Double Morality. Column in ComputerreOnline #11

A proud woman from the land of Pu came to Teacher Mu.
— Why are women who sleep with many men condemned, while men who sleep with several women are sometimes even praised?
Teacher led the woman to a tea‑ceremony table, where several cups and teapots stood.
— Pour from one teapot into four cups… How is that?
— Fine.
— Now pour into one cup from four teapots. And…?
— Also fine.
— Fool! — shouted Teacher Mu. — You have ruined the parable!
The double standard—different criteria for judging men’s and women’s behavior—has been characteristic of human societies at all times. To demonstrate this, following D.A. Zhukov (Biological Foundations of Behavior. Humoral Mechanisms. St. Petersburg: “Legal Center Press”, 2004 — 457 p.), I will retell a joke with a two‑thousand‑year‑old beard.
The Roman emperor Octavian Augustus saw a Greek who looked very much like himself. “Did your mother ever visit Rome?” the emperor asked. “No,” the Greek replied, “but my father did.”
Both we and the ancient Romans understand the point of this story. Two major differences: Octavian’s father slept with a Greek woman, or his mother slept with a Greek man. Why?
A great many explanations for this oddity have accumulated. Let us compare three of them (we will not take Teacher Mu’s version into account, as he did not fully develop it). Here they are.
Explanation 1. At the suggestion of the Serpent, Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and offered it to Adam. Therefore it is women, not men, who should bear the primary responsibility for violating moral prohibitions.
Explanation 2. From a social standpoint, men and women differ in no way, but men conspired, enslaved women, and imposed a morality that reflects male interests.
Explanation 3. Public morality reflects innate strategies that optimized the reproductive success (the success in leaving offspring) of men and women in earlier stages of our species’ development.
Of course, these explanations are not equivalent. The first cannot be criticized without offending believers. To dispute the second is to attack the ideals of democracy and political correctness. The third, however, can be both debated and twisted, mocking its foolishness. Imagine someone who claims that our morality is based on natural selection, as in some animals! Read the leading anthropologists, philosophers, philologists, politicians, and the like. None of them explain concepts of duty, morality, chastity, sin, and dignity by referring to animals. Humanistic discourse circulates within its characteristic concepts and does not need to reach beyond its bounds into the realm of natural sciences.
Moreover, there is a strange asymmetry in debates with proponents of various dogmatic doctrines. Imagine, for example, a debate between a believer and an agnostic. If the agnostic says: “Your faith is based on an uncritical acceptance of moss‑covered tales that are imposed on you to control your behavior,” that is taken as an insult to faith. If the believer says: “Atheists lead an immoral life far from spirituality because they deny the source of truth and goodness; they will be punished with hellish torments for their sins,” that is neither an insult nor an attack on another’s freedom. It is a “moral sermon.”
But can one argue with feminists on logical grounds? From the fact that traditional societies repeatedly celebrated male morality, can we not infer that there are fundamental social differences between men and women? In some countries, such a statement can get you fired and blacklisted. Yet are feminists persecuted for the foolishness and illogic of their claims?
The role of a conduit of lofty moral ideas—whether sacred truths or politically correct ideals—immediately places a person in a position beyond criticism. Do you think this is clear only to us, while the deceivers remain unaware?
Explanations grounded in the scientific method can not only be criticized (criticized, not defamed or mocked!) but must be. Science (natural science) is a complex system of facts, explanations, and technologies, whose reliability is ensured by continual cross‑checking for consistency.
Alright, enough about the double standard in ideological debates; let us return to the double standard of female and male infidelity…
How to explain it from an evolutionary‑ethological perspective? Let us start with a simpler example. In different cultures researchers compared how grandmothers care for their grandchildren born of their sons versus those born of their daughters. Grandmother care among Australian Aboriginals is hard to compare with that among English aristocracy. Yet one can compare the contribution of grandmothers among Aboriginals (in the number of caterpillars collected for grandchildren) with that among aristocrats (in the value of bequests mentioned in wills). In all cultures, when choosing between grandchildren of sons and grandchildren of daughters, grandmothers statistically prefer… Do you guess?
This phenomenon is less obvious than the double moral standard in judging infidelity, and therefore no ready‑made explanations referring to biblical stories or ideological constructs exist for it. Selection more strongly favored grandmother care for grandchildren of daughters, because any grandmother’s daughters are her own grandchildren. With grandchildren of a son, the grandmother can be sure of her genetic relatedness no more than her son can be of his paternity. Children by a “different” father were not rare at the time when selection shaped human reproductive strategies, and they are not rare now.
Let us examine gender relations in a primitive human society, where natural selection formed the basis of our innate strategies. First, a peculiarity of our species is adaptation through traits acquired during learning. This requires a very long childhood and an extended period of dependence on parents. In a primitive society, it was extremely difficult for a mother to raise a child without male assistance. In these conditions, women and men organized their interactions so as to increase the number of their viable offspring.

Thus, a woman receives two main things from a man: care and genes. A man increases his contribution to future generations in two ways: by siring children with women and by enhancing the survival of some of them through parental investment (care).
Two different strategies can be successful for men. The one who appears to women as a bearer of superb (from a reproductive standpoint) genes benefits from leaving offspring with as many partners as possible and not caring for them. The offspring will be so numerous that a substantial portion will survive. The one who finds it harder to win many women benefits from choosing one and caring for the children they have together. If he has the opportunity to sire children who require no care elsewhere, this only increases his contribution to the next generation.
What course of action is optimal for a woman? First of all, choose a caring partner and receive care from him. And from whom to bear children? “Donjuans” (“Rzhev lieutenants,” according to Anatoly Protopopov) produce more children than caring homebodies (“Obolensky cornets,” per Protopopov). Hence, it is advantageous (from a maximization‑of‑offspring perspective) to live with a homebody and to have children with a seasoned philanderer. You know that during ovulation the probability that a woman will have sex with a random acquaintance and then forget about it increases manyfold? A woman’s consciousness is unaware of ovulation, and there are no secrets for her innate programs here. She only has to do it so that the regular partner does not suspect and does not withhold care—covertly.
Is it advantageous for homebodies to allow their wives to become pregnant by outsiders? No! Men who raised other men’s children left fewer of their own. Selection will favor those who curtailed obvious or hidden side contacts of their partners. Thus, intolerance toward female infidelity was supported by selection.
Conversely, a woman (biologically) loses little from her partner’s infidelity. He may have children on the side… as long as he cares for those who live with him. There was no significant selection for intolerance toward male infidelity, and this asymmetry is the cause of the double standard.
We live in a different world. We have partially broken the link between sex and reproduction. We are influenced by what we have learned. Our psyche can radically alter the action of innate programs. Yet our view of the world and human behavior reflects the experience of a chain of ancestors who managed to outplay competitors and leave successful descendants…