Feeling my Age

My last post here was a reply to a paper by Joona Räsänen in the Journal of Medical Ethics that had argued that there was a case for allowing people to change their legal ages.  I... wasn't convinced.  And, encouraged by people on Facebook, I submitted a slightly tweaked version of the reply to the JME; it's now published, and available here.  I was not the only critic - and it's notable that the criticisms that have been published raise very similar points.  For his part, Räsänen has provided a reply to some of the criticisms.

Readers: it's not convincing.  I'll be brief.

"Iain Brassington and William Simkulet both raise the following objection against legal age change," he says, paraphrasing us thus:

Ageism is not a reason to allow age change but a reason to require that age is not asked while recruiting employees.  Age change should not, therefore, be allowed because there is an easier way to solve the problem of discrimination: restricting access to one’s birthdate.

OK.  That seems like a reasonable précis, and it attracts a twofold response from him.  First, if recruiters are allowed to ask but applicants allowed to withhold age, that is a sign that there is something to hide, and so it would not solve the problem.  This is possibly correct, as far as it goes - but that's a symptom of ageism, and so it's not quite clear where we should go next.

The second option, Räsänen continues,

is to prohibit everyone from revealing their ages in job applications to ensure that no-one can be discriminated against because of age.

(This is the position towards which I lean, by the way.)  But, he objects,

[t]his option might reduce discrimination but the cost is too high. Age is an important part of people’s identities. If we do not allow people to reveal their ages to others, we are committing a serious moral wrong because we are restricting their freedom on something that matters to them greatly.

I have real problems with this.  Bluntly, I don't know what it means, and I can't even speculate about what it's supposed to mean.  What are we supposed to make about a claim that "age is an important part of people's identities"?  What work is being done by "identity"?  Indeed, is any work being done by it at all?  In what sense is age important to whatever it is that "identity" is supposed to mean?

What a Drag it is Getting Old

There is an ongoing argument across social media and some areas of academia that sometimes gets very, very nasty indeed, and I'm not going to dip my toes into it here, or even name it.  If you know what it is, you know, and if you don't, it won't matter much to what I'm about to consider.  One of the areas of dispute has to do with the intersection between "identity" and - for want of a better phrase - material reality (or facticity, if you're so inclined).  A lot of people take it as clear that the two are very different; hence one cannot identify or stipulate certain facts about the world into being other than they are.  Age is a paradigmatic example of that.  Having been on this planet a shade over 42 years, I can't be anything other than 42, for the simple reason that that's what I am.

Not so fast, says Joona Räsänen in the JME, in what appears not actually to be meant as a reductio ad absurdum.  There is, he thinks, a case to be made for legally changing one's age.

Unfortunately, as we'll see, it's not a very strong case.  (If I'm so sure of my position, why not write it up as a paper in its own right?  Well, because I don't think it takes long enough to dismiss the argument to generate a paper, even for a journal with as low a word limit as the JME.)