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This is just appallingly sad:
When Seattle oncologist Dr. Marc Chamberlain was treating his brain cancer patients, he noticed an alarming pattern. His male patients were typically receiving much needed support from their wives. But a number of his female patients were going it alone, ending up separated or divorced after receiving a brain tumor diagnosis.Dr. Chamberlain, chief of the neuro-oncology division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, had heard similar stories from his colleagues. To find out if these observations were based in fact, he embarked on a study with Dr. Michael J. Glantz of the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute and colleagues from three other institutions who began to collect data on 515 patients diagnosed with brain tumors or multiple sclerosis from 2001 through 2006.
The results were shocking. Women in the study who were diagnosed with a serious illness were six times more likely to become separated or divorced than men with similar health problems, according to the report published in the journal Cancer.
As John Cole said regarding this study: “I’m really not sure how some people live with themselves.”
… Apparently, people like Newt Gingrich appear to live with themselves just fine:
Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery.
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DOWN THE VINE
Syndication
And while leading an impeachment charge while engaing in the same thing that he was blaming Clinton for.
You are apparently required to rip out your hypocrisy regulator when you become a republican politician
Women more attached to partners than men, film at 11.
Regarding Newt's hypocrisy, Matt Cooper put it well…
i always did like that quote
Also…
nice, i hadn't seen that before
To elucidate further (stop if I'm boring you) it's a physiological fact that women are more sexually selective than men. They have fewer gametes, and the energy cost of sexual activity is much greater (i.e. carrying a child to term). Men have plenty of seed to go around, so they can be more promiscuous. Higher selectivity for women is a biological imperative.
Applied to the cancer scenario, women are more invested in their partner than men are. The partner may get cancer, but there's a lot of other things about them that she's decided she likes, making her less likely to cut her losses and abandon them.
Whereas for men, there are a lot of other possible partners out there who fulfill most of their (less selective) requirements while not having brain cancer.
You can construct an ethical system in which men and women are expected to care for their partners equally, with the express goal of producing egalitarian results. But it should come as no surprise that, in a free society, adherence to such ethics is weaker than the underlying biological imperatives.
John Cole's "I’m really not sure how some people live with themselves" is the statement of an armchair philosopher contemptuous of the world-as-it-is. It's exactly this sort of idealism which, applied to other areas, leads to absurd conclusions like "they should great us as liberators".
interesting, although you're ultimately just making a reductionist argument based on innate predispositions. i have all sorts of innate urges and predispositions -- e.g., wanting to kill the comcast guy that shows up 5 hours late to an appointment by driving a remote into his ear -- but the fact that I have this urge doesn't bear on the ethical question of whether I should do it or how it would make me feel if i did it. when john cole says "I’m really not sure how some people live with themselves", he's reacting to the act of dumping a spouse once they're diagnosed with a serious illness through an ethical lens that would make him feel bad if he did that and makes him look upon others that do that with scorn. yes, there are a lot of barely-evolved sheeple in the world that only have a basic and infantile ethical compass that doesn't incorporate nuance related to complex ethical scenarios, but if we were to set our ethical guideposts by what the sheeple do, and what our innate urges drive us to do, what's the point of having an ethical system in the first place?
I don't think we should set our own ethical guideposts accordingly, only that we should be aware of how things work in practice, plan accordingly, and not be blindsided by things like the higher likelihood of a male partner leaving.
If Cole said "People shouldn't abandon sick partners", it would be an acceptable value judgment.
But people are going to fall short of such selfless ideals for many reasons, especially biological ones. To be puzzled or surprised at how they "live with themselves" is a statement of ignorance.
If Cole was not being ignorant--but instead insinuating their lives are worth less than those with different biological predispositions--I'm not sure what to say to that.
I just looked over his post, and more telling is the way it's introduced: "The findings of this research really suck"
Really? It "sucks" that male-female biological differences result in different social outcomes?
Or, from the NYT post he cites, it's "shocking" ?
Or as you wrote here, "appallingly sad" ?
I call nonsense.
It's sad when people leave sick partners, but to an educated person there's no mystery nor cause for sadness in men being more likely to do so than women.
For me, it is "appallingly sad". I am unfortunately given over to a latent hope that humanity someday prove itself more noble than its current state. It always makes me sad when people kill people, or spouses leave their dying spouse, or beat up on a weaker person, or pistol-whip a gay teenager until he dies.
Your construct leaves no room for empathy, no room for being able to picture yourself, or a loved one, in the shoes of the one who was done wrong. Just because we intellectually "know" that men are predisposed to be cads and lots of people are predisposed to kill people or rape children, doesn't make the exposure to numbers that cast this in stark relief not "sad".
These are the wrong numbers for that.
Suppose we found gay men are 6x more likely to die from AIDS than straight men. Would this be sad or shocking?
Suppose we found the incidence of breast cancer in women is a hundred or a thousand times greater than the incidence of breast cancer in men. Would this be sad or shocking?
No. What could be sad or shocking is some absolute number of incidence, or the number relative to non-incidence within the same group.
That incidence varies according to gender or orientation groups is not something to be sad or shocked about.
> Your construct leaves no room for empathy, no room for being able to picture yourself, or a loved one, in the shoes of the one who was done wrong
False.
> I am unfortunately given over to a latent hope that humanity someday prove itself more noble than its current state.
No problem here either. If you want to look at trends over time and see if the situation is getting better or worse, be it among a subgroup like men or in general, that's fine.
All I object to is getting worked up about banal male-female differences, as if different biologies having different results weren't perfectly ordinary.
Now you've gone completely apples-and-oranges on me. Statistics like the ones you cite do not involve a volitional ethical choice. Yes, statistics showing that men generally die from heart attacks at a younger age than women wouldn't "shock" me or be "appalling sad". There is no window into the fundamental ethical construct of humanity when you're dealing with something that doesn't involve volitional ethical choices.
In the case of men leaving their sick wives more than women leave their husbands, we are dealing with a volitional ethical choice. Just because someone has a innate predisposition to assault people, or rape people, or leave a wounded mate on the plains in order to find a new, healthy and fertile, mate to inseminate, does not mean that that person is overwhelmingly compelled to act on such a predisposition. Because many of us are not simply animals, one quality that makes us human is the ability to make a complex, volitional ethical choice that ultimately boils down to: do the right thing, or do the wrong thing. Lots of people make the right choice, and that pleases me. Some people choose to do the wrong thing and the inherent window that that provides me into their ethical compass (or lack thereof) is what makes me sad.
Why do you persist in going off on tangents that have nothing to do with what I wrote? I didn't say those other things involved a volitional ethical choice, only that numbers showing relative incidence are equally banal, and not something to be sad or shocked about for this reason. There may be additional reasons, such as your desire to only preoccupy yourself with things that involve volitional ethical choices. But those additional reasons are beside my point, which you haven't addressed.
Anyhow, if you're genuinely interested in comparing volitional ethical choice, you should do it between groups that have more volitional control over their differences, or that involve differences that are sociological rather than biological, something we have more control over.
For example, if it was discovered that Baptists are six times more likely to leave sick partners than Methodists, that could be worth some attention.
If it was discovered that people in 2009 are six times more likely to leave a sick partner than people were in 1899, that's worth some attention.
Those are situations where ethical and societal differences matter.
Whereas you can't draw ethical conclusions about differences between men and women that are based in biology.
To give a fanciful apple-to-apples comparison, consider a world in which half the population, A, is tempted by Satan with degree X. The other half, B, is tempted with degree 6X. And it turns out that the B group sins 6 times more than A.
Can we draw any interesting conclusions about A and B's volitional propensity for sin (unethical behavior) from this data?
In this contrived example, and assuming a linear system, we know their volitional propensity is the same--and we know B was simply more tempted.
In the case of men and women leaving partners, we can't determine propensities for a fact, but we do know that biologically men are more "tempted" to leave sick partners, so it shouldn't shock or appall us that more of them do so.
The only meaningful ethical conclusion you can reach from the cited survey is rather weak: "Some people don't live up to an ethical ideal." Or in commonspeak, "we're only human."
You're welcome to be sad about that if you like, but I won't be spending too much time bemoaning it. "Appallingly sad" seems clearly over the top.
at least this has been an interesting conversation. that's why I like you gherald -- always pushing the envelope. kind of reminds me of my role in my last relationship (hint: we argued a lot)
to the point at hand, i think i see the point where we're talking past each other. what makes me "sad" about the study is the window it gives me into the ethical choices of people. when i read it, as a gay man -- for example, i picture myself as a sick husband with a partner/spouse of many years who loves me dearly and then in a short span of time runs for the high hills and finds someone else because I got sick. putting myself in those shoes makes me sad. just like putting myself in the shoes of matthew shepard makes me sad, or putting myself in the shoes of hurricane katrina victims makes me sad.
it's not only the prevalence of the act of leaving a sick spouse that bothers me (although it does), it's also the empathy i feel for people that have been victims of a poor ethical choice.
I would think that a large selection of samples should be taken before such a conclusions can be made. I can still remember my father caring for my mother for fifteen years as her health deteriorated and she died at 69. He did not put her in a home, but cared for her himself. And then my siblings had a cow when he remarried a short time after her death, to a much young woman. But the point is that he took personal care of her for over fifteen years.
The Kohlberg/Gilligan research on moral development may inform this discussion also. In brief, K's old research found boys superior to girls, and G said "Whoa!" and her research found boys and girls developing differently but equally (such as in a softball game, if a boy is hurt they cart him off the field and continue the game, whereas the girls stop the game and care for her). As men and women, to move into the realm of moral maturity, typically the "stretch" for men is to learn to care for others as much as they care for themselves, and for women it is to care for themselves like they care for others. Development post-stretch/maturity is then quite similar. Perhaps schu's dad made the stretch and thus stayed, whereas many do not. Further, there may be situations where a women stays, when indeed she should not, but stays to her detriment since she's not yet made her stretch.
He was raised to believe that marriage was till death do you part. Part of a Lutheran marriage ceremony is an oath to each other and a oath to God about your commitment. Unfortunately many people today do not think about their commitment or they have signed on to the situation ethics selection of what is good for them.