The Moralistic Fallacy

Article here. Excerpt:

'City Journal's Kay Hymowitz weighed in over the holidays with a response to our Dec. 16 column, in which we faulted the premise of her earlier article titled "Boy Trouble." She maintains that the main body of the article (which we described as "informative and important") is responsive to our criticism:
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That said, Hymowitz's hypothesis that family breakdown causes "boy troubles" is an entirely plausible one. But there's still a problem with it: That framing makes the argument circular. Recall that she posed the question as (among other things) why "poor and working-class boys" fail to become "reliable husbands and fathers." She ends up concluding that the cause of fatherlessness is . . . fatherlessness.

... But identifying a causal cycle begs the question if the question is about the ultimate cause. If your child is sophisticated enough to ask how human beings came into existence, he won't be satisfied if you answer by explaining where babies come from.
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The 2011 figures (which exclude Hispanics) were 29.1% for whites and 72.3% for blacks--a more than eightfold increase for whites and more than threefold for blacks. A cycle of fatherlessness operating over two to three generations cannot be sufficient to explain such an enormous rise.

So what does? In our view, a dramatic change in incentives owing to two major social changes that were just getting under way when Moynihan wrote.
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That brings us back to the moralistic fallacy for which we faulted Hymowitz in our column last month. Completely absent from her analysis of why boys fail to grow up into "reliable husbands and fathers" is the crucial factor of female choice. If young women are less apt to marry because they are focused on education and career, and more willing to engage in sexual relationships unaccompanied by marriage or the expectation thereof, the incentives for young men are dramatically different.
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Nonetheless, the vast majority of children who are growing up without fathers are doing so in large part because of their mothers' choices. In our column last month, we half-facetiously raised "the converse lament that young females are insufficiently interested in 'becoming reliable wives and mothers.' " Let us now raise it half-seriously. It is trivially true that an unmarried woman who bears a child is not a reliable wife. If Hymowitz is correct about the baneful effects of fatherlessness on boys, such a woman also is not a reliable mother, at least to her sons.'