For instance: age of sexual consent, age for legally drinking alcohol, age for driving, age for voting, age for participating in pornography
Depending on the place, each of those requires a different minimum age. Why is that? Are some activities “more adult” than others? Using USA as an example: legal drinking age is 21, legal driving age is 16, age of consent varies between 16-18.
Not asking about different countries/states having different ages, but any single place having different ages for different adult activities
To be fair, most first world countries seem to have settled on 18 for all of this. I think the wrong assumption is that the age limits are related to each-other, while they’ve been brought into law at different points in history and there hasn’t been a need to change them. There are also the environmental factors, such as the driving age in the USA probably being lower as a consequence of a car-centric culture.
Of course the first example would be that. No, you can’t screw kids. Internalize that as fact.
That is a fact. But they can screw each other, if they’re old enough. But they’r still classified as kids. “Adolescent kid” is a subjective term, and I would even suggest raising the age higher than 16: until they’re legally adults.
I think the question is coming from a “why is it different in different countries” point of view.
I’m not going to Google it and put myself on a watch list, but I think I recall hearing some back-asswards country where the age of “consent” was 14, or some even lower. Culturally that doesn’t make any sense to me - but then i agree with you that kids shouldn’t be screwer nor screwee.
The other ages are interesting too - in the UK we wait for our teens to grow up a bit before putting them behind the wheel of a car. The driving age is 18 - and forget even getting affordable insurance until you’re 25 anyway.
I’m guessing it’s because different parts of us mature at different rates. Brain development continues into the early twenties, so mind-altering substances are generally regulated with that in mind. Physical maturity ends in the late teens, so things like military service eligibility start there. Other activities are based on more abstract measures like responsibility, emotional stability, etc.
These sorts of decisions are the result of specific historic conflicts, and cannot really be understood without knowing about these conflicts. They aren’t derived from first principles.
For instance, the US voting age was only lowered to 18 in 1971, partly in response to the Vietnam-War-era objection that 18-year-old men were being drafted to go kill or die overseas, but could not vote.
Meanwhile, Reagan being an ass is why the drinking age in all states got upped to 21!
I actually did. I have some minor family history of alcoholism, nothing too drastic, but enough that I figured my brain could probably use an extra couple years of development before I pushed my luck on it.
Don’t know if it actually made any significant difference, but I have a pretty healthy relationship with booze, I’m no teetotaler by a longshot, but I don’t drink to excess except for a small handful of parties a year, and normally go a couple weeks even a month or more between drinking.
The idea that virtually nothing in life is actually derived from first principles, and is instead derived from sometimes very random history, would probably deserve to go near the top of any FAQ for life. Might be one of the most common misconceptions in the entire world, the idea that somehow, some way, someone had to have created things the way they are intentionally, for specific reasons.
Instead of things just working out this way because of a handful of barely-related decisions made by basically random people here and there through history, and everyone else just going along with it because they mainly just care about their own lives, who they’re dating/marrying, what job they have and what’s for dinner tonight, far more than they care about the voting age.
Our world is far more haphazard than planned, overall.
Yep. But also, fake first-principles explanations are commonly offered when people ask “Why is the rule thus-and-so?”
“Why can’t I vote yet? (or: marry, buy a gun, etc.)?”
“You’re not old enough.”
“Why not?”
“Because 18-year-olds are just more mature than 15-year-olds.”
“Why? Who says?”
“Um. The Constitution!”
“But it used to say something different.”
“Yep. We know better now.”
“Says who?”
“Democracy!”
The 15-year-old correctly assesses that these are not real explanations, but rather rationalizations of a rule that was decided not from first principles, but rather through people in history arguing over it, sometimes protesting or even fighting, and changing the rules.
I’d imagine history has a huge amount to do with this.
In Britain, the age of consent is 16. The age at which you can get married is also 16.
It’s also illegal to sell alcohol to children under 18 (unless alongside a meal, with an adult accompanying them, in which case 16). It’s not actually illegal to drink alcohol underage, and it’s not uncommon in the slightest for parents to allow their kids to try their drinks at any age.
Britain is an old place though, so I guess things are this way because of centuries, possibly millennia of inertia.
The US is a young country, and as a result the laws are far most maliable - particularly by lobbyists. Puritans push the age limit of ‘sinful’ things up, capitalists keep the age limit of indulgences low.