Posted by 79 at 1:10pm Aug 10 '13i agree 100% that people mature at different rates. take the example of leaving home for college - some kids are mature enough to handle it, while others aren't (this also reflects their experiences).
the thing is, there really isn't any practical way to deal with age cutoffs or the ages at which certain life events generally happen when you're dealing with millions of people. especially when it comes to issues as complex as going to college at 18 - there are many kids younger than that who are ready for college academically, of course. but they may not be ready socially (when my dad was in college, there was a kid in his class who matriculated at 14 - brilliant and was acing his classes, but being a 14yo when all of your peers are 18-22 did more harm than good).
it may not be completely fair to use age as a determining factor in cutoffs like voting - i know a great many minors who would take the responsibility seriously, and i know far more people who can vote that are a long way from being responsible. i would support the idea of a test, for example, that minors could pass in order to vote - but making that test relevant, non-partisan, and fair for every demographic including economic and cultural backgrounds is prohibitively impossible.
an age cutoff, on the other hand, is fair across every demographic - rich children reach 18 in exactly the same time that poor children do, every single ethnic group ages at the same speed, and all sexes reach it at the same time. age isn't a perfect metric, but it's far more fair than anything else we could possibly use.
the argument about different voting ages in different countries is interesting. however, i think it only works when one is talking about equivalent votes. if someone born in brazil could vote in the US at 16 while i had to wait another two years, that would be a problem. instead, it's better to frame it as "no matter where you are from, no matter who you are, etc etc, you cannot vote in a japanese election until you are 20". it's like drinking laws - no matter who a person is, they can drink in europe before they can drink in the us (i have known international students who get very annoyed by this).
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.
irrelevant to ageism. there is no ageist component in breathing, yet someone who dies at 40 will have had far less opportunity to do so than someone who dies at 80. this can more or less be extended to most possible human experiences, with or without an age component. any person who will die at a younger age than another will have less time to spend doing anything that requires being alive.
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.
and because i was born later than my father, i never got the chance to see jimi hendrix live as he did. i don't think it's fair to compare laws across time; there's an expectation in our society that each generation will grow up in a different world than its parents.
if such arguments do hold water, then you run into the problem that every law that gives more freedoms discriminates against anyone born earlier. was the VRA discriminatory against people who had previously been discriminated against?
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.
i fully support this. age-dependent laws are not perfect, they are simply the fairest way we have to deal with these situations. given that they are not perfect and are used just because they are far better than any other approach, i see no reason why exceptions cannot be made - i think in this case it was a perfectly reasonable exception.
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.
profiling in general is a bad idea. but in this case maturity does play a role - and because it's very difficult to tell how mature someone is at a glance, it's a pretty good rule of thumb to assume that older people are more mature than younger ones. this is especially true when it comes to taking responsibility for the society around you. children learn at a very young age how to look out for their own best interests - learning how to balance those against society's interests (eg, not stealing) takes a lot longer. some never learn it, of course, and some learn it very early. but it's far more likely that a 30yo knows it than a 14yo.
i'd be willing to posit that for the vast majority of people, their teenage years involved far more risk-taking than later years.
once you start bringing clothing style into it, you're no longer dealing just with age issues. the very fact that a teenager dressed like a goth will generate more suspicion than a teenager dressed "normally" shows that clothing impacts perception quite a lot compared to perceived age - as it should, since age is not a choice whereas clothing is.
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
oh, every situation is absolutely unique. for instance, looking back at the drinking example, i'm an alcoholic - even though i've been legally able to drink for years, having a few beers would be far worse for me than your average 15yo...yet it's legal for me and not him.
however, overall someone my age is much more likely to be responsible after a couple beers than a 15yo. so it does make sense to try to make it so someone my age can drink and someone much younger cannot.
basically, i agree that laws depending on age is not perfect by any means. there will always be many exceptions, some of which should be allowed and some of which should just be born (like a 40 year old voting republican - that's moronic, but it would be a bad idea to find a way to stop them from voting).
however, any other possible and practical way of approaching the many situations age-specific laws deal with is far worse and far more discriminatory. like i said, age applies equally to everyone. socioeconomic status, ethnicity, location, sexual orientation, and even disability don't change how fast someone ages. any child, anywhere, will take the exact same amount of time to reach any given age as any other child. that's about as fair as you can get. and barring terminal cases (which i do give exceptions for), everyone gets the exact same opportunities as everyone else, under the exact same qualifications.
calling that setup discriminatory seems a little odd to me.
Re: Interesting argument - 79