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Notes -
I’ll raise the issue of paternity testing as potential culture war fuel.
As far as I know, the law in US federal states and Western European countries is usually that a husband may not have a paternity test done on the child or children unless the wife agrees to it in writing and the family court permits it (in case of a divorce). I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the specifics. But anyway, the practical reality is that a husband having such a test done on the kids without consulting anyone else is illegal. Basically there is never any permission given to do such tests.
On one of the now-defunct Manosphere sites, namely Dalrock’s blog, a regular commenter who went under the online name Novaseeker made a prediction about 10 or more years ago: not only will there not be any new legislation making paternity tests easier, as usually demanded online by angry men’s rights activists, but the opposite will happen. Namely: a growing number of men, usually in case of facing an initiated divorce, will start tinkering with these laws, covertly getting paternity tests done, basically on the black market, and this in turn will result on corresponding legislation becoming even more punitive and restrictive. There’ll be heavy fines, maybe even prison sentences etc.
Again, this was written more than 10 years ago. I wonder if anything of this has materialized or not.
This has always been morally insane.
I can't think of any other areas where society and law has some justification along the lines of "well it wasn't you, but someone needs to pay for it, and you are the easiest to catch."
Imagine this justification used for crimes:
[state]: pay the fine for running a red light
[person]: but i didnt run a red light
[state]: Well someone ran that red light, and we can't let it be known that running red lights will go unpunished. You were nearby and I've already captured you, it would be too much work to go get the real culprit if it turns out it wasn't you.
That is a light crime and it already feels heinous. More serious crimes with more serious punishments feels even more heinous. Imagine the above but for a crime that carries a lifetime prison sentence.
Just reversing the gender roles shows how insane this can be. A husband and wife. The husband wants kids, the wife does not. The husband manages to somehow adopt a kid without the wife's knowledge or consent (or he even forges her signature and commits some level of fraud in getting her assigned as the adoptive mother). Or the husband gets a surrogate to carry his baby, then he and the surrogate lie at the hospital about the mother's identity and he brings home a kid that isn't the wife's.
The wife then files for divorce because the husband clearly betrayed her trust. The wife then must pay child support to the husband for the raising of the adopted kid.
One of those scenarios might be the only way such insane parenting laws get reversed. Or they will just carve out an exception and send the man to jail without the slightest hitch in their step at the dissonance of their actions.
Its also a weird take on the responsibility level of the women involved. A women can't be expected to know for certain who the father is, but can be expected to raise a child? Like what?! Raising a child is way harder than knowing who the father is. In most cases not knowing who the father is would also be a demonstration of incompetence. If you claim to care about the welfare of the child, maybe having them raised by a woman that can't keep track of her sexual partners is not a great idea. Even if they aren't keeping constant track, once they know the due date of the baby they should be able to narrow down the conception to a 1-2 week time frame.
In a sane world we would be using this as an example of why Utilitarians shouldn't be in charge of writing laws.
Scenario: A person roles into the hospital with a gunshot wound to the [organ that can be lived without]. The shooter has the same blood type as the victim.
Question: Is it ok to take the organ from the shooter to replace the organ of the wounded person?
Utilitarian: You can take the organ from the healthy person in the waiting room, they are easier to find and might have been the shooter anyways.
You're surprised at this? Copyright infringement, illegal immigration, white collar/fiscal fraud, tax evasion, consumer product (healthcare, food and beverage) testing and certification, procurement grift....
I believe this is basically how much of law enforcement works today. Not all, but a significant proportion. They know stopping it is impossible, but they have to do something, so they find someone they can actually get and make an example out of them.
edit: whoops, not awake yet. Didn't realize you were talking about the actually innocent.
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It's not quite analogous, but IIRC some states have written their traffic laws such that the owner has strict liability, regardless of whether they actually drove the car through the light. "I didn't run a red light" "But someone you lent your car to (you didn't report it stolen) did, so pay up" isn't that Kafka-esque.
That justification doesn't transfer over from the analogy. If you lend your car to someone, that's a deliberate action you take, with your responsibilities being clear beforehand. A man who got cheated on by his wife took no such action, he's the victim in this situation. If your car was stolen, making you pay for what the thief did with it I would indeed call kafkaesque.
Second, you have ownership of your car, with all that implies, but you do not have ownership of your wife. I do in fact get to lend my car to someone, or decline to, and the car gets no say, so it makes sense that the responsibility is on me. But husbands to not get to rent out their wife's body. It's also understood that I'm responsible for its safe operation. If I neglect to put on the parking brake, that's on me. Is it also negligent to not put a chastity belt on my wife?
Third, the car is a tool, not a person with agency. It doesn't do anything on its own (or if it does, I might be able to hold the manufacturer liable instead.) A woman, of course, is a person, who can take her own actions that aren't my responsibility.
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Someone else pointed it out, but in that analogy I feel like the woman would be strictly liable. They own the vehicle of birth. The man is more like a driver.
It would be like charging someone who once borrowed a car with a crime associated with the car.
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It's still Kafka-esque, it's just precedented Kafka instead of unprecedented.
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I would have to disagree with that. These rules were developed in a time when (1) paternity testing was unavailable; (2) husbands had more power to control their wives' movements; and (3) people had children -- in large part -- as a way of getting free labor on the farm.
Nowadays, the rule no longer makes sense, but since we live in a gynocentric society, there's just not much push to make things fair for men.
That being said, I was checking, and a surprisingly large number of jurisdictions in the US give cuckolded husbands a legal remedy, i.e. a way to establish nonpaternity and avoid child support. It could be better, but it's not nothing.
I'm checking now too, and what I'm seeing makes me think @Botond173 was wrong above. That paternity tests happen plenty in the US when there is any suspicion of a need.
Its just France that is crazy and seems to ban it.
It seems the OP on that bygone blog was a bit of a doomposter then. At least it's what we can conclude as of now. Then again, doomposting generally did seem more than warranted back then.
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One way to fix this would be to just normalize genetic testing after birth for everyone. Compared to all the other healthcare costs of giving birth, a 23-and-me style genetic test is an utterly trivial expense. It is certainly good for the parents to know if their new baby has any genetic disease, especially if they can obtain the info without ending up in a government or industry database.
And it is trivial for the father to also verify that he is indeed the father.
After all, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by it.
--
Another aspect is that in the age of IVF, women can become victims of parentage fraud just as well. Of course, it would require the fertility clinic to be in on it.
I think it would not be very hard to bodymod a man so that instead of sperm, he is squirting a fertilized egg of his preferred genetic partner. I doubt that this would lead to implantation very often, though, fertilized eggs are not very mobile. One would need a microscopic robot bringing the payload where it needs to go. Still, not something which seems out of reach for this century.
Once women can no longer be certain of their genetic motherhood, I am sure their attitude towards genetic testing will change.
If my husband demanded a paternity test for our kids, I'd be very offended. If he couldn't trust me that much, does he even want to be married?
But if it was just standard at every birth, I wouldn't care at all.
Maybe a state will normalize it for some reason and the rest will follow suit.
I suspect that we're moving in a different direction though. Many states are making the spouse of the mother is listed on the birth certificate by default, even if they obviously are not the father. For example, two lesbians end up on the birth certificate and that's affirming and cute under the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA). There seems to be a trend towards "intended parents" over genetic parent.
If intended parents matter more to the state than genetic parent, it doesn't make sense to start genetic testing. It would just be a triggering reminder that two women can't actually make a baby on their own.
As this, as far as I know, has actually been a decree in the Napoleonic Code, and basically the simple codified normalization of a Christian tradition, I'm not surprised. I don't think it's anything new.
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Presumably, none of the parents there are under any illusions that they are both genetic parents. Likewise, there are likely plenty of cases where one partner is infertile and is happy to raise a kid created without their genetic contribution. This is all fine, as long as there is informed consent of all the parties involved, a lot of things are fine which would not be so otherwise, after all.
You are probably right that things are unlikely to move in the 'more testing' direction; there are likely some blue tribers around who would claim that if a woman was in a relationship with a guy while she got pregnant, any kids are spiritually his (unless she denies it, of course) and he should just pay up. And so far changing any family legislation which advantages women has not been much of a priority for MAGA either, so I doubt this is going to change.
In Australia this is pretty much how it goes now. If you have a pre-established relationship with the children (of several years say) then you are presumed to have assumed parenting responsibilities and need to pay child support in the event of a divorce.
The 'needs of the child' are said to out way the injustice done to the 'father'. Why the state can't provide for the needs of the child and that only 'daddy's money' can spiritually succor the child even though the cucked man wants no relationship with them is somehow left unsaid.
So you get scenarios where a man assumes that his wife/partner has been faithful, happily signs his name on the birth certificate, develops a relationship with 'his' child and then finds out 5 years later that he's been cucked by her ex-boyfriend Chad. He is horrified at the betrayal, divorces his wife and wants to cut off contact with Chad's biological kids. The Family Court comes after him with the full force of the law and is willing to throw him in 'debtors prison with extra steps'. He says go after Chad for the cash. The court says you have assumed the role of father and have signed the birth certificate so pay up.
I'd like to see mandatory genetic testing at birth. There are other medical benefits such as identifying susceptibility to genetic diseases early as well as the 'needs of the child' in knowing with certainty who their bio-parents are. Somehow the courts don't seem that the 'needs of the child' are important in these other areas.
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What proportion of those are Blue?
Genetic testing in this case would protect the man and bind the Woman. Obviously not going to fly in a gynosupremacist environment.
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This is textbook emotional blackmail. If you take offense to his verification of highly sensitive and legally important information, I question if you actually want to be married.
It's completely normal to be upset at the implication of suspecting adultery. She just said 'if paternity testing was normal outside of Maury Povich' she'd be fine with it.
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That is not remotely emotional blackmail. It's perfectly normal to be upset when your spouse doesn't trust you and demands to check up on your behavior just in case you're up to something.
Not when it comes to legally binding documents. "Trust, but verify" is the way healthy relationships work. "Trust, but don't you dare verify" is the way abusive ones work.
No. A healthy relationship works on "trust". That's it. Not "trust, but verify" (which is in fact a lack of trust), not "trust, but don't you dare verify". Simply trust.
A lack of trust in the spoken word alone maybe, but otherwise this is not the case. The assumption that the parties abide by the agreement is still there. There is a whole Wikipedia article on the subject.
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That would only make sense if you view trust as a binary. Typical usage treats it instead as a spectrum, with healthy relationships requiring less verification for the same level of risk.
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Are you married?
Let's say there was a test with 99% accuracy that would determine if you have had sex with someone else (maybe a genital swab of you and your wife that would identify bacteria from another women.) Your wife out of the blue demands that you take the test. The implication is that she suspects you have been cheating on her. You had a healthy relationship. You thought she trusted you. You never would even think of another woman.
Wouldn't this be off-putting to say the least? You thought you had one kind of relationship, one where it was you two, forever together, just you and her til death. And then suddenly it appears that she is in some other relationship, one in which you would cheat.
You're comparing this to your relationship, but when a guy wants this kind of test, probably it's not the kind of relationship that you likely have.
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Yes, I am married and similar emotional blackmail nearly changed that. No. Women do not deserve "trust" in this case since they are guaranteed such knowledge naturally. If you don't care enough about your husband to grant him the same privilege that biology grants you, you don't deserve him.
I do not have a natural guarantee that my husband is faithful to me. All I can guarantee is that I am faithful to him.
Also see my response here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3726/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/440420?context=8#context
Men and women stand equal in their lack of natural guarantees about faithfulness, but not in their guarantees about parentage: you can present him with a child and falsely claim it is his. He can't present you with a child and falsely claim it is yours.
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I think most men would love that as an alternative to the wife seething in jealousy for months because she suspects he cheated but neither can prove their side of the argument. I don't think I'd mind at all, and would be delighted to establish the norm of wives periodically demanding such tests in exchange for the norm of husbands demanding paternity tests.
In short: trade offer accepted. Trust but verify, etc etc.
That isn't trust. Trust, by definition, means that you believe someone without verifying. "Trust, but verify" is an incoherent expression that would be more accurately stated as "I don't trust you so I verify the claims you make".
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But see! This is the problem here. It'd be a sign that your wife is currently seething in jealousy! Your relationship is forever changed whether the test happens or not.
Let's look at the different worlds:
World 1: Wife does not ask for 'fidelity' test.
Possibilities:
World 2: Wife asks for "fidelity test"
Possibilities:
The possibility where your marriage is happy is gone now. Your marriage is different and you can't go back.
Given the responses from the Male Motte, the most I can say is that male and female intuitions on this topic are just diametrically opposed.
You've never had a woman pull the "I'm mad because I had a dream where you cheated on me" thing? Many women seethe in jealousy all the time for very little reason (and perhaps often secretly enjoy it for its own sake - jouissance). "Sure babe, q-tip my dick and send it to Labcorp" would be a very satisfying response, even if it doesn't address the deep underlying psychological cause of why she's mad about dreaming that you cheated on her (which, 90% of the time: she's bored/stressed/unfulfilled and subconsciously decided starting drama would be a fun distraction).
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For the record, I don’t think these intuitions are very much opposed at all on a male/female level. Everyone wants their spouse to trust them. This site just selects for a very particular type of person.
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Not really. It could be a phase for her. A momentary lapse in unconditional trust is not a thing that must ruin relationships, and I don't believe in unconditional trust anyway. What, if your husband one day starts giving off every single sign that he's cheating on you, basically everything other than straight up you catching him in the act, you wouldn't be jealous? As the other poster said, in today's world the man's unconditional trust risks him much more than the woman's, besides.
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I think it's more that people who were in an unhealthy relationship have a warped sense of what is acceptable. Like you, I would be very upset if my wife demanded a proof of fidelity out of nowhere (say if she wanted to randomly inspect my phone to make sure I didn't have any untoward text messages on it). That isn't something which should happen in a healthy marriage, and if it comes up at all, the marriage has problems.
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I can't think of a better example of reterritorialization: capital destroys the social norms that ensure certainty of paternity to sell women liberated lifestyles, this makes men uncertain about their children whilst the old territory of rules remains, but instead of going back we can instead create a new technical solution and in one dialectic swoop we have sold a bunch of new products and created an opportunity for mass data collection, which itself will create new dialectics of power and further the dissolution of man into capital.
Modernity is not for the faint of heart.
I think spousal infidelity either appeared with the neolithic revolution, or did already happen in the ancestral environment.
At least as long as men have gone to war, they had the opportunity to fuck around, at least if the brother of their wife is not in their unit keeping an eye on them.
For women, cheating was probably a bit harder in the ancestral environment, but I personally do not envision it like there were sabre-tooth tigers constantly circling around the tribe just waiting for their chance to eat a lone woman lagging a bit behind to meet her lover. Basically, as soon as you have cities which are safe enough to traverse unarmed, most societies will evolve norms to allow lone women to do so. This opens up the opportunity for a booty call on the way back from the market or whatever. Even in the countryside, a woman bringing her peasant husband his lunch could probably arrange a date in the woods on her way back.
I mean, sure, capitalism made it much more convenient, now There Is An App For That. But the only men in history who could really be reasonably sure that their kids were really theirs were men living in societies which were rather strict about policing women.
So my read of your argument is "what is bad about modernity is that it allows for more female infidelity than Saudi Arabia".
I think there is a common pattern where technological progress fixed a problem, which in turn created another problem, which was again fixed through technology. For example, in the good old days, child mortality was sky high. A woman might bury half of her kids or more. Modern medicine fixed that, which in turn might have meant that the population would double every generation. So we invented another ungodly modernist workaround: birth control. That in turn created some problems down the line, etc. Still, very few suggest that we should just go back to letting half the kids die of dysentery or whatever Just Like God Intended.
Which is a specific defining feature of all successful civilizations until very recently.
Yes of course. Adultery should be a crime. And arguably a capital one. How is marriage supposed to exist or men supposed to be expected to participate in a society that doesn't give them certainty the fruits of their labor will go to their line? Why sire children at all in such a system, where banditry naturally becomes the highest station?
You act as if cities were naturally dens of sin and conveniently forget we specifically evolved morality to solve such problems.
On this particular point, and as of now, the Arab world is civilized and the West is barbaric.
This isn't to say that female autonomy isn't an advancement in some sense, and it's always been a peculiarity of Western civilization to elevate such an autonomy. But paternity fraud is as antisocial as rape and needs to be punished as such. Or people will switch from orderly pair bonding to a free for all and thus dissolve society altogether, which is indubitably what's happening to the West.
Where "very recently" means the establishment of cisHajnal Europe as a distinct "western" civilisation around 1000AD, not the sexual revolution in the 20th century. Middle-class women having (and needing, to do their share of the work of the society) enough freedom to cheat on their husbands was enough of a thing in pre-modern society that Chaucer and Shakespeare both wrote about it (although it is probably significant that neither the Wife of Bath nor the Merry Wives of Windsor actually do the deed)
It's worth noting that the Romans believed that female adultery was very common in their society.
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Gangsters are a very common feature of dramatic fiction. Are we to believe that the societies that produce these stories are are dens of vice that idolize robbery?
Quite the contrary, the narrative arc is so compelling because the vices of the character allow us to expurge our passions through them through catharsis and thus retain our propriety.
Modern westerners are as tame as it comes, and yet they play a lot of very violent video games. Fiction and entertainment are escapism, and as such often depict what we are not, in a way to connect us to it or to critique it, or to critique us.
Was cuckholdry unheard of before the sexual revolution? Certainly not.
Did men enjoy certainty of paternity to an immensely higher degree when we had enforced monogamy? Certainly.
The idea that western civilization was always this sexually loose is preposterous.
I don't think the Wife of Bath or the Merry Wives idolise adultery - in so far as Merry Wives of Windsor has a villain, it is Falstaff and he gets his comeuppance in the finale. The point I am making is that they only make sense in a society where middle-class men couldn't lock up their wives the way middle-class Arabs do. Falstaff seducing another man's wife isn't good, but it is possible and Page and Ford have to worry about it, and ultimately given the nature of the society Shakespeare was living in and writing about, they have to rely on their wives' virtue to prevent it.
Early Modern cisHajnal Europe was much closer to your standard of "rather strict about policing women" than post-sexual revolution societies (but everyone agrees those are only able to exist because we have contraceptive tech that the Merry Wives didn't). But by the standards of pre-contraception societies, it was among the loosest.
The evidence of whether the actual nonpaternity rate has increased as a result of the sexual revolution is thin. There are a number of studies estimating Western nonpaternity rates over centuries by linking Y chromosomes to surnames - they all have small samples and large confidence bounds, but they converge on a range of 1-1.5%. Because of the methodology, this counts undocumented adoptions, including informal adoptions by stepfathers*, as nonpaternity but doesn't count cases where one male-line blood relative cucks another. See also this article about a Dutch research group that have reached the same conclusions more recently with a larger sample size and the added advantage of being able to cross-check against birth records rather than relying on surnames. They also cross-checked against a mitochondrial-DNA based estimate of nonmaternity (which you can't do with surnames), and discovered that nonmaternity is, as expected, vanishingly rare. The article says that the nonpaternity rate increased significantly in the 19th century (i.e. long before the sexual revolution) due to urbanisation - they say roughly 6% but don't give the error bars on the subsample.
The really hard part is estimating nonpaternity in the here and now. The taboo against unnecessary paternity tests means that the headline rate of nonpaternity from paternity testing (well north of 10%) is meaningless - it is an intentionally biased sample. To measure nonpaternity rates in cases where there isn't enough pre-existing suspicion for a DNA test to be ordered you need to get permission to test (anonymised, but paired) samples of father-child DNA taken for other reasons, like tracing genetic diseases. As far as I can see from the limited number of papers where people have got permission to do that, you get a nonpaternity rate of about 3% for the population as a whole, and 1.5-2% if you restrict the sample to unsuspicious cases. Which would mean that the sexual revolution reduced nonpaternity (presumably because cheaters use contraception) relative to the industrial-age urban baseline.
* I am aware that the manosphere considers this "pre-cucking", but it doesn't qualify under the conventional definition.
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I feel like a decent chunk of the insurance system defaults to this kind of approach if it can at all get away with it.
And people like when this happens and think insurance shouldn't go after the true culprit?
They don't but it's pretty illustrative of how the system works when money is involved.
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@stoatherd provided a good argument against this reasoning. In such a society, healthy people would avoid hospitals.
Likewise, the current situation discourages the adoptive father from supporting the child or even himself.
I actually think the adoptive father should be encouraged to raise the child as his own, key word encouraged. Coercion activates the innate human desire (common in men) to resist. No penalty for abandoning the child makes the father feel autonomous and "in control" when he raises them anyways, even if there's a (e.g. social) reward. (It also gives him control over the wife, but she still has the option of leaving him; if you think it's a bad or unfair outcome, can you think of a better or fairer one?)
I believe that is called rules utilitarianism, and maybe all actual utilitarians are actually rules utilitarians, and act utilitarianism is a straw man.
Maybe the current set of laws truly has no philosophical or moral backing, and I was wrong to tar anything with association.
I agree with your solution.
I don't think there's actually a coherent thing that "act utilitarianism" is pointing to. Its conceit seems to be that you can do some kind of causal surgery and ask: "Assuming that there are no downstream effects of this action (beyond some arbitrary cutoff?), and there are no implications of me being the kind of the person to have chosen this action... is it the best action?"
So there's two problems with this:
On point 2, the rule/act distinction is confused in a similar way that two-boxers in Newcomb are confused. If, in the organ scenario, you make the choice to kill an innocent person to take their organs... then you are the kind of person to do that. Which means you live in a society that generates people who choose to kill innocent people for their organs. You can't carve out the naive 1st-order utility calculation from the implications of people taking that choice, any more than in Newcomb you can go "I'm going be a one-boxer so I get the million dollars... and I'm going to take both boxes".
Act Utilitarianism seems to mostly exist as a strawman for people to say "utilitarians would kill you for your organs", which is silly, because they empirically don't.
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Literally legal precedent in the US.
For reference.
The amount of privlege the courts give women at times is absolutely insane.
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This exact scenario is the case in most of Europe. If a car runs a red light, the owner is fined. It doesn't matter who was driving. It is the same for speeding. The reason for the law is exactly as you said. It would be hard for an automated camera to find the driver (maybe less so now than 20 years ago though), but it can just read the license plate and check the registration.
This is an argument for making the mother fully responsible for the baby. They own the vehicle of birth. The father is the driver. The owner is responsible for who they allow to drive it. Exceptions can be made in cases where the vehicle is stolen, or the mother raped.
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The important difference is that it makes you responsible for who you allow to drive your car, and if someone steals it and commits traffic violations that cost you money, you would in theory (presuming that the guilty part got caught, which is a big if) be able to sue that person for damages to at least compensate those. So you have avenues to avoid or (in theory) get reimbursed the fine. In his scenarios, you're held responsible for existing in the vicinity of the infraction, that's much more unfair than being punished for lending your keys to someone you should know better than to lend your keys to.
There are societies in which a man a man owns his wife (or daughter) and her sexuality (or lack thereof) in pretty much the same way a man in the Western world can own a car. In such societies, the analogy would make a bit of sense, we might say "well, you were the prison warden of your wife, if anyone else had sex with her you were clearly in on it or negligent in your duties as a husband."
In the Western world, this is very much not the case. Both husband and wife commonly have plenty of opportunity to cheat without their spouse catching them.
In the Western world, the law is both
"You were the owner/prison warden of your wife, if anyone else had sex with her you were clearly in on it or negligent in your duties as a husband."
and
"The wife has zero duties whatsoever, including the duty not to get pregnant with another man's child. If a husband attempts to assert any duty, he will be punished."
at the same time.
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I don't think the red light comparison quite works, or at least it exaggerates the injustice in a way that is not conducive to a fair discussion of the subject (effective as it may be as polemic). From what I understand, the situations where the man is on the hook are those where he was married to the woman who had the child, and the justification is essentially that integrity of the nuclear family, or at least material safety for the child, is valued higher than justice for the man. (Contrary to many arguments, a ban on unilateral paternity testing even in alimony/child support proceedings protects intact families too, because not having it would incentivise doubting men to divorce so they could get the test.) They are not arresting a completely random guy just because he was easy to catch, and there is a good being defended (the family that is involving him, his wife and the disputed child) that is much more specific to him than the "recompense for red light violation" good that could really be fulfilled by just about anyone.
It's hard to build a plausible analogy with cars, but perhaps we could imagine a hypothetical society that takes valuing privacy of private residences to an absurd extreme. In such a society, if someone was murdered on private property, by similar logic the property owner could always be on the hook, unless everyone who entered the property consented to an investigation: someone has to be punished for the murder, the registered property owner is easiest to catch, as the owner he is felt to carry some measure of default responsibility for what happens in it anyway, and the alternative would be a sudden unexpected violation of privacy of everyone who went into the house which is roundly agreed to be a greater evil than the possibility of sending the owner (who anyhow would look a bit lame for not being on top of what's going on in his home) to jail innocent.
Grant_us_eyes brought up the case in another comment where a 16 year old female babysitter had sex and was impregnated by the 12 year old boy she was watching. The boy was ordered to pay child support. link
Yes the justification was the well-being of the child. I have no idea how a judge said that with a straight face as he ordered a child to pay child support. And to specifically pay it to a mother that is a convicted pedophile rapist of a child that was under her care. I hope the newly born child in this situation was a girl, otherwise he will probably be having a sibling/child in another 13 years, and then he will have to get a job at 14 to pay child support to his mother. Insanity.
What about the incentives created by forcing doubting fathers to raise kids that aren't theirs or pay their wages to a woman who tricked them? If there are multiple kids in a family and just one is in doubt then guess who that father likes the least? I'm sure that kid is not having a pleasant time even if the parents stay together.
If you were married to a woman that cheated on you and then had to pay money to that woman and that child? I cannot imagine how infuriated I would be. I'd probably be willing to destroy my own life to spite them. Live poor for 18 years, leave the country to get out of payments, etc etc. I'm also not a violent person, but its not hard to imagine what choices a violent man might make in that situation.
Maybe it works because the type of man that can be actually cucked heavily overlaps with the type of man that can be cucked by the justice system.
I'll admit the traffic light example is a little polemic, but I don't think it takes very much wrangling to become more accurate.
Imagine a business is being stolen from by one employee. The theft is large enough that the business will go bankrupt unless the money is returned, which is bad for all of the employees, the owner, and their customers. We would not think it is ok to just confiscate the savings of one of the employees to pay for the theft.
Is a business just not that sympathetic? I can make it more sympathetic. Its not a business its a non-profit. They make pacemakers for people that can't afford them especially children. If the non-profit goes under people will die, children will die. Can we take money from a random employee? What if its not random, can we pick the ugliest man with the biggest bank account and no family? At what point in this hypothetical does it become ok? For me the answer is never. (which is the same answer I have to Robert Nozick's The Tale of a Slave)
Unfortunately, under the old ideal of the family (the mother runs the house, the father slaves away at a day job and maybe is home on the weekends every now and then to give some words of stern admonition to the kids), the incentives there don't matter so much. The father's role is to provide resources, and exist as an abstract sort of role model and stabilising force.
I don't have access to stats, but I would assume that out of all the "cucked" men in the world (who are stuck with a less than certainly affair-produced child in a marriage), a bigger fraction continues more or less playing out the above role than actually resorts to violence or spiteful self-sabotage. To begin with, I would think that the woman actually having an affair when the couple is trying to conceive correlates pretty well with such a family model, because otherwise the woman simply would not have enough opportunity to cultivate one. If my partner managed to get an affair baby, my first reaction would be "when the f did she manage to sneak that in"; outside of work we are basically together all the time and we are pretty well-aware of each other's social calendars too.
I think this once again misses the circumstance that the cucked husband is not some random bloke grabbed off the street. You seem to want to pick a random employee, or the ugliest one, or whatever, but why are you so resistent to picking the most obvious default-responsible one, which is the CEO? If you made the example say that some employee embezzled money from an LLC, but the state refused to investigate and just put the CEO on the hook for it, we would be getting closer to the marriage situation.
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I get that this is rhetorical, but here's the actual answer:
He ordered a man to pay child support.
A man is not a child, and being male takes precedence; furthermore, men can't be raped (their age of consent is 0- no Woman would ever actively want to fuck a man so this doesn't create any downstream problems, especially the most objectively attractive kind of Woman, that being a 16 year old one). The male gender role is to do the fucking, so this was Consensual, thus forcing him to take Responsibility makes trivial sense.
The only reason we pretend men can be raped is just basic gender equality, but that's just a fig leaf: they get the title but none of the protections that being a victim of the same grants Women. If we could get away with it, we would set the age of consent for Women to be infinite, even within the confines of a marriage (because otherwise, a Woman couldn't have Her husband thrown in jail if he displeased Her by retroactively revoking consent -> claiming marital rape, as all sex with Women is illegal).
TL;DR It was base human instinct.
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That's obviously special pleading though, because divorce laws would look much different if that principle were applied consistently.
And given that material safety for the child can be achieved in other ways, it just tells us how little justice for men is valued.
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