Posted by Psilocybin at 2:30am Aug 10 '13It's one I hadn't heard before. My thoughts on this:
Someone might object by bringing up the point that people mature (psychologically mainly, although some people argue that even physical maturity is relevant for certain things, such as age of consent laws) at different rates.
That being said, even if one discounts that argument, many age laws don't even reflect the average age at which one really becomes mature enough to do something. As psychologists Lois Weithorn and Susan Campbell said: "The ages of 18 or 21 as the ‘cutoffs’ below which individuals are presumed to be incompetent to make determinations about their own welfare do not reflect the psychological capacities of most adolescents".
There is intersectionality between age and country (the voting age is 16 in Brazil but 20 in Japan), so an 18-year-old who gets to vote because she was born in America is discriminated against positively, vis-à-vis an 18-year-old who was born in Japan and still lives there, whereas a 17-year-old who doesn't get to vote because she was born in America is discriminated against negatively, vis-à-vis a 17-year-old who was born in Brazil and still lives there.
In fact, even the laws within one country can change. Boomers born in 1953 got to vote when they were 18, whereas members of the Greatest Generation born in 1914 did not get to vote until they were 21. Discrimination against the Greatest Generation, in other words. When U.S. states begin following the lead of Austria, Jersey, the Isle of Man, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina and lowering their voting ages to 16, people like [private] will be discriminated against and many people who are bitter over not having been able to pick the president at 16 will be jealous, and try to stop the youth rights movement. Yes, it will be discriminatory. (Uh-oh, I see this being used as an argument against lowering legal ages.)
There is also the fact that people die at different ages. An American who dies on his fortieth birthday spends 47.5% of his life able to drink, whereas someone who is 21 now but lives to be 100, assuming no further changes in America's drinking age, spends about 80% of his life able to drink. Although they go through the same ages in the same order, the drinking age gave one a fuller life than the other.
In fact, a major problem with age restrictions is that many people, especially in third-world countries but even in places like the U.S., Canada and the U.K., die before they reach the legal age to eo something. A few years back, there was a 15-year-old boy named Jack living in the U.K. The age of consent in the U.K. is 16, but Jack was terminally ill at 15 and wanted to have sex before he died. The "you can wait" argument doesn't work here because they were sure Jack was going to die before his would-be sixteenth birthday. A female nurse, who remained anonymous, had sex with Jack illegally before he died, but if Jack had waited until he was 16, he never would have gotten that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Then there are ageist attitudes in general, as opposed to formally encoded laws, which don't have an exact cutoff the same way legal ages do. Take youth profiling, for instance. If someone is 16 and wears Abercrombie & Fitch, she still has a likelihood of being harassed by the cops when she hangs around the shopping center. If someone is 16 and dresses like a hippie, she is also likely to be the victim of youth profiling.Is someone is 25 and wears Abercrombie & Fitch, she will probably not be harassed by the cops. Is someone is 25 and dresses like a hippie, yep: youth profiling. A 35-year-old who dresses, even if she dresses like a hippie, will not be youth-profiled because American society pretty much agrees that 35 is past youth.
Then there are the problems of psychological trauma lasting well past minority, and the fact that each demographic variable among humans, not just age, presents a unique situation, which I go into here.
Interesting argument - Psilocybin