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.)


Apparently inspired by this case (though there have been other stories of more extreme examples over the years), Räsänen sets out the argument syllogistically, which is helpful:

P1) Legal age is a cause of severe discrimination for some people whose biological and emotional age do not match their chronological age.
P2) People should be allowed to secure relief from severe discrimination against them unless this has excessive consequences.

P3) Changing a person's legal age would not, in the case of people whose biological and emotional age do not match their chronological age, have excessive consequences.

C) People whose biological and emotional age do not match their chronological age should be allowed to change their legal age in order to secure relief from discrimination.

There's at least two problems here, which're fairly easy to see, but which I'll try to make even clearer by simplifying the argument further.  For example, I'll chop out the bit about consequences for others, because I'll take it as a given that any plausible argument about correction for injustice will have a criterion about reasonable and unreasonable impacts on others - we can take that as a given.  With a little hacking, the argument can be boiled down to this:

P1) Legal age is a cause of severe discrimination for some people.
P2) People should be allowed to secure relief from severe discrimination against them.
C) People should be allowed to change their legal age in order to secure relief from discrimination.

I'd've swapped the positions of the first and second premises, but that's a stylistic thing.  The problem is, of course, that the argument is clearly invalid; we have claims about "securing relief" in the premises, but these have become "changing age" in the conclusion.  That has come from nowhere.  A change in terminology may be a forgivable sin in an argument provided that the terms are mutually substitutable in normal language; but that's plainly not the case here.  Neither means the other; at the most, the latter is meant to be an example of the former.

But it's not the only possible example - there're lots of ways that one might secure relief from discrimination, and so why this one has been chosen specifically is unclear.  Maybe we're supposed to think it's the best possible way of securing relief.  But that's neither argued nor, in any case, true.  If it were, we'd presumably have to accept that changing one's race is the best way to make good the harms and wrongs of racism, and changing sex is the best way to make good the harms and wrongs of sexism.  I take both those suggestions to be absurd; therefore the correlate is absurd here, too.  At the outside, doing those things might allow one to dodge (some of) the harms and wrongs of racism and sexism; but that's different.  Indeed, pretending that one can snap one's fingers and opt out of this kind of discrimination, even if it were possible, is undesirable, just because it leaves the structures that make the harms and wrongs possible to begin with exactly as they were.  So even if changing one's legal age were - mirabile dictu - one way of avoiding the harms and wrongs of ageism, we wouldn't have to accept that it's the only one.  That's enough to invalidate the argument.

But it's not even one possible way to avoid those harms and wrongs - let alone the best one - because it wouldn't work to begin with.  Here's one particularly absurd passage from Räsänen's paper:

It seems correct that if a person suffering from ageism were able to change his legal age to younger, he would face less discrimination in hiring.  An analogy might help illustrate this.  Certain minorities, such as Muslim immigrants, are often discriminated against in hiring because of their foreign names.  Studies in Sweden have shown that when immigrants have changed their names, they have faced less discrimination in hiring and their annual earnings have increased substantially.  That is because discrimination was reduced after the name change.
Similarly, if those who are discriminated against because of their age had the option to change their legal age, they would face less discrimination in hiring and at the workplace.  That is because others would not be aware of their chronological age and they would therefore receive more invitations for job interviews.

That people looking for work are discriminated against because of their names and ages is true.  But that's a reason for not requiring names or ages to be given - at least in the early stages of recruitment - and to have rules about the kinds of question that can be asked later on.  Of course, that won't get rid of the problems entirely: someone might take against a candidate at interview when that candidate turns out to be a south-Asian hijabi.  That indicates an injustice.  But the solution to that is an alteration in the attitudes of the person who discriminates, not a legal fiction constructed around the discriminated-against  Besides: even if the name on the application form was Joanna Smith... well, that façade would crumble as soon as she walked into the room.  The discriminator's behaviour isn't going to change if he's given a piece of paper that says that the candidate is an English protestant male despite appearances.  Likewise with age.

The other problem is clear from the phrasing of the first premise.  Recall:

Legal age is a cause of severe discrimination for some people whose biological and emotional age do not match their chronological age.

This phrasing is repeated throughout the paper: there is a lot of reference to chronological age not matching biological or emotional age.  Legal age is introduced as something - a fourth kind of age! - that we assume must match chronological age, but that should be possible to consider as matching biological or emotional age.

But what, precisely, are biological or emotional age?

If by making a claim about the former I mean that I feel as fit and healthy as I did when I was, say, 20, then that's all well and good - but it's hardly a reason to change how the law sees me.  More fundamentally, I'd simply deny that there is anything that it's like to be a given age.  If I say that I feel like someone much younger, that seems to be figurative. I don't think that we can impute any kind of truth-value to it.

Can we say more?  Maybe so.  Maybe we could - and should - move the focus from what's going on inside my head to what's going on outside of it.  Along these lines,  Räsänen invites us to "consider two fictional but plausible cases":

Alan (chronological age of 50) drinks and smokes heavily, does not exercise, eats unhealthily and has a stressful job.  Alan visits a doctor for a medical check-up.  The doctor examines Alan and tells him that his body is that of a man aged 60 years.

Bob (chronological age of 50) does not smoke or drink, exercises, eats healthily and has a less stressful job.  Bob visits a doctor for a medical check-up.  The doctor examines Bob and tells him that his body is that of a man aged 40 years.

While the chronological ages of Alan and Bob are both 50 years, Alan’s biological age is 60 while Bob’s biological age is 40.  Thus, biological age does not always correspond with chronological age.  This has been confirmed by medical research.

Except... well, no, it hasn't.  If it had, we'd have to admit that because of generally increasing lifespan and healthspan in the west over the past half-century, today's 50-year-olds are actually 40.  But that's absurd.  The problem here is that Räsänen is taking the phrase he uses much too literally.  When we say that a 50-year-old has the body of a 50-year-old, what we mean is that it displays the kinds of things that we would typically expect of someone of that age.  There's nothing normative to it.  If we say that someone has the body of a person much younger, all we mean is that they match our expectations for a younger person.  We don't mean that they are in any way actually younger.  And this is confirmed by medical research only insofar as that medical research offers us a few hints about the sorts of things that we might want to look out for in people who are 50 years old or thereabouts: menopause, prostate problems, and so on, depending on sex.  If I hit 50, or 60, or 70, and there's still no sign of anything at all iffy with my prostate, nobody is going to wonder whether I might not have been born in '76 after all.*

Much the same applies to emotional age.  We might say that someone is immature, but that's a million miles away from giving us cause to wonder whether he's actually younger than his birth certificate says.  "Smith is not acting his age" is a criticism, not a call for legal reform.  In fact, appeals to emotional age say even less than do appeals to biological age, because there is at least something material to which the latter might hope to attach.

 

In other words, what we have in Räsänen's paper is an invalid argument that seeks to defend the absurd by appealing to the meaningless.  Oh dear.

 

(Oh, and yes: I did briefly consider making the headline something along the lines of "You're only as young as the woman you feel", but I decided against it.  So you don't have to tell me that I could have used that.)

*Ha.  Since I'm not registered with a GP, and doubt I ever will be, nobody'll ever know.  Thus I win.