I agree in principle but the choice of words seems perplexing. How can the cause of something be secondary to that something it causes? — BlueBanana

Well, I did not make any statement about the causal relationship between the fact of inadequate pay and the fact of pay inequality. But, supposing that that causal relationship is as you describe, I use the word "secondary" in the sense of importance. My reasoning for this I laid out here:

Granting that your earning an inadequate wage, where I am receiving my due, is an injustice, what is the nature of this injustice? It seems to me that the problem here is not a problem of inequality first and foremost. This may be seen clearly enough. We established earlier that rectifying a disparity in pay does not necessarily achieve a positive outcome. Indeed, to bring my adequate wage down to the level of your inadequate wage serves only to make the both of us underpaid. But we may go further still. Suppose that I, and all other employees, are made unemployed, so that you are the only employee left. Such would remove the inequality problem entirely. You now have no colleagues relative to whom you are unequal. And yet the principle problem – the fact that you are being underpaid – remains.

Therefore, even granting that there is an injustice here, the injustice is not one of inequality first and foremost. The principle injustice is not the fact that you are being paid less than I, but the fact that you are being less than what you are worth in yourself. Supposing that this is rectified, that your wage is improved, by whatever means, so that your pay is brought up to what it should be, the inequality problem is solved incidentally. The gap between your inadequate wage and my adequate wage is closed, not by addressing the inequality directly, but by addressing the fact that you are not being paid as much as you can reasonably demand in the market, relative to the value of your labour. As such, even conceding the fact that the inequality here is indeed a problem, we may see that it is a problem in a secondary, incidental sense, and one that is solved by addressing the more pressing problem. — SynodOfDordt

But if this is still unclear, consider an analogy. Suppose that there is a serial murderer, who kills women exclusively. And suppose that his killing of women is clearly motivated by a deep-seated misogyny. His very existence is therefore a threat to women, a problem for women, a "women's issue". There is therefore a problem of misogyny here. This man is motivated by misogyny to kill as he does. But, there is another problem here, and that is simply the problem of murder. Murders are taking place, and this is a problem in itself, regardless of the gender-bias according to which the murders take place. Is the misogyny a problem? Certainly, I do not deny it. But it is a secondary problem, in terms of importance.

Here's why. Suppose that we re-wind, and imagine that this murderer does not have a gender-bias at all. He is not driven by misogyny to kill women exclusively, but he kills men and women in equal measure. If such is the case, there is no longer a "women's issue" to speak of, any more than it would be a "left-handed issue" or a "brunette issue" if some of the victims just happened to be left-handed or brunettes. And yet, the far more pressing problem, the fact that people are being murdered, remains. Relative to the first example, the misogyny problem no longer exists. But there is still a murderer at large, and this, it seems to me, is of far greater importance than the question of whether he is motivated by a particular bias.

Moreover, going back to the case of the misogynistic killer, supposing he were caught and incarcerated so that he could kill no longer, it seems reasonable to say that he is to be found guilty or murder, not of specifically misogynistic murder. If you prevent this man from killing any more people in general, then you have also prevented him from killing women specifically. Therefore, the specifically misogynistic tendency of his killings is "secondary", in the sense that the killing of women is prevented incidentally, by preventing him from killing anyone else at all.

It does make a difference. The ethical concern isn't simply with paying one person more than another for the same job but with paying one person more than another for the same job because of their sex. It's the sexual discrimination that's the injustice, not the inequality, which is why your argument is a red herring. — Michael

But this is nothing that I have not already dealt with, both in my original post and in my response.

I concede that the kind of sexual discrimination that you describe is unethical. That is not in dispute. My thesis concerns what, if anything, should be done about it. I have argued that nothing should be done about it by force of law. You are free to disagree with this, of course, but it would be helpful for the purposes of the thread if you would do so by argument rather than by assertion. When your posts are shorter than the excerpt of mine which you are quoting, there is not much of philosophical substance with which to engage.

Let's get practical, by returning to a specific example. In the first example I presented, equality was achieved by lowering my wage to equal yours. In so doing, this created a situation which was, on the whole, worse. Therefore, achieving equality by any means necessary is not desirable. That is the argument. Now suppose that, in addition to the terms of this thought experiment, we make the additional stipulation that the employer is sexist, and that it is his prejudice which is responsible for the disparity in the first place. Is this ethically significant? Sure. But the conclusion remains unaltered. It is still the case that reducing my wage to equal yours generates a negative net effect. I can give similar explanations for each of the other thought experiments I provided in my original post.

What you need to do here, it seems, is to take one of my thought experiments, and modify it with the stipulation that the employer in question is acting out of a sexist impulse. Then you must show that this alters the conclusion, and explain how it does so. Until you do this, we are only ever going to be gainsaying one another in an automatic way. "Employers shouldn't be allowed to get away with this", "Yes they should", "No they shouldn't", etc. etc.

You can insist until you are blue in the face that unequal situations in pay that are due to sexual discrimination should not be allowed to take place, and each time you do so, I will redirect you to the argument I have presented in which I demonstrate the mistake of that intuition. It is no serious objection to an argument merely to assert that its conclusion is false.

Thank you, everyone, for your responses. They are helpful, and allow me to clarify a number of issues. I should point out, first of all, that I have not made (and, for the purposes of this thread, do not intend to make) any judgement about whether or not a gender pay-gap exists. Nor do I make a judgement about why it exists. Also, I am happy to concede that an employer who decides upon how much money he is prepared to pay his or her employees based solely on their gender is unethical and sexist. My thesis, for which I have argued not insubstantially, is that we should not consider it a problem to be solved by the political process; that is, by law. I have made no argument concerning the reasons or explanation for the unequal situation, nor what kind of personal value judgement we might make about it. That is for all of us to decide for ourselves.

First of all the (b) is the case, which is a statistically verifiable fact. In that the women are on average paid less than men the problem is, of course, that the women are paid too little - something which you used quite a bit of text to state (which is not a problem as much as it is rather amusing). The problem is caused by inequality, which is a problem in itself, although not in this context, where it merely causes the problem. — BlueBanana

This is not quite true, in that I did not assert that women are, in fact, paid less than they should be, nor that this is the chief cause of the pay-gap, should it exist (I did not deny any of this, either). Rather, my argument was entirely hypothetical: if there is a case of pay-inequality, and this inequality is due to one of the employees being payed less they are worth, then the fact of inequality is entirely a secondary issue, one that is resolved incidentally by tackling the more pressing problem of inadequate pay. If we are on the same page here (as we seem to be, in your acknowledgement of (b)), then all well and good.

But second, you've at least partly misunderstood the pay-gap. It's also, you see, a fact that pay-gap is almost non-existent when experience, career, profession, work-quality, etc. are considered. The issue is the culture and the gender roles defined by it that push men and women to different careers with different wages (maybe coincidentally, perhaps because the patriarchal society prefers the male-dominated careers). For example, teachers, most of whom are female, are underpaid considering the importance and influence of their jobs. — BlueBanana

If I understand your point here, then you seem to be suggesting that, in effect, there is no pay gap once we start comparing like with like. After this, though, I don’t exactly take your point. You seem to be suggesting that society “pushes” men and women to pursue different careers. This may or may not be the case; it may, after all, be the case that men and women are wired differently, and have different preferences. But supposing it is the case, I don’t see what impact this has on the argument I presented. My thesis was that the fact of pay-inequality, where it obtains, is either a non-issue or a secondary issue, depending on the circumstances. Perhaps teachers are underpaid, and perhaps most teachers are women. But the two may well be accidental. If you are making an argument here, I don’t exactly see what it is.

No, that the gender-pay gap does exist is not contentious. It's more or less accepted that it does. What is controversial is why the gender-pay gap exist. Is it because simply because women freely choose less lucrative careers? Or is it because of sexism within higher paying industries (e.g. STEM) and "boy's club" mentality? Is it because women naturally tend to sacrifice careers over family? Or is it because there is societal pressure for women to choose the latter over the former? — Maw

This is true only in the narrow sense that men working full time earn more than women working full time, on average. When I suggest that the existence of the gender pay-gap is disputed, I intend this merely in the sense that Blue Banana suggested above: that the the gender pay-gap does not exist in any significant sense; that is, when like is compared with like. But as I have explained, my original post purposefully ignores the factual question of whether or not this is the case. The question I have explored is one that is entirely hypothetical.

Your arguments ignore the central issue, which is that I was offered a contract with a lower wage because I'm a woman. — Michael

I ignored the question of sexist employers for the simple reason that it is irrelevant to the philosophical substance of the argument I presented. I presented three variations of the one thought experiment, which, I believe, collectively covered every permutation of events as regards pay-disparity situations. In each case, you may insert the additional stipulation that the reason for the disparity in the first place was due to a sexist prejudice on the part of the employer, but it does not make any philosophical difference to the argument.

Discrimination based on sex is illegal and unethical. Illegal and unethical practices ought be abolished and, where possible, rectified. — Michael

There are two issues here: illegality and unethical-ness(?). It seems to me that the illegality argument is entirely question-begging. I am sure that I do not need to point out that not everything that is illegal necessarily should be, and that not everything that should be illegal actually is. So to say, as you do, that “Illegal … practices ought to be abolished” is not necessarily the case, unless one has already assumed that the law is correct to punish employers who discriminate on the basis of gender. But this is the very question that is being disputed. This argument is only convincing to one who already accepts that the law should punish employers who discriminate in this way. Hence, question-begging.

The ethical question is trickier: I have conceded that discrimination on the basis of gender, at least when it comes to pay, in unethical. But it is not at all clear that this entails any kind of coercive or prohibitive involvement on the part of the law. Consider, by analogy, the vote. The vote is an extremely important right indeed. And, in an ideal world, everyone would exercise their respective vote in a responsible way; voting for candidates, for example, on the basis of political principles, and so on. But there is nothing preventing someone from voting for someone purely on the basis of their gender, or say, refusing to vote for someone purely because of the colour of their skin. I do not condone this, nor, I am sure, would you. But to suggest that they be prevented from doing so – by, perhaps, monitoring people’s personal reasons for voting as they do and then taking the vote away from people who do so for unethical reasons – is a frightening notion indeed. What it means to have freedom in some aspect of life, is that, sooner or later, certain people will exercise this freedom in a way that you deem unpalatable. Freedom of speech would be another premier example of this very idea. In short, this is the price we pay for freedom. To suggest that one should be “free from discrimination” is therefore much too simplistic. By extension, if, in general, I am free to hire whomever I wish, according to whatever contractual terms the two of us can voluntarily agree, then it does not follow axiomatically that any discrimination upon which I act when exercising such freedom should be regulated by force of law (which is just what the legal requirement of “equal pay for equal work” demands).

Although there may be problems regarding how to go about rectifying existing contracts – do we raise women's wages, lower men's wages, or both? – at the very least it should be ensured that in the future the sex of the applicant does not determine the wage they're offered. — Michael

With respect, it precisely this view – we may call it the naïve view – which I have argued against. By “naïve”, I am referring to the view that, if we have a situation in which there is a woman who is earning less than a man, when they have an (otherwise) identical employment situation, then this is a problem to be solved, an inequality to be equalised, come what may. In other words, all one ever need know in order to recognise that an injustice has taken place is that some man is earning more than some woman, for the same work, and perhaps also on the assumption that they are working for the same employer. I understand the intuition – really, I do – but the intuition is mistaken, and it is mistaken for the reasons I have presented at length. This is the very reason that I wrote this piece.

This is a red herring. In the case of there being a gender pay gap, the decision to pay me less (or you more) isn't arbitrary. The decision was made on the basis of our sex. It isn't just a case of one person who happens to be a man being paid more than another person who happens to be a woman but a case of women systematically being paid less than men (all other things being equal, as your own argument assumes). That's an injustice. — Michael

This is something I should clarify. When I say “arbitrary”, I mean arbitrary from a commercial point of view. I don’t mean to suggest that there is no gender-based discrimination taking place. Whether one is a man or woman does not, I am sure we can agree, have any bearing (necessarily) on one’s productivity. As such, when an employer discriminates on the basis of such a characteristic, it is “arbitrary” in the sense that they are making their commercial decisions on the basis of considerations that are commercially irrelevant. Moreover, in the excerpt of mine which you quoted, it was stipulated that you, the hypothetical woman, are being paid a perfectly fair and adequate wage, and that I, the hypothetical man, am being paid an overly generous wage. My argument was that, if such is the case, then you are no victim, any more than a relatively less patronised charity is a victim because its benefactor has patronised another charity to a greater degree. Against this, you insist that an injustice exists merely because of the inequality, regardless of whatever other considerations are at play. But this is not to engage with my argument at all. It is simply to ignore it.

Thank you for the suggestions, though the question calls for me to use only the rules I stipulated above. It is interesting, though: in the textbook where this exercise appears, this question is posed before the reader is introduced to reductio ad absurdum. I am inclined to think that this is a mistake, though. The reason is that the proof can be completed easily enough once reductio is introduced into one's arsenal of rules, and this results in a proof of exactly 11 lines, which is just the number of lines that the textbook indicates is correct. With reductio, the proof I arrived at goes something like this:

(P & Q) --> ~R : R --> (P --> ~Q)

1. (P & Q) --> ~R (Premise)
2. R (Assumption for conditional proof)
3. P (Assumption for conditional proof)
4. Q (Assumption for reductio)
5. ~~R (Double-negation introduction on 2.)
6. ~(P & Q) (Modus tollens 1,5)
7. P & Q (&-Introduction 3,4)
8. (P & Q) & ~(P & Q) (&-Introduction 6,7)
9. ~Q (Reductio 4,8)
10. P --> ~Q (Conditional proof 3,9)
11. R --> (P --> ~Q) (Conditional proof 2,10)

Hopefully that'll do it.

The exercise calls for the proof to be presented in the line-by-line format I used above. It has to be like that.