are not employment at-will.
Interestingly, the likes of James A. Donald lament that wives are now allowed to deny consent to sex or to divorce while apparently seeing nothing wrong with at-will employment.
Fortunately, the likes of James A Donald are not participating in this thread.