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It's not as though they're arriving in their interactions having come from an isolated place. They're hearing messages from older siblings, from media, or some of the boys' parents

They're creating a culture for themselves based on the bits and pieces they've gotten elsewhere.

it's more that distinction between compromise and over-compromise, in which they're so focused on setting up a particular image that they believe will get them what they want—acceptance and popularity and success—and realizing that that comes at a cost.

then at these later reports when they get to adolescence where boys are reporting fewer close relationships, lower levels of intimacy within their close relationships, then that kind of suggests that for boys, their socialization and development are associated with a move out of relationships. They start out wanting and thriving in relationships, and then they are moved away from those protective relationships, and there's a cost.

when you take the whole range of human capabilities and qualities, and you say one half is masculine, and one half is feminine, and only boys can be masculine, and only girls can be feminine, then everybody loses, because you're asking e

we live in a culture and a society where we are perceived in our bodies, and people respond to us accordingly. So boys and girls do grow up in a gendered society

infant studies show us that both boys and girls are born with a capacity for and a fundamental desire for relationships—to be close and to be connected. And if anything they find that boy babies need more help regulating themselves. When they are upset they need their primary caregiver to help them regulate and come back to a feeling of contentment.

they need to have at least one place or one relationship where they can do those things.

the single best protector during adolescence, against psychological risks like low self-esteem and depression, and against social risks like unintended pregnancy, was having access to at least one close, confiding relationship. And that could be with a parent or a mentor or a friend or a sibling or whoever. The kids who had at least one close relationship were protected against all of those risks, and were better off for it.  

Early in his career, Professor Thaler created a list of observed behaviors that were obviously inconsistent with the predictions of established orthodoxy.

“Misbehaving” charts Mr. Thaler’s journey to document these anomalies in the face of economists’ increasingly desperate, and sometimes comical, efforts to deny their existence or relevance

As these tools have been applied to practical problems, Professor Thaler has noted that there has been “very little actual economics involved.” Instead, the resulting insights have “come primarily from psychology and the other social sciences.”

To the extent that economists fought the integration of behavioral insights into economic analyses, it seems that their fears were founded. Rather than making the resulting work less rigorous, however, it simply made its economic underpinnings less relevant. Professor Thaler argues that it is actually “a slur on those other social sciences if people insist on calling any policy-related research some kind of economics.”

by trying to set itself as somehow above other social sciences, the “rationalist” school of economics actually ended up contributing far less than it could have. The group’s intellectual denial led to not just sloppy social science, but sloppy philosophy.

Economists would do well to embrace both their philosophical and social science roots. No amount of number-crunching can replace the need to confront the complexity of human existence.

It is not only in academics that the most difficult questions are avoided behind a mathematical smoke screen. When businesses use cost-benefit analysis, for instance, they are applying a moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, popularized by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century.

Mill has relatively few contemporary adherents in professional philosophical circles. But utilitarianism does have the virtue of lending itself to mathematical calculation. By giving the contentious philosophy a benign bureaucratic name like “cost-benefit analysis,” corporations hope to circumvent the need to confront the profound ethical issues implicated.

The economics profession that Mr. Thaler entered in the early 1970s was deeply invested in proving that it was more than a mere social science.

But economic outcomes are the result of human decision-making. To achieve the same mathematical precision of hard sciences, economists made a radically simplifying assumption that people are “optimizers” whose behavior is as predictable as the speed of physical body falling through space.

After so-called behavioral economics began to go mainstream, Professor Thaler turned his attention to helping solve a variety of business and, increasingly, public policy issues. As these tools have been applied to practical problems, Professor Thaler has noted that there has been “very little actual economics involved.” Instead, the resulting insights have “come primarily from psychology and the other social sciences.”

it is actually “a slur on those other social sciences if people insist on calling any policy-related research some kind of economics.”

Professor Thaler’s narrative ultimately demonstrates that by trying to set itself as somehow above other social sciences, the “rationalist” school of economics actually ended up contributing far less than it could have. The group’s intellectual denial led to not just sloppy social science, but sloppy philosophy.

Economists would do well to embrace both their philosophical and social science roots. No amount of number-crunching can replace the need to confront the complexity of human existence.

It is not only in academics that the most difficult questions are avoided behind a mathematical smoke screen. When businesses use cost-benefit analysis, for instance, they are applying a moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, popularized by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century.

Compared against alternative moral philosophies, like those of Kant or Aristotle, Mill has relatively few contemporary adherents in professional philosophical circles. But utilitarianism does have the virtue of lending itself to mathematical calculation. By giving the contentious philosophy a benign bureaucratic name like “cost-benefit analysis,” corporations hope to circumvent the need to confront the profound ethical issues implicated.

The “misbehaving” of Professor Thaler’s title is supposed to refer to how human actions are inconsistent with rationalist economic theory

as has happened before with other forms of property, the most politically influential owners of the new property are doing their utmost to increase their profits by creating monopolies

The most valuable intellectual properties are platforms so widely used that everyone else has to use them, too. Think of standard operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android; Google’s search engine; Amazon’s shopping system; and Facebook’s communication network

Despite an explosion in the number of websites over the last decade, page views are becoming more concentrated. While in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all page views in America, by 2010 the top 10 accounted for 75 percent

Amazon is now the first stop for almost a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything

Google and Facebook are now the first stops for many Americans seeking news — while Internet traffic to much of the nation’s newspapers, network television and other news gathering agencies has fallen well below 50 percent of all traffic.

almost all of the profits go to the platforms’ owners, who have all of the bargaining power

The rate at which new businesses have formed in the United States has slowed markedly since the late 1970s. Big Tech’s sweeping patents, standard platforms, fleets of lawyers to litigate against potential rivals and armies of lobbyists have created formidable barriers to new entrants

The law gives 20 years of patent protection to inventions that are “new and useful,” as decided by the Patent and Trademark Office. But the winners are big enough to game the system. They make small improvements warranting new patents, effectively making their intellectual property semipermanent.

They also lay claim to whole terrains of potential innovation including ideas barely on drawing boards and flood the system with so many applications that lone inventors have to wait years.

Big Tech has been almost immune to serious antitrust scrutiny, even though the largest tech companies have more market power than ever. Maybe that’s because they’ve accumulated so much political power.

Economic and political power can’t be separated because dominant corporations gain political influence over how markets are maintained and enforced, which enlarges their economic power further. One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent this.

We are now in a new gilded age similar to the first Gilded Age, when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. As then, those with great power and resources are making the “free market” function on their behalf. Big Tech — along with the drug, insurance, agriculture and financial giants — dominates both our economy and our politics.

The real question is how government organizes the market, and who has the most influence over its decisions

Yet as long as we remain obsessed by the debate over the relative merits of the “free market” and “government,” we have little hope of seeing what’s occurring and taking the action that’s needed to make our economy work for the many, not the few.

This way of doing business rewards huge Internet platforms, since ads that are worth so little can support only companies with hundreds of millions of users.

Ad-based businesses distort our online interactions. People flock to Internet platforms because they help us connect with one another or the world’s bounty of information — a crucial, valuable function. Yet ad-based financing means that the companies have an interest in manipulating our attention on behalf of advertisers, instead of letting us connect as we wish.

Many users think their feed shows everything that their friends post. It doesn’t. Facebook runs its billion-plus users’ newsfeed by a proprietary, ever-changing algorithm that decides what we see. If Facebook didn’t have to control the feed to keep us on the site longer and to inject ads into our stream, it could instead offer us control over this algorithm.

we’re not starting from scratch. Micropayment systems that would allow users to spend a few cents here and there, not be so easily tracked by all the Big Brothers, and even allow personalization were developed in the early days of the Internet. Big banks and large Internet platforms didn’t show much interest in this micropayment path, which would limit their surveillance abilities. We can revive it.

What to do? It’s simple: Internet sites should allow their users to be the customers. I would, as I bet many others would, happily pay more than 20 cents per month for a Facebook or a Google that did not track me, upgraded its encryption and treated me as a customer whose preferences and privacy matter.

Many people say that no significant number of users will ever pay directly for Internet services. But that is because we are misled by the mantra that these services are free. With growing awareness of the privacy cost of ads, this may well change. Millions of people pay for Netflix despite the fact that pirated copies of many movies are available free. We eventually pay for ads, anyway, as that cost is baked into products we purchase

A seamless, secure micropayment system that spreads a few pennies at a time as we browse a social network, up to a preset monthly limit, would alter the whole landscape for the better.

Many nonprofits and civic groups that were initially thrilled about their success in using Facebook to reach people are now despondent as their entries are less and less likely to reach people who “liked” their posts unless they pay Facebook to help boost their updates.

If even a quarter of Facebook’s 1.5 billion users were willing to pay $1 per month in return for not being tracked or targeted based on their data, that would yield more than $4 billion per year — surely a number worth considering.

Mr. Zuckerberg has reportedly spent more than $30 million to buy the homes around his in Palo Alto, Calif., and more than $100 million for a secluded parcel of land in Hawaii. He knows privacy is worth paying for. So he should let us pay a few dollars to protect ours.

“These studies suggest that empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation. Its contribution is negligible in children, modest in adults, and nonexistent when costs are significant.” Other scholars have called empathy a “fragile flower,” easily crushed by self-concern.

empathy often leads people astray. It influences people to care more about cute victims than ugly victims. It leads to nepotism. It subverts justice; juries give lighter sentences to defendants that show sadness.

Empathy orients you toward moral action, but it doesn’t seem to help much when that action comes at a personal cost. You may feel a pang for the homeless guy on the other side of the street, but the odds are that you are not going to cross the street to give him a dollar.

It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.

People who actually perform pro-social action don’t only feel for those who are suffering, they feel compelled to act by a sense of duty. Their lives are structured by sacred codes.

Think of anybody you admire. They probably have some talent for fellow-feeling, but it is overshadowed by their sense of obligation to some religious, military, social or philosophic code. They would feel a sense of shame or guilt if they didn’t live up to the code. The code tells them when they deserve public admiration or dishonor.

The code isn’t just a set of rules. It’s a source of identity. It’s pursued with joy. It arouses the strongest emotions and attachments. Empathy is a sideshow. If you want to make the world a better place, help people debate, understand, reform, revere and enact their codes. Accept that codes conflict.

youth work programs went out of style in the 1980s, as the baby boom generation stopped needing them.

Now, struggles among white, middle-class young people have helped bring the issue back to the fore, he said. “They’re not getting traction,” he added. “The fear that’s the strongest of all is that young people won’t be middle class anymore.”

Still, Mr. Carnevale said, “Spending for retirement is crowding out investment in young people, especially human capital investment.”

Young Invincibles said that federal youth jobs programs had been cut by $1 billion a year since 2002, and recommended expanding the Labor Department’s registered apprenticeship program and AmeriCorps, a national service program that had more than half a million applicants last year for about 80,000 positions, Mr. O’Sullivan said. It also advocates restoring financing to Youth Opportunity Grants, which were aimed at at-risk youth and were ended in 2005.

At Stanford, where I teach, an idea still in the concept phase developed by a student-led team in the university’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design calls for the replacement of four consecutive college years in young adulthood with multiple residencies distributed over a lifetime. What the designers call Open Loop University would grant students admitted to Stanford multiple years to spend on campus, along with advisers to help them time those years strategically in light of their personal development and career ambitions. Today’s arbitrarily segregated world of teenagers and young adults would become an ever-replenished intergenerational community of purposeful learners.

the status quo is not sustainable. Unrelenting demand for better-educated workers, rapidly developing technological capacity to support learning digitally and the soaring costs of conventional campus life are driving us toward substantial change.

A follow-up question posed to the same expert panel asked whether the total benefits of the stimulus bill will end up exceeding the costs. The idea was to take account of all of the consequences, both positive and negative. On this question, there’s greater modesty, but still no raging debate. Of the 37 respondents, 25 agreed that the benefits exceeded the costs, while 10 were uncertain. Only 2 disagreed that the stimulus was worth it.

the best research into the views of economists finds that this consensus is pervasive across a range of issues. Call it the hidden consensus in economics. It’s there, but remains largely out of sight, because in a competitive political system there’s always an incentive for at least some advocates to try to portray any empirical claim as deeply contested.

. Parents have more to spend if they only have to fork out for one wedding (they usually share costs with the spouse-to-be’s family).

The result is evident in weddings, which now focus on the couple. Both sets of parents are represented, but their position is peripheral. Weddings often feature a day of wedding photos, shot before the event, with the couple in a range of outfits against romantic backgrounds, but with no family members.

Republicans are the party of Big Energy and Big Food: they dominate contributions from extractive industries and agribusiness. And they are, in particular, the party of Big Pizza.

pizza partisanship tells you a lot about what is happening to American politics as a whole.

Why should pizza, of all things, be a divisive issue

The immediate answer is that it has been caught up in the nutrition wars

the pizza sector has chosen instead to take a stand for the right to add extra cheese.

The rhetoric of this fight is familiar. The pizza lobby portrays itself as the defender of personal choice and personal responsibility. It’s up to the consumer, so the argument goes, to decide what he or she wants to eat, and we don’t need a nanny state telling us what to do.

it doesn’t hold up too well once you look at what’s actually at stake in the pizza disputes.

Nobody is proposing a ban on pizza, or indeed any limitation on what informed adults should be allowed to eat. Instead, the fights involve things like labeling requirements — giving consumers the information to make informed choices — and the nutritional content of school lunches, that is, food decisions that aren’t made by responsible adults but are instead made on behalf of children.

Nutrition, where increased choice can be a bad thing, because it all too often leads to bad choices despite the best of intentions, is one of those areas — like smoking — where there’s a lot to be said for a nanny state.

diet isn’t purely a personal choice, either; obesity imposes large costs on the economy as a whole.

But you shouldn’t expect such arguments to gain much traction

For one thing, free-market fundamentalists don’t want to hear about qualifications to their doctrine

Also, with big corporations involved, the Upton Sinclair principle applies: It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it

nutritional partisanship taps into deeper cultural issues.

At one level, there is a clear correlation between lifestyles and partisan orientation: heavier states tend to vote Republican, and the G.O.P. lean is especially pronounced in what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call the “diabetes belt” of counties, mostly in the South, that suffer most from that particular health problem

At a still deeper level, health experts may say that we need to change how we eat, pointing to scientific evidence, but the Republican base doesn’t much like experts, science, or evidence. Debates about nutrition policy bring out a kind of venomous anger — much of it now directed at Michelle Obama, who has been championing school lunch reforms — that is all too familiar if you’ve been following the debate over climate change.

It is, instead, a case study in the toxic mix of big money, blind ideology, and popular prejudices that is making America ever less governable.

The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens.

In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.

Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do. There are a bunch of charts that look like open scissors. In the 1960s or 1970s, college-educated and noncollege-educated families behaved roughly the same. But since then, behavior patterns have ever more sharply diverged. High-school-educated parents dine with their children less than college-educated parents, read to them less, talk to them less, take them to church less, encourage them less and spend less time engaging in developmental activity.

Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Next it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry.

People sometimes wonder why I’ve taken this column in a spiritual and moral direction of late. It’s in part because we won’t have social repair unless we are more morally articulate, unless we have clearer definitions of how we should be behaving at all levels.

History is full of examples of moral revival, when social chaos was reversed, when behavior was tightened and norms reasserted. It happened in England in the 1830s and in the U.S. amid economic stress in the 1930s.

Smith had a particular example in mind when he talked about market integration between continents: Europe and America.

Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson argued in a 2002 paper that globalisation only really began in the nineteenth century when a sudden drop in transport costs allowed the prices of commodities in Europe and Asia to converge

But there is one important market that Mssrs O’Rourke and Williamson ignore in their analysis: that for silver. As European currencies were generally based on the value of silver, any change in its value would have had big effects on the European price level.

The impact of what historians have called the resulting “price revolution” dramatically changed the face of Europe. Historians attribute everything from the dominance of the Spanish Empire in Europe to the sudden increase in witch hunts around the sixteenth century to the destabilising effects of inflation on European society. And if it were not for the sudden increase of silver imports from Europe to China and India during this period, European inflation would have been much worse than it was. Price rises only stopped in about 1650 when the price of silver coinage in Europe fell to such a low level that it was no longer profitable to import it from the Americas.

The German historical economist, Andre Gunder Frank, has argued that the start of globalisation can be traced back to the growth of trade and market integration between the Sumer and Indus civilisations of the third millennium BC. Trade links between China and Europe first grew during the Hellenistic Age, with further increases in global market convergence occuring when transport costs dropped in the sixteenth century and more rapidly in the modern era of globalisation, which Mssrs O’Rourke and Williamson describe as after 1750.

it is clear that globalisation is not simply a process that started in the last two decades or even the last two centuries. It has a history that stretches thousands of years, starting with Smith’s primitive hunter-gatherers trading with the next village, and eventually developing into the globally interconnected societies of today. Whether you think globalisation is a “good thing” or not, it appears to be an essential element of the economic history of mankind.

One of these forces is America’s income inequality, which has steadily increased since 1969. We typically think of this process as one in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Surely, that should, if anything, make upper income earners able to relax.

technology both creates and reflects economic realities. Instead, less visible forces have given birth to this state of affairs.

even with the same work hours and household duties, women with higher incomes report feeling more stressed than women with lower incomes, according to a recent study by the economists Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee. In other words, not only does more money not solve our problems at home, it may even make things worse.

t it turns out that the growing disparity is really between the middle and the top. If we divided the American population in half, we would find that those in the lower half have been pretty stable over the last few decades in terms of their incomes relative to one another. However, the top half has been stretching out like taffy. In fact, as we move up the ladder the rungs get spaced farther and farther apart.

The result of this high and rising inequality is what I call an “economic red shift.” Like the shift in the light spectrum caused by the galaxies rushing away, those Americans who are in the top half of the income distribution experience a sensation that, while they may be pulling away from the bottom half, they are also being left further and further behind by those just above them.

since inequality rises exponentially the higher you climb the economic ladder, the better off you are in absolute terms, the more relatively deprived you may feel. In fact, a poll of New Yorkers found that those who earned more than $200,000 a year were the most likely of any income group to agree that “seeing other people with money” makes them feel poor.

Because these forces drive each other, they trap us in a vicious cycle: Rising inequality causes us to work more to keep up in an economy increasingly dominated by status goods. That further widens income differences.

if you are someone who is pretty well off but couldn’t stop working yesterday nonetheless, don’t blame your iPhone or laptop. Blame a new wrinkle in something much more antiquated: inequality.

After all, four decades of social pressure and sometimes coercive enforcement have deeply engrained the one-child norm into Chinese identity — and it may well take as many decades to root it out. And given the economic realities associated with raising a child in modern China, a second child could be an expensive luxury, reserved largely for the wealthy.

Chinese culture has long valued children above all things. Families with large broods were seen as exceptionally fortunate — because more offspring are signs of wealth, or meant more hands to work for the family.

having two or fewer children was a patriotic duty that ensured the nation would have enough resources for all

one child has become a social standard, with the consequence that for every household, a single son or daughter is now doted upon by two parents and four grandparents, showered with material possessions, pushed to excel academically and entrusted with the entirety of a family's hopes and expectations.

Americans spend about $13,600 per year on each child they have. That's about 27% of the median U.S. household income. Chinese spend around $3,745 per year on their kids — or about 50% of China's median household income. Almost three-quarters of that money goes toward education and enrichment; it's seen as an investment in the future

most of China's 140 million rising middle-class families feel they simply can't afford the financial burden of raising more than one. Which is why China's attempted doubling down on childbirth may ultimately have little near-term effect on Chinese demographics.

The affluent have always been able to pay the penalties for multiples. Fong points out that the three richest men in China all have more than one child. But for middle class families, simply removing penalties isn't enough. "I think many will be resistant to have second children unless the measures are accompanied by financial relief — tax breaks, scholarship guarantees, things like that.

Will second children simply be a luxury of the wealthy? And if so, how will that impact Chinese society?My prediction: Within a few years, no Chinese millionaire's Mercedes will be fully complete without two baby seats in back, and Bugaboo Donkey double strollers will become the new Prada bags.

The company's changes include an effort to boost the content of local news outlets, which have suffered sizable subscription and readership declines

The changes follow another major News Feed redesign, announced last week, in which Facebook said users would begin to see less content from news organizations and brands in favor of "meaningful" posts from friends and family.

Currently, 5 percent of Facebook posts are generated by news organizations; that number is expected to drop to 4 percent after the redesign, Zuckerberg said.

On Friday, Google announced it would cancel a two-month-old experiment, called Knowledge Panel, that informed its users that a news article had been disputed by independent fact-checking organizations. Conservatives had complained the feature unfairly targeted a right-leaning outlet.

More than two-thirds of Americans now get some of their news from social media, according to Pew Research Center.

That shift has empowered Facebook and Google, putting them in an uncomfortable position of deciding what news they should distribute to their global audiences. But it also has led to questions about whether these corporations should be considered media companie

"Just by putting things out to a vote in terms of what the community would find trustworthy undermines the role for any serious institutionalized process to determine what’s quality and what’s not,” he said.

rther criticism that the social network had become vulnerable to bad actors seeking to spread disinformation.

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said that Facebook learned the wrong lesson from Trending Topics, which was to try to avoid politics at all costs

“One of the things that can happen if you are determined to avoid politics at all costs is you are driven to illusory solutions,” he said. “I don’t think there is any alternative to using your judgement. But Facebook is convinced that there is. This idea that they can avoid judgement is part of their problem.”

Facebook revealed few details about how it is conducting its trust surveys,

"The hard question we've struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted," Zuckerberg wrote. "We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that's not something we're comfortable with. We considered asking outside experts, which would take the decision out of our hands but would likely not solve the objectivity problem. Or we could ask you -- the community -- and have your feedback determine the ranking."

Some experts wondered whether Facebook's latest effort could be gamed.

"This seems like a positive step toward improving the news environment on Facebook," Diresta said. "That said, the potential downside is that the survey approach unfairly penalizes emerging publications."

More generative for him are the examples of artists who became known as Minimalists even as they disavowed the term.

What’s most striking about Chayka’s minimalist gestures is how frail they seem next to the larger upheavals that are taking place.

Discussing the renunciatory philosophy of the Stoics and Henry David Thoreau, he discerns “a strategy of avoidance, especially in moments when society feels chaotic or catastrophic.” There’s a strain of this in contemporary lifestyle minimalism, which offers self-protection and retreat: “Your bedroom might be cleaner, but the world stays bad.”

The minimalism that Chayka seeks encourages not an escape from the world but a deeper engagement with it

Chayka’s journey ends in a rock garden in Kyoto, where serene contemplation contends with jostling visitors.

“Up through the 20th century, material accumulation and stability made sense as forms of security,” Chayka writes. “Little of this feels true today.” Tangible goods now cost exceedingly less, and intangible “forms of security” cost exceedingly more.

After all, it’s unlikely that the tchotchkes or the new TV set will toss you into financial straits; it’s the college tuition that will put you into crushing debt, the very real possibility you’ll outlive your meager retirement account, or the medical treatment not covered by insurance.

Reading Chayka’s book put me in mind of a longing for less stuff, and a longing for more support.

I've grown very close to new people whose perspectives are radically different than mine.

It floors me: These individuals are all repositories of wisdom. They've gleaned it from experiences I'll never have, assumptions I don't share, and brains wired different than mine. I want to learn what they know.

Does that get us anywhere? A little ways, I think.

"Are we stuck with a passé traditionalism on one hand, and total laissez-faire on the other?" Is there common ground shared by the orthodox-Christian sexual ethics of a Rod Dreher and those who treat consent as their lodestar?

Gobry suggests that Emmanuel Kant provides a framework everyone can and should embrace, wherein consent isn't nearly enough to make a sexual act moral--we must, in addition, treat the people in our sex lives as ends, not means.

Here's how Kant put it: "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."

the disappearance of a default sexual ethic in America and the divergence of our lived experiences means we have more to learn from one another than ever, even as our different choices raise the emotional stakes.

Nor does it seem intuitively obvious that a suffering, terminally ill 90-year-old is regarding himself as a means, or an object, if he prefers to end his life with a lethal injection rather than waiting three months in semi-lucid agony for his lungs to slowly shut down and suffocate him. (Kant thought suicide impermissible.) The terminally ill man isn't denigrating his own worth or the preciousness of life or saying it's permissible "any time" it is difficult. He believes ending his life is permissible only because the end is nigh, and the interim affords no opportunity for "living" in anything except a narrow biological sense.

It seems to me that, whether we're talking about a three-week college relationship or a 60-year marriage, it is equally possible to treat one's partner as a means or as an end (though I would agree that "treating as means" is more common in hookups than marriage)

my simple definition is this: It is wrong to treat human persons in such a way that they are reduced to objects. This says nothing about consent: a person may consent to be used as an object, but it is still wrong to use them that way. It says nothing about utility: society may approve of using some people as objects; whether those people are actual slaves or economically oppressed wage-slaves it is still wrong to treat them like objects. What it says, in fact, is that human beings have intrinsic worth and dignity such that treating them like objects is wrong.

what it means to treat someone as a means, or as an object, turns out to be in dispute.

Years ago, I interviewed a sister who was acting as a surrogate for a sibling who couldn't carry her own child. The notion that either regarded the other (or themselves) as an object seems preposterous to me. Neither was treating the other as a means, because they both freely chose, desired and worked in concert to achieve the same end.

It seems to me that the Kantian insight is exactly the sort of challenge traditionalist Christians should make to college students as they try to persuade them to look more critically at hookup culture. I think a lot of college students casually mislead one another about their intentions and degree of investment, feigning romantic interest when actually they just want to have sex. Some would say they're transgressing against consent. I think Kant has a more powerful challenge. 

Ultimately, Kant only gets us a little way in this conversation because, outside the realm of sex, he thinks consent goes a long way toward mitigating the means problem, whereas in the realm of sex, not so much. This is inseparable from notions he has about sex that many of us just don't share.

two Biblical passages fit my moral intuition even better than Kant. "Love your neighbor as yourself." And "therefore all things whatsoever would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.

"do unto others..." is extremely demanding, hard to live up to, and a very close fit with my moral intuitions.

"Do unto others" is also enough to condemn all sorts of porn, and to share all sorts of common ground with Dreher beyond consent. Interesting that it leaves us with so many disagreements too. "Do unto others" is core to my support for gay marriage.

Are our bones always to be trusted?) The sexual behavior parents would be mortified by is highly variable across time and cultures. So how can I regard it as a credible guide of inherent wrong? Professional football and championship boxing are every bit as violent and far more physically damaging to their participants than that basement scene, yet their cultural familiarity is such that most people don't feel them to be morally suspect. Lots of parents are proud, not mortified, when a son makes the NFL.

"Porn operates in fantasy the way boxing and football operate in fantasy. The injuries are quite real." He is, as you can see, uncomfortable with both. Forced at gunpoint to choose which of two events could proceed on a given night, an exact replica of the San Francisco porn shoot or an Ultimate Fighting Championship tournament--if I had to shut one down and grant the other permission to proceed--what would the correct choice be?

insofar as there is something morally objectionable here, it's that the audience is taking pleasure in the spectacle of someone being abused, whether that abuse is fact or convincing illusion. Violent sports and violent porn interact with dark impulses in humanity, as their producers well know.

If Princess Donna was failing to "do unto others" at all, the audience was arguably who she failed. Would she want others to entertain her by stoking her dark human impulses? Then again, perhaps she is helping to neuter and dissipate them in a harmless way. That's one theory of sports, isn't it? We go to war on the gridiron as a replacement for going to war? And the rise in violent porn has seemed to coincide with falling, not rising, incidence of sexual violence. 

On all sorts of moral questions I can articulate confident judgments. But I am confident in neither my intellect nor my gut when it comes to judging Princess Donna, or whether others are transgressing against themselves or "nature" when doing things that I myself wouldn't want to do. Without understanding their mindset, why they find that thing desirable, or what it costs them, if anything, I am loath to declare that it's grounded in depravity or inherently immoral just because it triggers my disgust instinct, especially if the people involved articulate a plausible moral code that they are following, and it even passes a widely held standard like "do unto others."

Here's another way to put it. Asked to render moral judgments about sexual behaviors, there are some I would readily label as immoral. (Rape is an extreme example. Showing the topless photo your girlfriend sent to your best friend is a milder one.) But I often choose to hold back and error on the side of not rendering a definitive judgment, knowing that occasionally means I'll fail to label as unethical some things that actually turn out to be morally suspect.

Partly I take that approach because, unlike Dreher, I don't see any great value or urgency in the condemnations, and unlike Douthat, I worry more about wrongful stigma than lack of rightful stigmas

In a society where notions of sexual morality aren't coercively enforced by the church or the state, what purpose is condemnation serving?

People are great! Erring on the side of failing to condemn permits at least the possibility of people from all of these world views engaging in conversation with one another.

Dreher worries about the fact that, despite our discomfort, neither Witt nor I can bring ourselves to say that the sexual acts performed during the S.F. porn shoot were definitely wrong. Does that really matter? My interlocutors perhaps see a cost more clearly than me, as well they might. My bias is that just arguing around the fire is elevating.