What Locks & Keys Can Tell Us About Sex, Covid & Other Things

 

Pretty much everyone locks their doors, their bikes, their sheds, etc - and the lock and key industry is worth a fortune. But most people are not thieves and would never dream of stealing from another person. Locks and keys are a necessity for the entire population because of the actions of a tiny minority. The size of the industry is disproportionate to the number of people who make it necessary.

Locks provide a good illustration for some of the other things in life with a similar status. The minimum wage is one example. Most people pay their staff according to the marginal value of their labour. Occasionally rogue employers might pay their staff an exploitative wage - but they are in a tiny minority. Consequently, the minimum wage does a lot of harm, because the scope of the legislation is disproportionate to the number of people who make it necessary.

The same is true with so-called hate laws. People should have the right to express their views freely, with only extreme acts constituting threat or danger being investigated by the police. Again, hate speech laws do a lot of harm, because most people are just too easily offended, and not in any danger, so the scope of the hate crime legislation is disproportionate to the number of people who make it necessary.

The fact that most people are law-abiding when it comes to most laws means that requirement of these laws generally tends to be disproportionate to the number of people who make those laws necessary. But that fact doesn't tell us whether a particular law is desirable or not. After all, relative to the population size, not many people are murdered, raped or burgled, but we still want murder, rape and burglary to be illegal. The wise distinction, I think, is that in suppressing our right to murder, rape or burgle we are not imposing any unreasonable costs on society (as per the Harsanyi model). Whereas things like hate speech laws and the minimum wage do impose many costs because they censor or prohibit valuable human qualities associated with freedom and utility that would otherwise be allowed to flourish more freely. For simplicity, in the future you could think of the good laws as being Harsanyi-efficient and the bad laws as being Harsanyi-inefficient. Pick any law or regulation or policy and you should be able to assess which category you think it might fall under. Sometimes it will be obvious, other times less so.

Covid is a bit like the lock situation. Most people won't be very badly affected by catching Covid, but a minority will, so the economy is decimated and social value diminished to save the few. Opinions will vary about whether the net costs of Covid policies will turn out to outweigh the benefits. My feeling is, we'll have to play the long game and see about that, especially when we have a better idea about how thinly those costs will be spread. I doubt it's even possible to properly measure the costs and benefits - the calculus is probably too complex and epistemologically intractable for the naked eye.

The murder of Sarah Everard was absolutely tragic, but the panicked response about how safe women are has generally been disproportionate to the severity. That doesn’t mean women shouldn't be careful and men shouldn't be responsible, but the response has been politicised for the gain of a minority of attention seekers and virtue signallers. Here's a tip for spotting if something is likely to be based on a political agenda: if masses of people show no tangible signs of concern before an event that doesn't directly affect them, and then an immediate rush for concern after an event, it's highly likely (although not always) the case that the situation is being manipulated for personal gain. Like locks, the size of the panic here is disproportionate to the number of people who pose a threat to women's safety.

That said, it's good for all safe men to be aware that because of the minority of unsafe men, it's not easy for women walking alone to feel totally safe - so it behoves us men to do our best at all times to signal by our behaviour that we pose no threat. By doing that, we don't just increase the chances that women will feel safer, we also increase the chances that unsafe men will stand out more, and help women to act accordingly to avoid danger.

Finally, there is an article doing the rounds telling us we should prepare to redefine the binary categories of sex, because science is making them more and more obsolete. In fact, towards the end of the article, on the question of whether a person is male or female, and whether the varying categories of determination (anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes) cause a clash that undermines assignations of sex, we are told that:

“My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.”

No, no, that just won’t do. The fact is, in the vast majority of cases – by anatomy and by the sex category (male or female) individuals choose to identify as – the vast majority of individuals are easily and autonomously categorised as male or female. However far science progresses, that will always be true. While there are a minority of intersex cases that belie more straightforward categorisations (and we should, of course, be respectful, tolerant and loving towards them), there are empirically grounded methods of determining sex categorisations. Even in the foetal stage the male and female genital plumbing develops to form sexual development and the concomitant levels of testosterone or oestrogen, determining external genitalia and making sex usually easily definable.

The tone of the article tells us that because gene mutations result in chromosomal irregularities (departing from the standard XX and XY) and anomalous hormonal signalling, we should begin to get with the program and recognise that humans are a melting pot of male and female sex categorisation. But I don’t think this is a wise or accurate response. Just because we are a patchwork of cells with different genetic make-ups, that doesn’t stop us being in large part distinctly male or female. Even in the rare cases when an individual's anatomical sex seems to be at odds with their chromosomal sex, that usually doesn’t mean one is intersex – people generally identify with what they sense about their anatomy and feel perfectly comfortable doing so. The fact that there are a wide range of variations in genes that have mild effects on individuals does not equate to the person’s sex needing to be re-categorised.

It’s important to remember that maleness and femaleness conform to a Gestalt identity that is far greater than the parts that make up the sum. The sand on Norfolk beaches is yellow. The yellowness is because of the oxidised iron in the quartz formation. But I am more sure that the sand appears yellow than I am that it contains oxidised iron. Similarly, in the vast majority of individual cases, people are more certain that they are either male or female than they are at odds with what science may tell them they are when there are minor genetic anomalies in their make-up. As with the other cases, like thieves and locks, the size of the population for whom the clear cut categorisations of male and female constitutes a problem is vastly disproportionate to the number of people for whom male and female identity is a sine qua non primacy of their identity and personhood.