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?

The best I can make of it is that we might imagine someone saying something like "I identify as a 25-year-old, and this is important to me."  But that's only illusorily useful.  If someone says "I identify as a 25-year-old", are they offering that as a claim about the world, rather as one might identify an insect as belonging to a particular sub-order?  But that won't tell us anything about the desirability of legal age change, because - just as an entomologist might be wrong - there is scope for error here.  The facts might be against us.  (It would be a strange thing to say to begin with, but I'll put that to one side.)  Or are they expressing some kind of membership of a group, rather as someone might identify as a supporter of this or that football team?  Here, there is no reliance of facts as there would be in the other sense: if one says that one is a supporter, then (unless one habitually wears the rival team's colours) one is.  But the price we pay for this is that, because the statement makes no attempt to attach to the world outside our heads, it can't grip on to that world.  In short, it's not clear why anyone else, much less the law, should care.  Identify as being 25 (or anything else) all you like: you need much more than that to show that you actually are 25, or that anyone should have to treat you as such.  And since I can't really see what's going on with the identity claim, I'm utterly without a paddle when it comes to assessing whether "matters to them greatly" is worth taking seriously, what it should mean for law, and so on.

Anyway.

I get another namecheck later on in the response:

My critics claim that the terms I use are problematic. Saad would prefer physiological age instead of biological age, Simkulet would rather speak of physical and emotional maturity and Brassington seems to deny the existence of biological age altogether.

Except that I don't.  What I say is that "biological age" is figurative; that, beyond that, it is hard to see what Räsänen means by it, given that he seems to think it (a) literal, and (b) different from chronological age.  Or, y'know, age.

I'm still mystified by the original paper.  I can't help but to think that Räsänen's paper, and his response, is a warning against crowbarring "identity" into ethics: it rarely seems to generate nearly as much clarity as fog.  So it goes.