Why is it considered morally wrong for a man or a woman to have a romantic or sexual relationship with someone significantly younger than themselves?

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I don't know that it is considered morally wrong, simply in virtue of the age difference. It's true, to be sure, that people are often inclined to speculate about the reasons a younger person might be involved with an older one, but such speculation is typically just gossip. It's also true that such relationships can pose certain kinds of challenges. But, as I said, I don't know of any general reason to regard such relationships as immoral simply in virtue of the age difference.

Of course, it is another matter when we are talking about minors, but I don't take the question to concern that kind of relationship.

If the case does concern minors, as it might, then the question is still an interesting one. Why do we arbitrarily cut people off from certain sorts of behaviour at a certain age? We know that many of them might be more mature in character than those of legal age, and that many of legal age are incapable of entering into a relationship in an appropriate way. I suppose the answer is that any cut off age is going to be arbitrary and that the state has to legislate in such a way as to put most people into plausible categories. Most minors would be thought to be unable to know when they are being exploited or to have too little experience to know what the character of a particular relationship really is. This holds even for those who are not minors but still rather young.

I generally gree with Heck and Leaman have said, but would add a proviso: I am inclined to think that there is something (not without exceptions, of course--even numerous exceptions) in the kind of suspicion that people tend to have when they consider relationships between people who are unusually far apart in age--a suspicion that grows considerably more acute when the younger one is very young (i.e. a legal minor). In another response I made (on a question about animals), I noted how significant the value of reciprocation is, as a measure of relationships. People very different in age can, of course, enjoy fully reciprocal relationships. But differences in age usually also tend to be associated with differences in perspective, in interests, in worldly wisdom, and in lots of other areas that are profoundly important in relationships. So, when one tends to be suspicious of romantic relationships between people of very different ages--and all the more so when one partner is extremely young--it may well be because one is not unreasonably uneasy at the thought that the relationship itself may be very unequal and unreciprocal.

And there's another reason, that does not seem to me to be mere "gossip": I would hazard a guess that most such relationships pair much older men with much younger women--while again acknowledging that there are exceptions to this generality. Given the prevalence of sexism, such relationships seem to raise reasonable suspicions that they are embodiments of widespread sexist attitudes towards women, who suffer disproportionately from discrimination as they age, and for whom standards of attractiveness (including youthful appearance) are especially oppressive.

So I don't think it is always just prejudice and speculative gossip...but I also think that each relationship is unique and that suspicions based on generalities can never be secure guides by which to judge others.

The idea -- "I would hazard a guess that most such relationships pair much older men with much younger women--while again acknowledging that there are exceptions to this generality. Given the prevalence of sexism, such relationships seem to raise reasonable suspicions that they are embodiments of widespread sexist attitudes towards women, who suffer disproportionately from discrimination as they age, and for whom standards of attractiveness (including youthful appearance) are especially oppressive" -- ignores the mountain of evolutionary biological, sociobiological, and evolutionary psychological work done in this area that suggests that the pattern older man-younger woman is to be expected. This work might very well be false or full of oversimplifications, of course, in which case the charges of "oppression" and "sexism" in the pattern might be rightfully made. But the idea quoted too cavalierly writes off the evolutionary/biological underpinnings of such a pattern.

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