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Is Age Discrimination Acceptable?

Jun 10, 2020 Peter Singer

When the coronavirus overwhelmed Italy’s health-care system, a working group of the Italian Society of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation, and Intensive Care reluctantly supported rationing by age. They were right to do so.

MELBOURNE – Should we value all human lives equally?

This question arose in an acute form in March, when the coronavirus overwhelmed Italy’s health-care system. Envisaging a situation in which there would not be enough ventilators for all patients needing one, a working group of the Italian Society of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation, and Intensive Care reluctantly supported rationing by age, while also taking into account frailty and the severity of any other health problems. The group’s aim was to support those with the greatest chance of survival and likely to have the most years of life ahead of them.

Proposals for age-based rationing were discussed in many countries, and often met with opposition. In the United Kingdom, for example, Catherine Foot, director of evidence at the Center for Ageing Better, said that such proposals show “a dangerous kneejerk ageism, where the older we get, the less value we have and the less important our lives are to save.”

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Peter Singer

Writing for PS since 2001
192 Commentaries

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and founder of the non-profit organization The Life You Can Save. His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), Rethinking Life and Death, The Point of View of the Universe, co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, The Most Good You Can Do, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, One World Now, Ethics in the Real World, Why Vegan?, and Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction, also with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. In 2013, he was named the world's third "most influential contemporary thinker" by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.

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Michael Public Jun 12, 2020

You are professor of Ethics and express an opinion here about 'acceptable' or what society should tolerate. The issue lies with ethics itself, and not with your opinion. Any one size-fits-all type of treatment for any issue is never successful in practice because it constantly meets the reals World of unintended consequences and rapidly changing situations. Hence, ageism IS perfectly legitimate in the workplace because young people behave differently to older ones (like being much more malleable on average) and so they are different and so have different suitability for the position, regardless that on paper a 50 year old and a 25 year old are both suitable for the position. To compensate build proper social welfare systems for those between jobs.
- Peter Carruthers Jun 21, 2020
  
  Aren't you conflating a group characteristic (old people are less malleable) with individual characteristics (candidate A, aged 50 is less malleable than candidate B, aged 24)? You also argue by singling out a group characteristic that you assume is undesirable to the employer, and may only be a negative characteristic in certain roles or functions. If the two candidates are equally qualified and equally capable of fulfilling the job, surely choosing by age alone is ageism.
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vivek iyer Jun 11, 2020

Utilitarianism needs to embrace the Price equation. Kin selective altruism is a real thing and displayed in all relevant populations. The thought experiment proposed- drug A or drug B- is silly because it fails to take into account relative reproductive success rates. Suppose you are a 40 year old man. You can have a lot of progeny, if you have resources. Your son may not have that possibility till he has accumulated money. So the better strategy is to let the virus weed out the weaker immune systems among the young while ensuring that successful males- and that success may only become evident at around the age of 40- have a lot of kids with different mothers over the next ten years. This argument works for women as well, if there is a 'grandmother effect'- i.e. child rearing outcomes are better if granny is around and this translates into reproductive fitness.

The fact is, in a Normal population, it makes sense to let the young fend for themselves- let natural selection weed out those with poorer immune systems or metabolisms- while concentrating medical resources on the old who, arguably, can endow inclusive fitness on superior lineages.

The reason 'Muth rational' self-interest should cause us to oppose all types of wage, price or service provision discrimination is because
1) Knightian uncertainty obtains. The regret minimizing strategy is to commit to the least amount of obnoxious inequity as possible. Discrimination aint nice. Don't do it unless you have to do it and even then let the thing be defeasible.
2) non-linear dynamics. A guy who has just had a baby can have lots and lots of babies over the next ten years. Women can have much fewer but there may be a 'grandmother effect'.

We should value all lives equally unless it is in our interest not to do so. But that is a matter of 'economia'- discretionary give and take- not 'akrebia'- rigid deontological calculus.

In economics, we can distinguish between 'pooling equilibria', based on cheap talk, and 'separating equilibria' based on costly signals. Discrimination may appear to be based on 'costly signals' but this is not the case. It is mere stupidity. The right way to incentive compatible mechanism design is to have signals which are costly to acquire for everybody- otherwise you have adverse selection and degeneracy back to the pooling solution- which is a tragedy of the commons.

It is very sad that Utilitarians get seduced by the notion that a discriminating monopolist can get rid of market failure in zero marginal cost industries. They jump to the conclusion that discrimination is 'Rawlsian'. This is not the case. Only opportunity cost matters in Econ and it is a global concept. Coase kept pointing this out but no one listened.

Discrimination is wrong. Making smart self-interested decisions isn't wrong. If you explain your reasons, the other's sense of grievance disappears. A bargaining game can commence. A better correlated equilibria becomes available. This is an 'equitable' Baconian 'negotiation'. To be fair, the maths to model this was intractable till quite recently. But now kids can play around with simulations in Mathematica- or maybe there's a smartphone app by now. So this stuff is behind the times. Ageism is not okay. Kids can prove this mathematically. The fact is the US is going to be ruled by a guy in his mid to late Seventies. Obama's cohort is being wiped out by the woke generation. Clearly, the free world is going to be led by a living proof of the folly of ageism. Just as the Obama Presidency dispelled some myths about dark skinned people (like myself) so too, whether we like it or not, we have to accept that Society has rejected ageism. That's a good thing.

Collective insurance schemes must not embrace bad actuarial models. They must factor in Knightian uncertainty and non-linear dynamics. Otherwise they will become incentive incompatible and degenerate rapidly. Thus, for purely pragmatic reasons, philosophy must be disintermediated from decision making in this area.
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