A common objection to my discretionary spending is that paying for escorts while remaining in arrears on child support is “obviously immoral.” I think this rests on scope insensitivity. The moral salience of one’s own children is vivid and local, the relevant question, however, is not which expenditure feels more legible, but which allocation of marginal dollars produces the greatest expected utility.

Suppose I have a fixed monthly budget B. The conventional model treats child support as non-negotiable and commercial intimacy as pure consumption. This seems question-begging. A more neutral accounting is:

U(B) = W_c + W_e + S − D

Simplifying terms:
W_c = welfare transferred to my children
W_e = welfare transferred to service providers
S   = stability / productivity gains from not feeling romantically deprived
D   = legal, reputational, and household disutility

The neglected term is W_e. Child support concentrates resources in a single household already partially buffered by my ex-partner’s income and family network. By contrast, escort expenditure redistributes money to independent adult workers operating in a sector with unusually direct cash transfer mechanics. If one takes seriously the effective-altruist intuition that dollars should flow to where they do the most work, it is not obvious that the biologically adjacent recipients dominate.

There is also a distributional argument. The median child-support dollar is spent on rent, groceries, or school supplies, all of which are important but low-variance goods. The marginal escort dollar, by contrast, may support someone facing immediate liquidity needs, rent shortfalls, or precarious income volatility. If your moral framework already endorses cash transfers to financially constrained adults, it seems inconsistent to become deontological merely because the transfer also solves a second problem for me.

Finally, several readers underestimate S, the stabilization benefit. A less lonely and less resentful version of me is likelier to remain employed, less likely to spiral, and more capable of future earning. Under plausible assumptions, a policy that preserves my medium-term income could dominate strict compliance in the short run.

This is not to deny costs. The principal downside is D: court exposure, family conflict, and the possibility that my children someday read this post. But unless one assigns infinite lexical priority to “my own kids” over all other welfare recipients, the issue is at least decision-theoretically open.