Welcome, featuring thoughts on categorisation, equality and blank slate activism

Welcome to Science: Good Bad and Bogus, a name which I freely admit I borrowed from a very interesting History and Philosophy of Science course I took in second year university (thanks Dr. Slezak). The central goal of this course was to solve the demarcation problem, which for the uninitiated, is the problem of defining science. How do we carve up all the investigative disciplines into Science and Non-Science? This, like many other fascinating philosophical discussions, is essentially a categorisation problem. As human beings we have an innate and generally very adaptive desire to categorise the world into groups of A's and B's. We run into trouble of course, when the world isn't as neatly demarcated as the categories we are attempting to fit it into. We are especially bad at the boundaries of categories. Consider the very emotional abortion debate, which centres on when something is "alive" or has "personhood". In other words, when does an entity move from the category "Biological Mass" into the category "Human Being"? Nobody in the pro-life camp believes that all biological masses deserve moral consideration and nobody in the pro-choice camp believes that all human beings should be killed at whim. The disagreement comes when we try to agree on the category boundaries. 

This introduction nicely provides the background for the main topic of this post, which would be a coincidence too amazing to be believed, if I hadn't planned it that way. In recent adventures on the internet (especially on the forum I am a member of) there has been lots of discussion around equality. Naturally this thorny topic provides a great deal of discussion that can essentially be reduced to discussions of categories of people. Which categories are valid for making judgments upon? Which categories are even real? Should we be discriminating on the basis of categories at all? Interestingly, in the context of categorisation, discrimination just means learning to differentiate between members of different categories. Generally, we learn to discriminate based on features that are most predictive of differences between the categories. That is, we pick the features that most reliably signal category membership. And we tend to be very good at it. It isn't very often that we latch on to a feature that is totally non-predictive and persevere in using it (we do sometimes pick a feature that is less predictive, but correlated with, another more important feature).

With that in mind, is biological sex a useful predictive category on which to make judgments? Can gender equality be achieved whilst acknowledging there may be differences between sexes*? 

The debate centres on the following points:

1) Is sex a real (biologically extant) category?

2) Is sex a useful (predictive) category?

3) Is sex distinct from gender? I won't really be addressing this point, in this particular post.

Arguments around gender equality have typically centred on the first two points. It is articulated as follows; sex isn't a biological reality at all and doesn't predict any reliable differences (behaviourally, psychologically or otherwise). There is no sex; we are all the same, Q.E.D. equality. Leaving aside the fact that I believe I can empirically demonstrate that the first two points are incorrect, deciding that we are equal because we are identical is a disturbing and dangerous assertion. It is essentially placing the cause of equality on the incorrect notion that we are all born tabula rasa (blank slates). We are all identical to begin with; therefore we are all equal in our potential. The problem with this argument is twofold:

1) It is flatly contradictory to the pro-equality mantra that diversity is a wonderful, enriching thing (which I wholeheartedly believe). We can't be diverse if we are all identical.

2) It places equality on very unsteady ground, because anytime anyone demonstrates that there are in fact differences between people, it is seemingly falsified. 

People aren't entitled to equal treatment because we are all carbon copies of each other. We differ in numerous beautiful ways (height, weight, sex, intelligence, neuroticism, extraversion...) and many of these differences are very appropriately used to determine our suitability for jobs, partners, and hobbies. People are entitled to equal treatment because at the most important level, that of humanity, we are the same. We are all members of this superordinate category and we have decided together that membership means a right to certain standards of life. We might one day even extend this category to include members of other species, but sharing this high level category doesn't obliterate the important within category diversity. The reality is that like with all of our other categories, the world is far messier and shaded that the categories contained within our minds. Evidence suggests we can train ourselves into forming fuzzy categories with semi-permeable boundaries and these sort of categories hold out the best hope for us understanding and thinking about thorny issues. 

Since categorisation is an inescapable facet of human cognition that is often extremely useful, it seems perverse to force ourselves to completely ignore them. Instead, we ought to acknowledge that in the absence of all other information, they provide a statistical 'best-guess' of what a person might be like. This can, and indeed should, be refined as new and more person specific information comes to light. It is only when categories are overgeneralised and impervious to disconfirmation that they become stereotypes.

For the final say on this topic, I hand over to Steven Pinker, whose ideas have been instrumental in helping me form my own

"As many people have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that all people are clones."

                                - Steven Pinker
 

*Whenever I talk about differences, I mean at an aggregate level. There are for example reliable differences in the average height of men and women, with men being statistically significantly taller on average. This doesn't mean an individual woman can't be taller than an individual man. This will always hold true for any differences discussed.