I’m not arguing against the need to express sexuality in a moral way. But if we have good reason to think that sexuality (or status-seeking, the wish to redress grievances, or any of the psychology behind revenge, nepotism, etc.) is a low-level motivation, then from a eudaemonic standpoint it seems like a very bad move to prioritize denying or minimizing those motivations instead of looking for relatively benign ways to express them.
We have only a very limited ability to change our motivational structure, and even within those limits it’s easy to screw up our emotional equilibrium by doing so. It’s far better—if far harder—to come up with an incentive structure that rewards ethical pursuit of human drives than to build one which frustrates them.
I agree with the first paragraph and ADBOC with the second. Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
I don’t disagree, but I do think that the existing incentive structures surrounding sexuality are pretty damned dysfunctional. I chose the wording I did because I think there’ll need to be a lot of original thought going into a better incentive structure (and because I don’t think there currently exist any really good candidate solutions), but I’m not trying to imply that we need to throw out the existing culture completely.
Some have argued the same regarding revenge, nepotism, and various other “drives” that we might expect people to learn how to express in a moral way.
I’m not arguing against the need to express sexuality in a moral way. But if we have good reason to think that sexuality (or status-seeking, the wish to redress grievances, or any of the psychology behind revenge, nepotism, etc.) is a low-level motivation, then from a eudaemonic standpoint it seems like a very bad move to prioritize denying or minimizing those motivations instead of looking for relatively benign ways to express them.
We have only a very limited ability to change our motivational structure, and even within those limits it’s easy to screw up our emotional equilibrium by doing so. It’s far better—if far harder—to come up with an incentive structure that rewards ethical pursuit of human drives than to build one which frustrates them.
I agree with the first paragraph and ADBOC with the second. Human culture contains lots of incentive structures that do just that. It is often not at all necessary to invent new ones, but rather to evaluate, choose, and tweak existing ones.
I don’t disagree, but I do think that the existing incentive structures surrounding sexuality are pretty damned dysfunctional. I chose the wording I did because I think there’ll need to be a lot of original thought going into a better incentive structure (and because I don’t think there currently exist any really good candidate solutions), but I’m not trying to imply that we need to throw out the existing culture completely.