Male-Female Differences in Philosophical Intuition

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both agree that there is a pay differential between men and women and that it’s due to discrimination and that the government should outlaw it.

Parenthetically, I wonder what the pay story is when people change sexes or represent themselves as having changed their sex. And I wonder whether the responses of these change groups change to that of their adopted sex when tested in controlled experimental situations.

Those acquainted with economics understand that pay differentials occur for a number of reasons other than discrimination. Using power to eliminate the difference thwarts factors operating in the market and has serious negative effects that harm women, men and the operation of the market.

But it is not these arguments or the argument that using government power in these circumstances is aggressive to which I wish to call attention. I ran across something very different than these concerns in an article written by two philosophers. The article is “Gender and Philosophical Intuition” by Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich dated September 26, 2010. They are interested in the significantly different responses to questions of philosophical intuition in controlled experiments. The paper contains many of these tests in brief. They are simple, easy to understand and fun to take, and you can compare your answers to those of the men and women who took the tests. Interestingly, men and women give very different answers. This leads Buckwalter and Stich to hypothesize that women tend to self-select out of studying philosophy and becoming philosophy professors and that this helps explain why philosophy departments are about 20% women, not 50%. The reason, under this hypothesis, is that current philosophy employs a lot of intuition technique and women find themselves in discord with it.

What we do not know about male-female differences is very great, and the paper points out areas that might profitably be investigated. The authors also mention that other literatures in experimental social psychology and experimental behavioral economics find gender differences.

Now, as a scientist, I find all of this extremely intriguing. As a resident of upstate New York where both Clinton and Sanders have made appearances at the University that once employed me and as a reader of the local news, I observe a knowledge gap between both candidates and what I’d call the scientific reality, be it the well-known work in economics that has sought to explain the pay differential or this newer work on male-female differences that has ramifications in labor markets and in many other areas of human behavior. For example, it may well be that females are better suited to take care of little children than males. Questions like these can be addressed, at least to some extent, by scientific methods as the philosophy paper and other literature demonstrate.

This “knowledge gap” separates the politician from the scholar or scientist, the latter having been my career. In my reckoning, those who want to use power to effect changes or to make what one considers “progress” (those who speak of eliminating the gender gaps consider it progress when these gaps are narrowed) should have the burden of the evidence placed upon their shoulders to show that such uses are morally correct and actually do good, not harm. If they are acting in ignorance, as both Clinton and Sanders are in this case, or worse, if they are acting upon personal motives of gain or manipulation by interest groups or pandering to voter prejudices, we certainly cannot make a case for supporting their recommendations. The evidence in case after case after case is that such uses of power in ignorance do great damage to us. Obama, for example, is now expressing regret over the U.S. actions in making war on Libya. Bush’s attack on Iraq is another huge blunder. In both cases, the negative results were predictable and voices were raised against these decisions.

The process in this democratic republic of placing the burden of proof upon the officeholders is weak, messy and subject to circumvention by those in power. They have the power. They manipulate the news and opinion. They dispense favors. They make deals to win crucial support. It is known that oligarchic forces are strong and that bureaucratic and deep government forces are strong. It is known that money affects decisions.

All of this results in a continual flow of cases in which power acts as if it has knowledge or is doing something good, moral and even necessary when, in fact, the opposite conditions typically prevail. Clinton and Sanders act as if they know something about a gender gap and can close it, which they consider to be progress and rectification, but the reality is that they know almost nothing about this relatively complex situation. The research on male-female differences sheds a newer and additional light on understanding gender differences and roles. In this light, attempts to erase gender differences without knowing why they exist in the first place or attributing such differences to factors like discrimination that are unlikely to be a correct or complete explanation is a fool’s errand. Making radical alterations in such matters, especially by using institutions of power, is done in ignorance, without bridging the knowledge gap. It can do great damage, and finding evidence that it already has done great damage should not be difficult.

Our system grants huge powers to officeholders and allows them to persuade voters or otherwise institute changes in conditions of knowledge gaps such as these. Is this the best we can do? Hardly. At the very least, we should have limited government. We should be constantly seeking to narrow our ignorance, and we should also constantly be seeking to remove power and personal decisions imposed on us collectively by those who are steeped in ignorance like candidates Clinton and Sanders, or who, if they do know more than they communicate, which I very much doubt, are intentionally pandering to get elected.

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