Sex differences: part 1: boys kill

“Gender is the single best predictor of criminal behavior: men commit more crime, and women commit less. This distinction holds throughout history, for all societies, for all groups, and for nearly every crime category. The universality of this fact is really quite remarkable, even though many tend to take it for granted.”

~ Darrell Steffensmeier and Emilie Allan, “Gender and Crime.”
Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice. Encyclopedia.com. 18 Apr. 2018

“Not all men are criminals, but nearly all criminals are men. By a ratio of 94 to 6, men outnumber women in prison, a fact that raises the questions of whether and why crime is a masculine statement.”
~ June Stephenson, Men are Not Cost-effective, 1995

“Men do crime like fish swim… This is just the sort of ‘duh’ knowledge ripe for philosophical investigation. If you wonder what’s under yonder rock, be a scientist and look, or ask a scientist. But if the very essence of rockness or the intrinsic criminality of the masculine principle has you up at night, maybe you should risk studying a little philosophy.”
~ Bianco Luno

They do. Not all of them. Not all of the time. But boys, men, or masculine identity in who- or whatever it inheres break rules with a relish not found in girls, women, or the feminine. They are always poised for it. Killing others without (or risking the absence of) justification is at one end of the spectrum of rule-breaking. At the other end, you have creative chance-taking (so-called when successful) or inconsideration or incivility (as we call it, among worse things, when it is not), chronic liberty-taking, a preference for forgiveness over permission, etc. But it is all about violating something or other: a person’s right to live, their bodily integrity, their right to property, to expression, to dignity—or to anything else, for that matter, anything that tramples autonomy or gets in the way of domination. The victims (intended or not) of masculine rule-breaking needn’t even be human. It might be fauna and flora, the environment, nature itself. It might be entitlement to rob the universe of its secrets. Even in their quest for knowledge, they have a clear agenda: to know in order to exploit.

This topic is not about boys per se or about killing per se. Boys and killing are just the most potent symbols of masculine ambivalence toward the structure, order, and, perhaps, the very persistence of life. And, in the end, we cannot spare, their perennial aiders and abettors, girls. Or fail to blame whatever the opposite of killing is.

The topic is not boys and killing per se but those are good places to start because they are so in-your-face. Philosophy does not start with obscure facts or claims. If the object is that hard to see, it is a proper object for science, not philosophy (as Luno suggests in the epigraph). Though it may end up far from where it starts, philosophy must always start with the obvious—with the 800 pound gorilla in any room where human-created evil is being discussed, with who the principal agents of wrongdoing are. These are mostly men and boys. Only to a far lesser extent (and noticeably so), girls and women.

The topic requires two parts.

In this part, we draw attention to the character and magnitude of the problem. We’ll also look into the evidence and arguments surrounding the possible causes. There aren’t that many to choose from: biological and socio-political. It's unlikely we even have to choose. Why not both?

A more expanded writeup is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xfs9UPP-_IzI1V6YJjUPz9D1hI8XkFFiZRCGoA3cv7Y/edit?usp=sharing

Comments or discussion on this topic must be posted here:

https://www.meetup.com/The-Philosophy-Club/messages/boards/thread/51536224/#131230859