I said before that men have <moretendencies to be violent> than women do. Other male-specific bad behaviors are some tendency to
rape or coerce sex, and some tendency to abandon middle-aged wives
for younger women.
Of course women sometimes behave badly
in various ways, but in most cases men behave badly in the very same
ways, often with greater frequency or severity. Women may undercut
other women unfairly in search of higher status, but men undercut
other men as well -- sometimes with their fists.
I have struggled to come up with any
tendency women have to not do the right thing (as understood by
modern morality) based on evolutionary tendencies. Of course, there
simply might not be any. Evolution has no requirement to be balanced
or fair. "Fairness" enters evolutionary considerations very
narrowly within humans and some other animals where a concern for it
is likely an evolved trait that can be studied like any other.
One idea is the reluctance of women to
give up babies for adoption even when they intellectually understand
that the child would have a better life with someone else. If a new
mother is very young, single, poor, and/or has serious emotional or
psychological problems, a carefully screened adoptive couple would
likely give the baby a better chance. Women are primed to take care
of their babies, and in the environment we evolved in, giving a baby
up so that someone else could raise it better would not have
happened. A baby in a hunter-gatherer society who disappears is a
dead baby and a source of enormous grief.
The clearest case is one where the
mother would freely acknowledge that this isn't the best time for her
to become a mother and she could do that later -- or a case where the
mother already has other children. If the question is whether some
troubled woman can ethically choose to raise a child or two at some
point in her life or whether she should ethically give away any
children she bears, that is much less clear. We intuitively feel that
everyone (at least every woman) has a right to have and rear
children, whatever her pluses and minuses are as a potential parent.
Society is tolerant and understanding
of this strong predisposition in women to keep their babies even when
it's not in the child's interest. I'm not sure why. Maybe readers can
enlighten me. Maybe it's partly that committing to raising a child is
a nurturing, positive thing when viewed in isolation.
Modern men are also reluctant to give a
baby up for adoption, but I believe the tendency is much weaker.
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