“Male passengers were pushing ahead of women and children.”

So observed retired police chief inspector Ed Gurr disapprovingly after he and his wife Liz made it successfully off the sagging Costa Concordia on January 13th. They were joined by the vast majority of the vessel’s other occupants, including the captain of the ill-fated cruise liner, who is either destined to be regarded as one of the most prolific cowards of maritime history for his decision to abandon the ship before all aboard were safe, or was telling the truth to an exasperated coastguard when he claimed to have been ‘catapulted’ from the Concordia (albeit landing in a convenient rescue boat).

Allegations of cowardice are certainly stewing viciously in the wake of this disaster, which may claim up to 29 lives. But how cowardly can we judge the male passengers who boarded lifeboats ahead of women and children to have been? Does the oft-cited decree of the high seas prioritizing the female of the species and their children hold up today? Helping children to safety would seem to go without saying. Such is the proper role of the parent, guardian or nearby adult without whom many children may not survive at all. But we might pause longer to consider our consignment of women to the same category.

Perhaps to do so is an example of that sloppily transposed set of medieval military values called chivalry, which historically informs us of the ideal qualifications for knighthood. By ensuring that the women are safe, the actions of the men are seen as courageous and noble and, like a soldier who is willing to die in battle, his honor is ultimately viewed as being more valuable than was his life.

This is not, we should admit, a very easy transposition. For a start, there’s no objective reason that the life of a woman should be viewed as being of greater value than that of a man. Nor is it proper that his honor should be judged by how quickly he was able to circumvent his innate survival instincts in her favor (which, it may be argued, are themselves an expression of the highest value we know: survival, without which humanity would not exist today to argue about it).

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