Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Morally, consenting adults, anything goes. But in this fallen world, relatively high risk of scandal, loss of employment, and a vengeful ex keen to play those cards. Assess the future "victim"s emotional resilience and decide. From what I've seen, it's in short supply these days.
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Seems obvious that one shouldn't have a relationship with a student when they're responsible for grading their performance in any fashion. Ethically this is too much conflict of interest, and incentivizes students to seduce professors.
How to prevent it? Don't really know.
Outside that, I have an extremely strong 'don't shit where you eat' rule that, were I a professor, would preclude me from pursuing a relationship before the other party graduated. Although I'd probably end up bending the rule if they were in their final semester and weren't taking any of my classes.
The 'rationalist' take is going to just be the pure utilitarian "do the benefits outweigh the harms, as far as can be predicted in advance?"
But that discussion could end up going a few different ways. The naive version is "as long as the relationship is kosher by the standard of any other romantic/sexual pairing, should be fine."
Not clear why the rationalist take would change much just because it's professor/student.
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I see it like workplace romance. Institutions have an incentive to crack down, but there's no moral crime being done. My advice is, like with workplace romance, to keep it a secret until one partner leaves.
As for age gaps, the taboo against 50yos dating 20yos is a relic of the version of our civilization that enforced monogamy. Widowers double dipping with fertile women is a form of polygamy that crimps the supply of wives of mediocre males. Now that society doesn't meaningfully enforce monogamy, that taboo is just an old, irrational prejudice.
I come from a polygamous society. There is criticism of it there too - mainly from women, actually. It's just that it's so patriarchal it doesn't matter. America...is not that way so that criticism does matter.
Yes, there is a motive for weak or young (a lot of men look mediocre compared to a man further into the labour market to a woman of their own age) men to limit competition, but I don't think it's what's meaningfully driving the taboo in the West at this point.
I think it's actually driven by intrasexual competition amongst women who really don't want to compete with younger women for older men. The situation is asymmetrical: men value youth more than women, so women feel like they're losing out on "their" men (a similar thing happens with black men vs black women ; men marry out more. It's reversed for Asians). There's nothing more rational than trying to hobble your sexual competition (in this case while acting like you're concerned for them! Great example of covert social combat)
This is why the whining about age gaps is almost always about an older man, e.g. Leo DiCaprio (when it involves a woman it's driven by a desire to be consistent or to mark feminists as hypocrites*)
If your theory is right, this should fade as the old norms are torn down. If mine is right, it shouldn't (because intrasexual competition is eternal).
Obviously I'm biased, but my experience is (looking at the Leo thing) that the taboo continues and may even be intensifying. It's just that feminists - being handcuffed by blank-slateism - need to come up with some new justification beyond "it hurts our nonmoral interests" or "men and women are different" have had to lean on the argument that it's "abusive". Which has now become the canon explanation.
* See also: prison rape jokes.
Yeah, I totally agree that monogamy enforcing / age gap shaming is propped up by mostly female interests these days. The reaction of men to Leo is usually, damn, what a lucky bastard. (I didn't think of it while writing my comment because I have a biased viewpoint.) DiCaprio as a model for successful males is the archenemy of unmarried women from the mid-thirties and up.
However, I do think the taboo is a historical feature of our society, not an eternal dynamic of sexual competition. Other civs have had different norms — I don't get the impression that Afghanistan, say, makes any bones about age gaps even for totally monstrous child marriages; and there are actually tribes where the sexual norms are that old men get all the young wives. Past the level of city-state, things tend to converge into a few sexual regimes that work. The legacy package of Western monogamy (no premarital sex, til death we part, no widowers chasing young wives) was selected and conquered the world because of how it changed the behavior of males. This is my background paradigm which I abbreviated in my reply.
In practice, females enforce the norms.
Yup, that's what it boils down to. According to consent theory, there shouldn't be a problem with age gaps between adults. If you can sign a contract transferring $100k of your money to a college, you are definitely equipped to decide whose bits you want inside you. But people have to find some moral justification for their gut reaction, which is still rooted in values older than consent theory. This is what I mean when I say the taboo is irrational. (Not to say you couldn't justify age gap restrictions rationally)
The taboo? Yes. I guess the better way to put my position is that the impulse is natural but whether there's an enforced taboo varies by culture. Same with homosexuality and all sorts of other things.
Women I know loathe the idea of a younger second wife (enough that my mom warned me against it lol) and probably always have* but there's no strong taboo yet, since there's a counter-vailing norm for polygamy and many men aren't really inclined to care about the complaints of women.
I don't know if I would go that far in establishing a causal link between this and Western dominance** but I know that there are at least scholars I respect that do (e.g. Joseph Henrich)
* Cross-pollination with the West in the colonial era muddies the waters but I don't think the British invented the sense of grievance I've seen.
** One could argue that Western dominance led to replacing old norms with Western-flavored ones (e.g. like with Christianity)
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Only after the student has graduated. There's too much potential for corruption or exploitation to go on for it to be anything otherwise. I don't have an inherent objection to even an 18 yo student dating a 60 year old professor from another though. But in that case I would want to keep a close eye on things to make sure no one was being taken advantage of if I was a friend or family of either.
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My view? Either adults are adults, or they're not. Our society says eighteen is the cutoff.
I'm more than happy for there to be social norms against these sorts of relationships, but I don't think there's anything inherently exploitative, even if the odds are better.
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Campsite Rule. Leave your casual partner better than you found them. That means no pregnancy, disease, heartbreak, missed opportunities, destroyed friends/family relationships. If you succeed in threading that needle it's fine, if you fail then you're a shitheel.
With the big exception being that if you get married (and stay married for ten years) the rest is irrelevant. Justifies anything.
Note that both these are retrospective rather than prospective. Focusing on how relationships are formed rather than their results is the disease of consent-only sexual ethics. It's not just about the professor or student making the right decision to start a relationship, it's making the right decisions throughout to keep the relationship in bounds.
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