Is patriarchy unethical?  

 

• Great ape males compete to dominate and control as many females as possible.
• In humans this competition is cooperativised via social norms, which form a culture of patriarchy.
• We believe there was a ~2 million year gap where members of the human family tree were strictly egalitarian, had no power structures, and did not practice patriarchy.  
• Patriarchy is a form of morality, but is ultimately unethical because it fails to maximise human well being - it only maximises men’s well being and not women’s also.  

 

Introduction

 

At least since the Agricultural Revolution, most human societies have been patriarchal societies that valued men more highly than women.  No matter how a society defined 'man' and 'woman', to be a man was always better.  Patriarchal societies educate men to think and act in a masculine way and women to think and act in a feminine way, punishing anyone who dares cross those boundaries.  Yet they do not equally reward those who conform.  Qualities considered masculine are more valued than those considered feminine, and members of a society who personify the feminine ideal get less than those who exemplify the masculine ideal.  Fewer resources are invested in the health and education of women; they have fewer economic opportunities, less political power, and less freedom of movement.  Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal.  

Yuval Noah Harari - "Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind"

 

Patriarchy is defined as the system of human social norms aimed at the supremacy of males and the subordination of females, and the control of female sexuality. Sexism is defined as the enforcement of these social norms, and misogyny as the punishment meted out to females who break them (Manne, 2018). Patriarchy is a form of morality because it is a way of achieving normative goals (in this case, male reproduction) socially. Therefore it can be understood from the point of view of evolutionary ethics. For example, women may be "slut-shamed" for being promiscuous, on moral grounds.

The hypothesis is that human patriarchy is an innate part of our psychological and cultural make-up: i.e., we are born with it.  How would it be transmitted through time? Genetically or culturally? It is perennial: it exists in every known human culture except where it is actively opposed by a strict ethos of egalitarianism and autonomy (Endicott and Endicott, 2008). Perhaps patriarchy is simply reproductively convenient for men, and that is why it keeps returning. We believe that patriarchy has a U-shaped history: present in our great ape ancestors, absent for almost 2 million years of strict egalitarianism, then recently reappearing along with other power structures.

What would be the implications for human behaviour, if patriarchy is evolved and innate, rather than a product of modern society, like capitalism?  How should men and women respond to this knowledge?  Should it be used to justify oppression of women and girls, in some way?  Should it be used to recognise patriarchy for what it is, and in doing so, help us to recognise the egalitarian alternatives?  

While patriarchy represents the surest and lowest-cost way of maximising male reproduction - dominance, control and coercion - we may observe an alternative male reproductive strategy: making oneself into a high-quality mate, and allowing women to make a free choice. The ethical alternative to patriarchy (governing by men for men), is not matriarchy (governing by women for women): but egalitarianism, or equal rights.  

The question is: what style of male behaviour represents the easiest and most efficient way for men to reproduce?  In an interpersonal environment of male-male competition to dominate females, patriarchy represents the most efficient way for males to reproduce.  In an environment of strict male-male and male-female egalitarianism, then domination, control and aggression do not work and are actively discouraged by the culture.  In this environment, an egalitarian style of male-female relations is what women expect from men and culturally is expected from everyone.

As is usual in evolutionary ethics, the raw material for these hypotheses is biological, archaeological and anthropological information which forms an overall big picture.  

 

Evolution of patriarchy

Male and female reproduction

There is biological pressure to thrive, survive and reproduce maximally.

In mammals at least, males and females reproduce differently. Males can produce millions of sperm; females can produce a few eggs that require high parental investment. Accordingly, to reproduce to the maximum available extent, it is in the reproductive interests of males to seek greater quantity of mates, and of females to seek greater quality.

Humans are great apes. Among great apes, and many other primates, each male attempts to dominate and control as many females as possible for the purpose of reproduction by coercion (i.e., in this situation, the females do not get a choice) (Smuts, 1995). Dominant or "alpha" males will attempt to exclude other males from reproduction by controlling all the available females for themselves (Galdikas and Briggs, 1999; de Waal, 1982/2007). In bonobos, male control is successfully opposed by strong female sisterhood (Smuts, 1995; de Waal and Lanting, 1998). As well as dominating and controlling "his" females, each male will attempt to defend them against other males, thereby defending his reproductive success.

In great apes there is sexual selection for larger males, as larger males with more fighting ability are almost entirely the ones that get to reproduce. It is arguable whether the sexual selection is by females for larger males or by larger males for more females.

Competition, cooperation, and social norms

Importantly, in great apes, patriarchy is carried out in competition between males: each male competes with other males to dominate all the available females. A social norm is a way to behave cooperatively in otherwise competitive situations (Tomasello, 2016). Therefore, in making patriarchy a system of social norms, the human race has largely removed the competition from the hands of individual men, to achieve mating access to females, and placed it in the hands of society to handle collectively and cooperatively. This partly explains why so many women also buy into the patriarchy as morally "right": because our systems of social norms claim that it is so.

U-shaped history of patriarchy

The ancestors of the genus Homo, the australopithicines, had males and females of markedly different sizes (Roberts, 2011), which suggests sexual selection for larger males, which in turn suggests male-male competition for females, i.e., individualised competitive patriarchy. The closest relatives of humans are chimpanzees and bonobos. We shared a common ancestor with them around 6 million years ago. From archaeologically observing the body sizes and habitats of the first ancestors of humans as distinct from chimps and bonobos, we believe that they were all alike in their social habits: i.e., living in dense forest populations, practising multi-male, multi-female mating (Chapais, 2008). When environmental conditions are more harsh, fewer individuals per unit area can be supported, and it may be that males are then able to dominate a manageable number of females. It is consistent with this evidence to say that australopithicines may have been pair-bonded, polygynously (one male with several females).

Self-domestication of the human race

While other great apes live in competitive dominance heirarchies socially, humans (also) are egalitarian with a flat power structure and a desire to keep it that way. We believe that the human race must have gone through a relatively quick process of "self-domestication" at some stage (Tomasello, 2016), changing from a competitive to a cooperative way of life. The evidence points to this being around 2 million years ago when the genus Homo first appeared. The males and females of Homo erectus, one of the very first human species, were nearly the same size, for the first time in the history of human evolution.

We believe that self-domestication may have been caused by a number of factors occurring at the same time.

• Stone tools came into use around 2.5 million years ago and these could have been used between males as weapons, thereby somewhat levelling the playing field physically between males.
• There was a need to cooperate in the scavenging of large animal corpses, to scare away scavengers of other species, and to control or eject those human dominants or hogs who would otherwise take more than their share.
• If human pair-bonding first arose in australopithicines, even polygamously, then by 2 million years ago the (polygamous) family structure would have been well established. This may have had a pacifying effect on males who now could recognise those individuals they were related to, and hence were more likely to help and less likely to injure (Dawkins, 1976). After self-domestication and the introduction of (we assume) strict egalitarianism, it is consistent with current evidence to say that sexual pair-bonding would have been culturally monogamous, and divorce easy (Endicott and Endicott, 2008).
• Cooperative breeding likely arose at this time in response to the harsh new conditions that gave rise to the human race (highly variable savannah and open woodland): if mothers have help, then they are more likely to successfully raise their young. Cooperative breeding means collectively sharing child care among a small group.

The brain size of Homo erectus was the first to exceed the normal range in great apes in primate evolutionary history, and cooperative breeding is thought to allow for bigger brain size because it provides greater energy inputs (food and physical helping) to the mother and growing child, and this allows the mother to have more than one infant at a time, each infant being allowed a longer growth time before adulthood. Otherwise, in serial child-rearing, the species is constrained by the "grey ceiling" where a mother only has the chance to grow a limited number of infants in one lifetime, below which the species will die out.

The result of an expensive big brain is a longer bodily growth time, leading to a longer life span. Fossil teeth of Homo erectus in East Africa are found to have grown more slowly than in comparable great ape species.

While cooperative breeding allows for a greater brain size, it is not, in itself, an evolutionary pressure that creates a requirement for a greater brain size. Therefore the explosion in human brain size must have been driven by other factors, still unknown (Perry, 2021).

Cooperative breeding may have had a further pacifying effect on group members, in addition to the other concurrent factors that facilitated sharing and egalitarianism rather than hogging and competition.

 

Egalitarianism, autonomy, and immediate-return societies

 

Batek regarded each other as basically equal in their intrinsic value and therefore worthy of respect. Although some people, particularly shamans, were held in especially high regard, they neither expected nor received special treatment from others. All Batek felt that they deserved the same consideration as everyone else, and they were not shy in saying so.

Kirk M Endicott and Karen L Endicott - "The Headman was a Woman - The Gender Egalitarian Batek of Malaysia"

 

We distinguish immediate-return and delayed-return societies, economically speaking (Woodburn, 1982). The difference is that in immediate-return societies, there is no delay between making an investment (in effort, resources etc.) and reaping the rewards of the investment. For example, if you kill a deer, that deer is then immediately available for consumption. In delayed-return societies, which includes virtually every modern society, there is a time lag between making an investment (e.g. making and setting a trap, building a machine, etc.) and achieving a return on that investment in the form of something that provides you with utility. In a delayed-return society, people generally depend on specific others to help them, leading to power imbalances.

It is plausible, and evidence points towards the idea, that humans lived in immediate-return societies for most of the 2-million year history of our family tree. These kinds of societies have features that promote egalitarianism and autonomy. Woodburn (1982) gives four reasons for this:

1. Social groupings are flexible and constantly changing in composition.
2. Individuals have a choice of whom they associate with in residence, in the food quest, in trade and exchange, in ritual contexts.
3. People are not dependent on specific other people for access to basic requirements.
4. Relationships between people, whether relationships of kinship or other relationships, stress sharing and mutuality but do not involve long-term binding commitments and dependencies of the sort that are so familiar in delayed-return systems.

James Woodburn - "Egalitarian Societies" (1982)

In this kind of society, no one person may command another, individual rights are asserted, and people may live without patriarchy (Endicott and Endicott, 2008). This is because women have the liberty and autonomy to escape patriarchal rule, and still be able to live. Perry (2021) gives some reasons for this:

• independent economic security and access to sharing network

Both women and men are able to procure their own food directly, without necessarily having to rely on others; and are freely provisioned by the sharing network of the group.

• non-dependence on specific people

An individual may depend on the group as a whole, but does not have to depend on specific people.

• free movement of people

If two people are in conflict, one may easily move to live away from the other.

• dispersed authority

There is no institutionalised authority: each person is recognised as an authority in a particular sphere by virtue of their skills and experience, but nobody is in overall charge. The head man or woman is simply a kind of wise guide for the group who can persuade others through tact, intelligence and experience.

• culture of non-violence.

In the Malaysian Batek (largely immediate-return) society, the culture of non-violence means that women cannot be coerced by force (Endicott and Endicott, 2008).

Simon Perry - "Understanding morality and ethics" (2021)

 

Patriarchy and power structures

Patriarchy is hegemonic: it seeks to maximise its own power (Becker, 1999; Manne, 2018). Power (control and domination) is part of its nature. The maximisation is consistent with the maximising impulse to reproduce. Therefore we may say that the reason patriarchy seeks to maximise its power is because, in general, biologically, males seek to numerically maximise their reproduction, and power is the means to achieve it. After all, every active silverback gorilla seeks to maximise his power to dominate and protect females and to repel opponents, in order to maximise his reproduction.

Accordingly, patriarchy takes advantage of any existing power structures by excluding females from them by every available means, and disempowering females at every available opportunity, ultimately by force if necessary (Smuts, 1995). Arguably, organised religion and patriarchy take advantage of each other's power structures.

It is believed that patriarchy first reappeared in the human race when we began to stop being nomadic and become sedentary, around 10,000 years ago. When humans settled down to practice intensive agriculture and animal husbandry, family groups would have been separately confined to homesteads, giving males more opportunity to control the movements and activities of females and the resource base of the household, and thereby making females more dependent on them. Thus, it became costly for females to resist male control if they were not able to procure their own resources, and patriarchy was able to reassert itself.

Historic reproductive skew

Genetic analysis of present-day populations suggests a human reproduction ratio of 3:1 in favour of females, between 140-30,000 years ago - three women reproduced for every man who reproduced. After around 12,000 years ago, when we began to be sedentary, this rose to approximately 16:1 (Hagen and Garfield, 2019). On the face of it, this suggests polygyny in ancient human nomadic hunter-gatherers. However, it may also indicate serial monogamy, selected by women. It certainly appears to indicate extreme polygyny in settled communities.

 

Conservatives and liberals

Liberals tend to hold an optimistic view of human nature, that people are inherently "good" and need to be free in order to pursue their legitimate goals. Conservatives tend to believe that humans are inherently selfish and imperfectible, and that their base instincts need to be reined in (Graham, Haidt, and Nosek, 2009). Tomasello (2016) posits three stages to human moral evolution: peaceful, small-group, open-borders living for most of 2 million years; large cultural groups from around 150,000 years ago; and settled, warlike city-states from around 10,000 years ago. The liberal point of view seems to reflect the non-patriarchal small-group stage, and the conservative world-view the later, large-group stages when patriarchy and power structures had again taken hold.

 

Interpersonal and cultural patriarchies

We distinguish between

1. interpersonal, domestic patriarchy carried out between individuals, i.e., in the home and family
2. collective, cultural, societal patriarchy carried out society-wide using a system of social norms and power structures: e.g., those embedded in organised religion.  

 

The morality of patriarchy

Morality is defined as the achievement of normative goals (thriving, surviving, reproducing) jointly.  Patriarchy is a form of morality, since it represents a male reproductive strategy.  

If morality is “what people do”, then ethics is defined as “the best that people do”, or “the good”.  In a study of seven cultures around the world, Smith, Smith, and Christopher (2007) asked samples of young people to spend twenty minutes writing down their conceptions of what makes a good person.  The answer, overwhelmingly, was benevolence, its values summarised as prosocial interpersonal behaviour, with “restrictive conformity” or the restriction of antisocial interpersonal behaviour a distant second (Schwartz, 1992).  The currency of this is interpersonal benefit and harm.  In other words, the good is overwhelmingly defined by a representative sample of lay people as the maximisation of human welfare and the minimisation of human suffering, interpersonally.  Interestingly, fairness and justice barely figured at all in the lists of values and attributes, except as a popular value in Turkey: “not prejudiced”.  

 

Accordingly, patriarchy may be seen as unethical because it does not maximise human welfare: only the welfare of men.  

 

"Natural" does not equal "good".  To equate the two is to commit the naturalistic or is-ought fallacy (Curry, 2006).  The convenience of patriarchy for men, and hence, their impulse to be patriarchal, will always be in tension with ethical values of compassion and egalitarianism towards women.

 

 

Patriarchy and narcissism

Patriarchy may be seen as the narcissism of the male gender as a whole: self-centred, dominant, controlling, entitled, belittling of the opposition. If someone is my property, then of course I feel entitled to take what I want from them, without it troubling my conscience.

As such, personal and cultural patriarchy dovetail with personal narcissism and they can reinforce each other, such that a narcissistic man is more likely to abuse his female partner using patriarchal reasons than a non-narcissistic, neurotypical man.

 

Patriarchy and misogynistic incels

Misogynistic incels are defined as young men who blame feminism and women in general for their own lack of success with the opposite sex. As such, they are straightforward victims of the patriarchy. Instead of pursuing the option of making themselves more (psychologically and socially) attractive, they are commanded by the patriarchy to double down on dominance, control and abuse. Who wants to be dominated, controlled and abused? Nobody. Hence, misogynistic incels are locked into a tragic, irrational, patriarchal doom-spiral.

 

Pair-bonded morality

Patriarchy is related to sexual pair bonding.  Pair bonding may be enforced in a patriarchal way, such that female violations of pair-bonded morality are judged as worse than males’.  In any case, pair-bonded morality frowns on sexual promiscuity.    

Pair bonding has a morality associated with it, because it is a way of achieving normative goals (thriving, surviving, reproducing) jointly. The virtues of pair-bonded morality are faithfulness, communication, cooperation, honesty, transparency, duty to one’s partner, etc.  The closest relatives of humans (chimpanzees and bonobos) do not practice sexual pair-bonding, and since our common ancestors had similar bodies and environments, then we believe they had similar social habits (Chapais, 2008).  

 

Female competition occurs almost exclusively in pair-bonded species, such as many birds and a few mammals. In those cases, females try to gain or defend a long-term tie with a male. Our own species is a good example: research by David Buss has demonstrated that whereas men get most upset at the thought of their wife or girlfriend having sex with another man, women dislike most the thought that their husband or boyfriend actually loves another woman, regardless of whether or not sex occurred. Because women look at these things from the perspective of relationships, they are more concerned about a possible emotional tie between their mate and another woman.

Frans de Waal - "Chimpanzee Politics - power and sex among apes"

Reference: Buss, Larsen, Westen, and Semmelroth, 1992

 

Alternative view: Becker (1999)

 

But sexual access to women on men's terms is not the driving force behind patriarchy. The driving force is men's fear of other men and their need to achieve power and control to avoid domination by other men.

Mary Becker - "Patriarchy and Inequality: Towards a Substantive Feminism"

 

Sexual access to women on men's terms is precisely the driving force behind patriarchy, in its individualised form in great apes. The competition between human men is now largely handled by social norms (patriarchy) which promote cooperation in otherwise competitive situations.

 

Conclusion

Patriarchy is not ethical since it fails to maximise human welfare.  

Patriarchy is not inevitable: it's just, collectively, the easiest and surest way for men to reproduce. Interpersonally, there exist opposite values of egalitarianism and autonomy and the alternative reproductive strategy of men making themselves into high quality mates.

 

References:

Becker, Mary - "Patriarchy and Inequality: Towards a Substantive Feminism"; University of Chicago Legal Forum, Issue 1, Article 3, Volume 1999

Buss, David M; Drew Westen; Randy J Larsen; and Jennifer Semmelroth - “Sex Differences in Jealousy”; Psychological Science; July 1992

Chapais, Bernard - "Primeval Kinship – how pair-bonding gave birth to human society"; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2008

Curry, Oliver - “Who’s Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy?”; Evolutionary Psychology; human-nature.com/ep - 4 , 234-247, 2006

Dawkins, Richard - "The Selfish Gene"; Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1976

Endicott, Kirk M and Endicott, Karen L - "The Headman Was a Woman - The Gender Egalitarian Batek of Malaysia"; Waveland Press, Long Grove, Illinois 2008

Galdikas, Biruté M F; and Nancy Briggs - "Orangutan Odyssey"; Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1999

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Hagen, Edward; and Zachary Garfield - "Leadership and prestige, mothering, sexual selection, and encephalization: The computational services model": https://osf.io/9bcdk/ ; 26 May 2019

Manne, Kate - "Down Girl - The Logic of Misogyny"; Oxford University Press, 2018

Perry, Simon - "Understanding morality and ethics", https://orangebud.co.uk/Understanding%20morality%20and%20ethics.pdf , 2021

Roberts, Alice - "Evolution - the human story"; Dorling Kindersley, London 2011

Schwartz, Shalom H - “Universals in the content and structure of values: theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries”; Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol 25, 1992

Smith, Kyle D; Seyda Türk Smith; and John Chambers Christopher - “What Defines the Good Person?  Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Experts’ Models With Lay Prototypes”; Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, May 2007

Smuts, Barbara - "The Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy": Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1-32, 1995

Thornton, Alex and Katherine McAuliffe - "Cognitive Consequences of Cooperative Breeding? A Critical Appraisal" - Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter, UK; Department of Psychology, Yale University, USA

Tomasello, Michael - "A Natural History of Human Morality"; Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 2016

de Waal, Frans B M - "Chimpanzee Politics - power and sex among apes"; The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD 1982/2007

de Waal, Frans B M and Frans Lanting - "Bonobo - the forgotten ape"; University of California Press, Berkeley CA 1998

Woodburn, James - "Egalitarian Societies": Man, New Series, Vol. 17, No. 3. (Sep. 1982), pp. 431-451