14 April 2012
Here’s an interesting game to play with a group of friends: ask each person for the oldest and youngest ages that they would consider for a relationship with a partner. The age of the participant obviously affects the boundaries, but you might be surprised by how much the offered ages differ amongst people of similar ages.
Many of my friends - in their late teens early twenties – offer quite low upper limits, and it is normally possible to persuade them to ‘up’ this boundary by suggesting celebrities that are older – for instance, “You wouldn’t date someone over the age of 35? Huh, it’s just that Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz are 36 and 38…”
A rebuttal to this is often that the participant would hook up with those celebrities, if given the chance. For a night. But a full relationship is different. “You should be allowed two limits, one for just sex, and one for proper relationships,” they may suggest. On the upper limit this seems reasonable, you might be happy to fool around with a woman two decades (or three) your senior, but know that you would not want to strike up a ‘proper relationship’ (with ‘talking and stuff’ presumably), with them.
On the lower age limit, however, the conversation may turn a little chilly. For this situation, I am assuming that everyone playing the game is over 18. When it comes to offering the lower boundary, you will be unlikely to find many people touting any number under 17; even though the age of consent is 16. Although there wouldn’t be anything illegal going on if a 22 year old offered 16 as their lower boundary, every socially aware individual recognises that it is not really acceptable to admit that they would be happy, if the situation presented itself, to date and/or have sex with a 16 year old. The charge of socially accepted conventions may be protested, with a participant possibly offering, for example:
“It’s just that before you are 17 you aren’t really mature enough to make those sorts of decisions yet.”
We’ll forget that the law believes that at 16 you are old enough to make those decisions, for now. To keep the game alive, you may respond:
“That makes sense, people mature at different rates and ages. At 17 you can be sure that they have at least a little life experience though, having finished school. I guess, if it’s maturity that’s your measure, that if you got to know a particularly mature 16 year old, one that acted at least as old as a 17 year old, then you would be happy to have sex with them?
This reminds me of a paradox in philosophy called Eubulides Heap. Traditionally, it goes something like this: 1. You would not call a single grain of wheat a heap. 2. Adding just one more grain of wheat does not make a difference. 3. Two grains of wheat is, therefore, not a heap either. 4. Adding just one more grain of wheat does not make a difference. 5. Three grains of wheat is, therefore not a heap either. 6. … 7. 10,000 grains of wheat is, therefore, not a heap either.
This is a particularly annoying paradox. A paradox is an argument which has true premises and sound logic, but what appears to be a false conclusion. The premises here are true, and the conclusion is logically entailed, using rules of inference called modus ponens and cut. Modern classical logic endorses this way of arguing. It is annoying, I would suggest, because it feels like a silly exercise in semantics.
We, of course, can be vague with descriptive nouns like ‘heap’. We could, if it really bothered us, resolve this paradox with an agreed conceptual demarcation, with flexible boundaries for more casual inspection. We could agree a definition of heap - in reference to wheat - is any amount between 5,000 and 20,000 grains. Anything below 5,000 can be described as a pile, and more than 20,000 grains will be called a mound.
Unfortunately, the paradox isn’t so easily dealt with; there is a reason that it has survived two and a half thousand years. In offering definite boundaries, we haven’t got around the persistent logic of the argument. There is a reason for our vagueness in terms. It’s because we know that one grain of wheat doesn’t make a difference to the overall heap. It would be barmy to suggest that 20,000 grains is a heap, but if we added just one more then it would cease to be. You can’t draw a strict boundary because you would have to concede that adding or taking away a measure as small as one grain of wheat does not make any difference.
The same, of course, applies to our age game. If your lower age limit is 16, consider whether you would have sex someone a second before they turned 16? If you decide that you wouldn’t, that you have to wait until they are 16 because that is when it is legal, you obviously possess an admirable respect for the law.
You may not, however, be reasoning in a particularly rational way. Just like it seems barmy to suggest that a pile of sand could be considered a heap at 20,000 grains but not at 20,001, it also seems very obviously barmy to suggest that someone is ready to have sex at 504,836,200 seconds old (or 16 years) but not 504,836,199 seconds old.
So, the unfortunate conclusion, after this logic is followed through, is that you would happily have sex with someone just one second old.
The argument, using (amongst other systems) modern classical endorsed logic, would read like this. 1. It is acceptable to have sex with someone 504,836,200 seconds old 2. Being just one second younger doesn’t make any difference 3. It is therefore acceptable to have sex with someone 504,856,199 seconds old 4. Being just one second younger doesn’t make any difference 5. It is therefore acceptable to have sex with someone 504,836,198 seconds old 6. … 7. It is therefore acceptable to have sex with someone 1 second old
You will, of course, disagree. Probably along the lines of but one second does make a difference. In which case, it is up to you to draw the line somewhere. You have to say that a 504,836,200 second-year-old is old enough for sex, but anyone under this age isn’t. You must commit to a strict boundary. If this is your rebuttal, you have of course fallen into the same trap as those arguing that we can put strict boundaries on a ‘heap’.
Perhaps you can think of another way of escaping this unpalatable conclusion.
504836199 Seconds Old • Opuss № I