On Chivalry

A great article by Ed West, appearing in the Telegraph:

One of the disturbing aspects of the sinking of the Costa Concordia is the implication that men barged past families to rescue themselves, rather than adhering to the convention of “women and children first”. This has already led people to question whether chivalry is dead, or whether we should still abide by this unofficial rule of the sea. ...

Yet as a means of creating a gentle and pleasant society chivalry is hard to beat. Readers of the Guardian newspaper are in two minds about the concept, many readers arguing that priority should be given not based on sex but on need (taking aside, of course, the practical issue that sometimes it is logistically not possible to give one group priority).

The problem with this system is that it inevitably leads us to start making value judgments about other human beings; so if, one assumes, a young person should have priority over the old because they have their life ahead of them, perhaps one could easily make the argument that a healthy person should have priority over the sick or the disabled. One could even argue that a newborn should be last because, under the Peter Singer ethical model, they are not fully sentient.