Do you know why the age of consent for sex is 18? What would your sexual ethics be if it happened to have been raised to 21 not 18? Indeed this almost happened. Think about a wide array of questions, relationships, policies and norms you approve or disapprove of in light of this.
Even better, when you next time find yourself making judgements on them, try for a short time seeing them from the perspective of world-21-you instead of world-18-you. Applying the reversal test can be fun, but other people might not see it your way if you point it out.
The age of consent differs over the world. Even within the US. Kansas has one of 16 while it’s 18 in Florida.
According to Wikipedia Spain even has an age of consent of 13 (with some exceptions) and the government recently announced that it wants to raise it to 15.
I don’t think my morals on sexuality would change much by living in Spain.
I know this of course, I live in Slovenia where it is 15. However nearly everyone here assume it is 18. I think this is because:
It is 18 in the most culturally important state in the world: California
People treat 18 as Schelling point for legal adulthood.
The second is probably why they people here are surprised the drinking age is 21 in much of the United States. 18, rather than the more traditional 21 (see Roman laws) likely exists as a Schelling point for legal rights, because during the 20th century men of that age where judged useful for military service, not because it was determined as the age where people generally become capable of making all decisions on their own behalf.
The second is probably why they people here are surprised the drinking age is 21 in much of the United States. 18, rather than the more traditional 21 (see Roman laws) likely exists as a Schelling point for legal rights, because during the 20th century men of that age where judged useful for military service, not because it was determined as the age where people generally become capable of making all decisions on their own behalf.
Hitler started drafting people of age 22 when he reintroduced the draft in Germany. Later he drafted even people under 18.
I would rather think 18 it’s the time where most people leave high school or the local equivalent and go to college or take a job.
Taking a job means that you have to be able to make contracts while people act school don’t have to make their own contracts.
Historically the first conscription in modern times was done by the French:
“Conscription in its modern form arose in revolutionary France, where universal military service was regarded both as a Republican duty, based on the principles of equality and fraternity, and as a necessity for national survival. In August 1793, a law limited liability for service to men between the ages of 18 and 25” (source)
In those times most people did not go to high school or the local equivalents.
Hitler’s social order isn’t the direct ancestor of our current social order.
British and Americans drafted at 18. British starting in WW1 as far as I can tell, Americans in WW2. The voting age in the United States was lowered for all states to 18 around the time of the Vietnam war (1971 to be exact), specifically on the notion it being unfair to draft 18 year old to fight in a war they couldn’t vote on.
The US seems to have lowered it from 21 to 18 in 1942.
With googling I can’t find easily when the US made 18 the year in which people can engage in contracts. But I think that’s generally more central than voting and draft.
I would expect that age to be at 18 in the US before WWII.
If there is a question of sexual morality on which:
You grew up in a culture in which people tend to give one answer, which you agree with, and
People who grew up in Spain tend to give a different answer,
Then I think there’s a reasonable chance that: in the counterfactual world in which your parents moved to Spain shortly before you were born, and you grew up there, you would give the Spanish answer instead of your current one.
In general I don’t believe in a moral system where the central criteria of whether something is right or wrong gets decided by a straight rule.
What I do believe is wrong is when 16-year-old or a 20-year-old projects power in order to make the 13-year-old decide to have sex with them. Additionally I see responsibility to act afterwards in a way that the experience creates no emotional wounds or other damage.
Pregnancy would be damage because even if the 13-year-old gets an abortion getting a child killed inside himself leaves some emotional trauma. That means the older person would be responsible for seeing that the 13-year-old is on the pill and use condoms.
In practice I think there probably some level of wrongness in most cases where a 20-year-old has sex with a 13-year-old.
In practice I think there probably some level of wrongness in most cases where a 20-year-old has sex with a 13-year-old.
I suggest that, due to the anchoring effects of formal law, there exists some combination of ages such that you (and probably the average German) would say this and the average Spaniard, including hypothetical-you who grew up in Spain, would not. It may not be precisely 20 and 13, but I strongly suspect that such a pair of ages exists.
I went to an early college program — a residential four-year college where most students entered at age 15 or 16, after two years of high school. This was in a state where the legal age of consent was (and is) 16. As a consequence, many sexual relationships among first-year students were illegal. However, they were also very common.
The culture at this institution was such that students were treated as “college students who happen to be two years younger”, not as “gifted young teenagers who happen to be doing college-level academics”. As such, the age-of-consent law was basically regarded as an inappropriate technicality. Students were cautioned about it, but along the lines of “Technically, if someone really wanted to hurt you, they could charge you with this …”
So far as I know, the only time while I was there that anyone was even seriously threatened with legal charges over an “underage” relationship was one case where a freshman boy (age 15) cheated on his girlfriend with another guy (age 17). The girlfriend initially wanted to report this as “child abuse” but changed her mind before doing so.
While I’m not particularly in favor of age-of-consent laws setting such high bars as they do in most states, I suspect that this particular environment selected for a significantly higher-than-average degree of emotional maturity for that age range.
I would suggest that our teens would be better off if adults would offer them guidance in how to handle sexual relations responsibly, given the exceptional potential they can hold for interpersonal strife, rather than simply declaring them off-limits until a certain age and then assuming they’re mature enough to conduct themselves responsibly, except that it occurs to me that most adults probably aren’t competent to offer good advice on the subject even if they were willing to discuss such matters with teenagers.
I suspect that this particular environment selected for a significantly higher-than-average degree of emotional maturity for that age range.
The lore — I have no sources for this; it was word-of-mouth at the time — was that when psychologists had once tested the student body for emotional maturity, what they found was that entering students were no more mature than comparable teenagers, but that graduating students were as mature as other college graduates. IOW, it was believed to be not a selection process, but an “if you treat ’em like adults, they’ll act like adults” process.
(Of course, this also neatly fits the institution’s founding ideology, which was opposition to the sustained infantilization of mainstream schooling.)
I would suggest that our teens would be better off if adults would offer them guidance in how to handle sexual relations responsibly, given the exceptional potential they can hold for interpersonal strife, rather than simply declaring them off-limits until a certain age and then assuming they’re mature enough to conduct themselves responsibly, except that it occurs to me that most adults probably aren’t competent to offer good advice on the subject even if they were willing to discuss such matters with teenagers.
I once saw someone on the Internet proposing that ability to consent should be granted after an exam, rather than after a given age, much like we don’t grant everyone who reaches a certain age a driving licence.
I was going to dispute that, but you know, you’re probably right. The death toll would be tremendous, but it wouldn’t be the government’s place to regulate people’s god-given right to use the cars they were born with.
You want to make it easy for people to know whether another person has the legal ability to consent. If consent is about whether the person had taken an exam, it would be hard to know.
A twenty five year old woman who doesn’t want to have sex before marriage for religious reasons could simply avoid taking the test. People who take the test before getting married could be expelled by the local church.
The proposal seems to give fundamental Christian’s a ugly tool for charging people who engage in premartial sex with rape.
You want to make it easy for people to know whether another person has the legal ability to consent. If consent is about whether the person had taken an exam, it would be hard to know.
Although you raise some compelling arguments against the proposition of an exam, I’ll note that in cases in the vicinity of the borderline, legal ability to consent by age is already quite hard to judge; people rarely card prospective sex partners.
Actually it was written by a self-declared pedophile (who had chosen not to act upon his urges) who argued that arbitrarily young people should be allowed to consent to sex provided they demonstrably know what they’re doing.
It must have been taken down, because I’ve found that blog but that post no longer seems to be there, and the blog is not on archive.org.
In Italy the age of consent is 14, it can go down to 13 if the partner is at max 15 years old, but it raises to 16 if the partner is a temporary or permanent authoritative figure, like a coach or a teacher.
18 is the limit at which it is allowed to publicly show or sell pictures/movies about that person naked or performing sexual acts.
I frankly feel that this is one of the very few cases where Italian laws get the facts right: thirteens would still (try to) have sex wether or not it was allowed. I remember that I believed too that the age of consent was 18, and felt fine with it, so it was a little shock to discover that the limit was much lower. I later however got various data about how sexual expression/desire/maturity starts around that age (mine too, FWIW), so I reconsidered that this was indeed a case of a law just making common sense: you don’t throw in jail a teenager just because of his/her natural impulses.
you don’t throw in jail a teenager just because of his/her natural impulses
Well, in the general case, of course you do… at least, if you throw them in jail at all. Adults, too. Most crimes are natural impulses, at least for people raised in a given culture; acts that we are neither naturally inclined to do nor explicitly taught to do tend not to be common enough to be worth the effort to pass laws against.
With respect to age of consent laws in particular, I would say there’s more than one relevant age threshold if we’re going to bother regulating this stuff by age at all; a typical thirteen-year-old is not equivalent to a typical 17-year-old, but neither is s/he equivalent to a typical 9-year-old.
I would also say that the kind of relationship matters more to capacity for consent than age, though I understand the “bright line” reasons for using the latter.
I’m pretty sure MrMind would class two teenagers lying to their parents about where they’re going to be and finding somewhere private to have sex as obeying precisely the sort of “natural impulses” referenced in their post. And, yes, agreed, most of the acts involved are entirely instrumental.
I would class that as the same kind of planning demonstrated by a bank robber (although one hopes that successful bank robbers require more sophisticated planning skills).
If you would say neither of those are “natural impulses” because they require instrumental planning, that’s fine, I won’t argue with you… I’m talking about the thing MrMind is talking about, and using their langauge to refer to it, but if y’all can agree on a different word to use I’ll happily use that word instead.
Semantics aside, if there’s an actual disagreement here, can you say more about what it is?
Well, I do agree with you that people are certainly thrown in jail because of their “natural impulses”—not all crimes are like that, but some are.
However the remainder of that paragraph (“Most crimes are natural impulses...”) makes no sense to me at all, I think it’s wrong because you’re completely ignoring instrumentality. Consider a trivial example: running a red light. Are people naturally inclined to do that? No, I don’t think so. Are they explicitly taught to do that? Nope. But is it common? Fairly common, I’d say and there are certainly laws against it.
As I say, I certainly agree that most of the acts people perform, whether criminal or not, are instrumental rather than… um… whatever the alternative is. (Reflexive? Instinctive?)
And yes, I guess you’re right that I’m ignoring that fact… precisely because it seems irrelevant to me.
Similarly, I’m happy to say that eating is a natural impulse. If someone objected that the overwhelming majority of the actions we perform in order to satisfy that impulse are instrumental and deliberate, I would certainly agree that this is true, but would find it strange to conclude that eating was therefore not a natural impulse. Instrumentality of acts just seems entirely beside the point.
Your position makes more sense to me as applied to running red lights, though. My (natural?) inclination is to extend the same reasoning to that case as well but I can definitely appreciate the criticism that at this point I’m just being metaphorical and could just as easily classify anything as “natural,” and I’ll accept that I over-reached with my original claim. People don’t run red lights in the wild.
But murder? Rape? Battery? Nah, in response to certain stimuli these are as natural as eating and having sex. The psychological and social structures we’ve constructed to prevent those stimuli from arising, and to prevent us from responding with those impulses when the stimuli do arise, and to prevent us from implementing those impulses when we do experience them… those structures are wonderful things, and in many contexts they enable us to do much much better than our natural impulses would lead us to do… but to therefore claim that those impulses don’t exist just seems bizarre to me.
I wonder whether what’s underlying the inferential gap here is some unstated assumptions relating to the moral implications of something being a natural impulse. Does it help at all if I say out loud that many of our natural impulses are utterly abhorrent?
I think the word “impulse” is providing more confusion here than light.
I’m happy to say that eating is a natural impulse
Let’s unpack. You have a biologically hardwired desire/instinct to eat. That provides you with a “natural” goal that you may reach through a variety of instrumental ways. Some of them are more acceptable (either from a psychological or from a cultural standpoint), some of them less.
Similarly, there is a desire/instinct to, say, have sex. That, however, doesn’t make rape “natural” as what’s “natural” is desire, not a particular way to satisfy it. There are ways to have sex other than through rape—just as there are ways to eat other than by stealing food and ways to assert dominance other than by punching someone in the face. That’s why distinguishing between the underlying desire and the specific way chosen to satisfy it is important.
many of our natural impulses are utterly abhorrent?
No, I don’t think so. Do you have any particular examples?
So going back to the OP I responded to… when two 14 year olds have sex, is that a specific way, or an underlying desire?
When the OP says it’s common sense not to imprison teenagers “just because of his/her natural impulses”, is it referring to specific ways, or underlying desires?
acts that we are neither naturally inclined to do nor explicitly taught to do tend not to be common enough to be worth the effort to pass laws against.
So would you say that murder is either:
1) a natural inclination of human being;
2) explicitly taught;
3) not regulated by the law.
3 is clearly not the case, so I’m curious to know what would you pick between 1 and 2.
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
It sounds like you disagree with this claim; can you say more about why? (I’m willing to defend it, but right now I feel like someone has incredulously said to me “Wait, you’re saying humans consume organic matter for fuel?”… I don’t know where to start addressing your disagreement.)
There are also contexts in which killing people is explicitly taught, but they are relatively rare and we tend not to label them “murder” and they tend to be legal.
I guess one question is what do you mean by “natural inclination”.
Humans are clearly capable of murder. They also, clearly, engage in it quite rarely (regardless of the degree of law & order around, I might add). Evolutionary speaking, the capability to murder is beneficial, but needs very strong constraints on it—a tendency to murder those (of your species) around you is likely to wash out of the population pretty quickly.
So yes, there is a biologically hardwired ability to murder, but there are also hardwired brakes on it. These brakes are pretty powerful.
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
I don’t think this is true, for most values of “natural inclination”.
Indications are that it’s very hard to reliably convince people to kill. First-world militaries base quite a bit of their training methods and tactics on working around this; training reforms suggested by S.L.A. Marshall and contemporaries took the US Army from about 25% of front-line soldiers firing their weapons in WWII (!) to a ratio of around 55% in the Korean War, and near 90% by Vietnam. But modern tactics still lean quite heavily on indirect fire and other less personal methods of killing enemies.
Even more tellingly, research into PTSD and related conditions seems to point to a stronger link with responsibility for violence than with exposure to personal danger. Granted, shooting strangers in warfare is rather different from, say, knifing someone in a bar fight; but the evidence seems to suggest that people without sociopathic traits need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before killing’s considered as an option.
Yes, I would expect that most people need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before they are willing to kill someone, especially before they are willing to kill complete strangers. If that is inconsistent with something being a natural inclination, well, OK, then I’ll agree that murder isn’t a natural inclination.
As you suggest in your first sentence, this has more to do with the meaning of “natural inclination” than with anything related to my original point.
Trying to get away from the purely semantic issue… do you disagree with any of this? If so, what?
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
Then it is very possible that we intend with “natural inclination” wildly different things. I see “natural inclination” as whatever innate impulse is strongly present almost universally in humans, such that not meeting it creates a sense of urgency and/or frustration: eating, company, sex, etc. That’s why what you say feels to me like “Of course humans eat truck tires for breakfast!” :) Do you (I hope) intend something much less… coercive.
Barring the socializing influences of culture, I expect typical humans to intermittently experience urges to eat, to socialize, to have sex with each other, and to kill each other.
I also expect that every successful human culture has established cultural norms that govern those urges so that they don’t become too dangerous to the group. Consequently we mostly don’t go around eating whatever we want, having sex with whoever we want, or killing whoever we want… instead, we follow social rules that govern what and when and how it’s OK to do those things.
In some cases we internalize such rules and adopt them as values of our own (“I respect the property rights of others and will therefore not eat food that isn’t mine”, “I respect the bodily autonomy of others and will therefore not have sex with them unless the desire is mutual,” “I respect the social rules that govern acceptable sex partners and will therefore not have sex with socially unacceptable partners whether or not the desire is mutual”, “I respect the lives of others and will therefore not kill them even when they deserve it,” etc.). In other cases we don’t internalize them, but we follow them because it’s more practical to do so.
That doesn’t mean the impulse isn’t there.
That having been said… I would agree that the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not eating for a day is very different from the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not murdering someone who violates me.
But I would also say that the sense of urgency that arises from not having sex with someone really attractive is not very much like either of those, and more like the latter than the former.
This will inevitability turn into a nature/nurture discussion about what is and is not natural. Let’s dissolve it.
Most humans instinctively understand how to inflict harm, possess emotions that can trigger violence under certain conditions, and also have an innate desire to prevent harm from occurring.
Cultural mechanisms can prevent the conditions of murder. Cultural mechanisms can also override the instinct of harm avoidance so that murder can be more easily committed.
I’m going to come at this from descriptive ethics, rather than a prescriptive ethics, because I find that more interesting for this particular case.
The popularly termed “age creepiness rule” (don’t date under age/2+7) appears to be a weirdly accurate reflection of what most OKCupid men proclaim is reasonable (see: male chart, youngest allowable match) and this is despite the human male inclination towards choosing younger mates (as okcupid shows, actual messaging rates differ from declared values)
Let’s just suppose that outwardly stated preferences on OKCupid mimic (at the very least) the moral intuitions of Western men, and that the “age creepiness equation” is not well known enough to actually alter anything.
What would we predict about our laws, given age/2+7?
14=14/2+7
Making 14 the age at which people can start exploring sex without violating the equation.
18=22/2+7
Making 22 the age at which it is inappropriate to have sex with anyone under 18.
Another equation conforming pair which seems to correspond to legally important ages: 16 & 18.
Does this information hold any predictive value for how nations tend to make laws? Does the equation change based on cultural variables? Do you think that the equation reflects anything important about human maturity levels? Does it reflect anything about which behavior would be adaptive ancestrally? Does the equation makes sense from a proscriptive ethics perspective?
My answer to these is generally “yes” with increasing uncertainty and qualifying for each successive question.
I was less “applying” and more observing the way this “rule of thumb” conforms to many people’s moral intuitions, and its possible implications. I’m not denying that at the older ends of the scale there comes a point at which increasing age does not mean decreasing vulnerability to exploitation. For example, I wouldn’t say 35 and 55 is an immoral pairing, despite violating the equation.
Probabilistically your question makes sense. It doesn’t make much sense if I think about my personal experience. I don’t think my ethics are determined by the law and I don’t give much thought to it when thinking about right and wrong. Then again, I know myself imperfectly. My mom was generally obeying the law and my dad was breaking it. I learned from both of them.
In Finland, the age of consent is 16. I disagree with it, but don’t really care to elaborate how. I find it really hard to be judgemental about sex.
Do you know why the age of consent for sex is 18? What would your sexual ethics be if it happened to have been raised to 21 not 18? Indeed this almost happened. Think about a wide array of questions, relationships, policies and norms you approve or disapprove of in light of this.
Even better, when you next time find yourself making judgements on them, try for a short time seeing them from the perspective of world-21-you instead of world-18-you. Applying the reversal test can be fun, but other people might not see it your way if you point it out.
The age of consent differs over the world. Even within the US. Kansas has one of 16 while it’s 18 in Florida.
According to Wikipedia Spain even has an age of consent of 13 (with some exceptions) and the government recently announced that it wants to raise it to 15.
I don’t think my morals on sexuality would change much by living in Spain.
I know this of course, I live in Slovenia where it is 15. However nearly everyone here assume it is 18. I think this is because:
It is 18 in the most culturally important state in the world: California
People treat 18 as Schelling point for legal adulthood.
The second is probably why they people here are surprised the drinking age is 21 in much of the United States. 18, rather than the more traditional 21 (see Roman laws) likely exists as a Schelling point for legal rights, because during the 20th century men of that age where judged useful for military service, not because it was determined as the age where people generally become capable of making all decisions on their own behalf.
Hitler started drafting people of age 22 when he reintroduced the draft in Germany. Later he drafted even people under 18.
I would rather think 18 it’s the time where most people leave high school or the local equivalent and go to college or take a job. Taking a job means that you have to be able to make contracts while people act school don’t have to make their own contracts.
Historically the first conscription in modern times was done by the French:
“Conscription in its modern form arose in revolutionary France, where universal military service was regarded both as a Republican duty, based on the principles of equality and fraternity, and as a necessity for national survival. In August 1793, a law limited liability for service to men between the ages of 18 and 25” (source)
In those times most people did not go to high school or the local equivalents.
Hitler’s social order isn’t the direct ancestor of our current social order.
British and Americans drafted at 18. British starting in WW1 as far as I can tell, Americans in WW2. The voting age in the United States was lowered for all states to 18 around the time of the Vietnam war (1971 to be exact), specifically on the notion it being unfair to draft 18 year old to fight in a war they couldn’t vote on.
The US seems to have lowered it from 21 to 18 in 1942.
With googling I can’t find easily when the US made 18 the year in which people can engage in contracts. But I think that’s generally more central than voting and draft.
I would expect that age to be at 18 in the US before WWII.
Maybe, I certainly think it matters more than voting. But I suspect voting carriers more symbolic weight in people’s minds.
This is an interesting question, If I have some time I’ll check it out as well. Is there a lawyer who happens to know the answer here?
AFAIK few people stayed in school that long when the age of majority was set at 18, and many started working earlier.
That’s another example I thought of including in the post I’ve been thinking of writing but never got around to about what happens when the central example of a category for someone isn’t the same as the central example of the same category for someone else.
Is this the post you want to write?
Not exactly.
I bet they would. At least if you grew up in Spain. Though probably not because of this law.
On what moral question do you predict I would have a much different opinion if I were from Spain?
If there is a question of sexual morality on which:
You grew up in a culture in which people tend to give one answer, which you agree with, and
People who grew up in Spain tend to give a different answer,
Then I think there’s a reasonable chance that: in the counterfactual world in which your parents moved to Spain shortly before you were born, and you grew up there, you would give the Spanish answer instead of your current one.
That’s an obvious point.
I don’t think such questions exist to the extend that the answer is much different.
Is it usually wrong for two 13-year-olds to have sex with each other? What about a 16-year-old and a 13-year-old? 20 and 13?
In general I don’t believe in a moral system where the central criteria of whether something is right or wrong gets decided by a straight rule.
What I do believe is wrong is when 16-year-old or a 20-year-old projects power in order to make the 13-year-old decide to have sex with them. Additionally I see responsibility to act afterwards in a way that the experience creates no emotional wounds or other damage.
Pregnancy would be damage because even if the 13-year-old gets an abortion getting a child killed inside himself leaves some emotional trauma. That means the older person would be responsible for seeing that the 13-year-old is on the pill and use condoms.
In practice I think there probably some level of wrongness in most cases where a 20-year-old has sex with a 13-year-old.
I suggest that, due to the anchoring effects of formal law, there exists some combination of ages such that you (and probably the average German) would say this and the average Spaniard, including hypothetical-you who grew up in Spain, would not. It may not be precisely 20 and 13, but I strongly suspect that such a pair of ages exists.
To make a specific answer I would first have to know which country you are from and then check the social data on differences of opinion from Spain.
It’s in my profile that I’m from Germany, specifically from Berlin. In case It helps you, I’m born here.
I went to an early college program — a residential four-year college where most students entered at age 15 or 16, after two years of high school. This was in a state where the legal age of consent was (and is) 16. As a consequence, many sexual relationships among first-year students were illegal. However, they were also very common.
The culture at this institution was such that students were treated as “college students who happen to be two years younger”, not as “gifted young teenagers who happen to be doing college-level academics”. As such, the age-of-consent law was basically regarded as an inappropriate technicality. Students were cautioned about it, but along the lines of “Technically, if someone really wanted to hurt you, they could charge you with this …”
So far as I know, the only time while I was there that anyone was even seriously threatened with legal charges over an “underage” relationship was one case where a freshman boy (age 15) cheated on his girlfriend with another guy (age 17). The girlfriend initially wanted to report this as “child abuse” but changed her mind before doing so.
While I’m not particularly in favor of age-of-consent laws setting such high bars as they do in most states, I suspect that this particular environment selected for a significantly higher-than-average degree of emotional maturity for that age range.
I would suggest that our teens would be better off if adults would offer them guidance in how to handle sexual relations responsibly, given the exceptional potential they can hold for interpersonal strife, rather than simply declaring them off-limits until a certain age and then assuming they’re mature enough to conduct themselves responsibly, except that it occurs to me that most adults probably aren’t competent to offer good advice on the subject even if they were willing to discuss such matters with teenagers.
The lore — I have no sources for this; it was word-of-mouth at the time — was that when psychologists had once tested the student body for emotional maturity, what they found was that entering students were no more mature than comparable teenagers, but that graduating students were as mature as other college graduates. IOW, it was believed to be not a selection process, but an “if you treat ’em like adults, they’ll act like adults” process.
(Of course, this also neatly fits the institution’s founding ideology, which was opposition to the sustained infantilization of mainstream schooling.)
I once saw someone on the Internet proposing that ability to consent should be granted after an exam, rather than after a given age, much like we don’t grant everyone who reaches a certain age a driving licence.
If everyone had a built-in car automatically activated at puberty, there would be no driving tests, either.
I was going to dispute that, but you know, you’re probably right. The death toll would be tremendous, but it wouldn’t be the government’s place to regulate people’s god-given right to use the cars they were born with.
You want to make it easy for people to know whether another person has the legal ability to consent. If consent is about whether the person had taken an exam, it would be hard to know.
A twenty five year old woman who doesn’t want to have sex before marriage for religious reasons could simply avoid taking the test. People who take the test before getting married could be expelled by the local church.
The proposal seems to give fundamental Christian’s a ugly tool for charging people who engage in premartial sex with rape.
Although you raise some compelling arguments against the proposition of an exam, I’ll note that in cases in the vicinity of the borderline, legal ability to consent by age is already quite hard to judge; people rarely card prospective sex partners.
Actually it was written by a self-declared pedophile (who had chosen not to act upon his urges) who argued that arbitrarily young people should be allowed to consent to sex provided they demonstrably know what they’re doing.
It must have been taken down, because I’ve found that blog but that post no longer seems to be there, and the blog is not on archive.org.
Written exam, or practical?
:-)
Oral (no pun intended!) IIRC.
Yeah, I was carefully avoiding that one.
In Italy the age of consent is 14, it can go down to 13 if the partner is at max 15 years old, but it raises to 16 if the partner is a temporary or permanent authoritative figure, like a coach or a teacher.
18 is the limit at which it is allowed to publicly show or sell pictures/movies about that person naked or performing sexual acts.
I frankly feel that this is one of the very few cases where Italian laws get the facts right: thirteens would still (try to) have sex wether or not it was allowed.
I remember that I believed too that the age of consent was 18, and felt fine with it, so it was a little shock to discover that the limit was much lower. I later however got various data about how sexual expression/desire/maturity starts around that age (mine too, FWIW), so I reconsidered that this was indeed a case of a law just making common sense: you don’t throw in jail a teenager just because of his/her natural impulses.
Well, in the general case, of course you do… at least, if you throw them in jail at all. Adults, too. Most crimes are natural impulses, at least for people raised in a given culture; acts that we are neither naturally inclined to do nor explicitly taught to do tend not to be common enough to be worth the effort to pass laws against.
With respect to age of consent laws in particular, I would say there’s more than one relevant age threshold if we’re going to bother regulating this stuff by age at all; a typical thirteen-year-old is not equivalent to a typical 17-year-old, but neither is s/he equivalent to a typical 9-year-old.
I would also say that the kind of relationship matters more to capacity for consent than age, though I understand the “bright line” reasons for using the latter.
No, most crimes have “natural” motivations. If you, say, plan and execute a bank robbery that’s not an impulse.
Most acts are instrumental—you do them to reach a goal, not because you’re “naturally inclined” to do them just so.
I’m pretty sure MrMind would class two teenagers lying to their parents about where they’re going to be and finding somewhere private to have sex as obeying precisely the sort of “natural impulses” referenced in their post. And, yes, agreed, most of the acts involved are entirely instrumental.
I would class that as the same kind of planning demonstrated by a bank robber (although one hopes that successful bank robbers require more sophisticated planning skills).
If you would say neither of those are “natural impulses” because they require instrumental planning, that’s fine, I won’t argue with you… I’m talking about the thing MrMind is talking about, and using their langauge to refer to it, but if y’all can agree on a different word to use I’ll happily use that word instead.
Semantics aside, if there’s an actual disagreement here, can you say more about what it is?
Well, I do agree with you that people are certainly thrown in jail because of their “natural impulses”—not all crimes are like that, but some are.
However the remainder of that paragraph (“Most crimes are natural impulses...”) makes no sense to me at all, I think it’s wrong because you’re completely ignoring instrumentality. Consider a trivial example: running a red light. Are people naturally inclined to do that? No, I don’t think so. Are they explicitly taught to do that? Nope. But is it common? Fairly common, I’d say and there are certainly laws against it.
(nods) Thanks for answering my question.
As I say, I certainly agree that most of the acts people perform, whether criminal or not, are instrumental rather than… um… whatever the alternative is. (Reflexive? Instinctive?)
And yes, I guess you’re right that I’m ignoring that fact… precisely because it seems irrelevant to me.
Similarly, I’m happy to say that eating is a natural impulse. If someone objected that the overwhelming majority of the actions we perform in order to satisfy that impulse are instrumental and deliberate, I would certainly agree that this is true, but would find it strange to conclude that eating was therefore not a natural impulse. Instrumentality of acts just seems entirely beside the point.
Your position makes more sense to me as applied to running red lights, though. My (natural?) inclination is to extend the same reasoning to that case as well but I can definitely appreciate the criticism that at this point I’m just being metaphorical and could just as easily classify anything as “natural,” and I’ll accept that I over-reached with my original claim. People don’t run red lights in the wild.
But murder? Rape? Battery? Nah, in response to certain stimuli these are as natural as eating and having sex. The psychological and social structures we’ve constructed to prevent those stimuli from arising, and to prevent us from responding with those impulses when the stimuli do arise, and to prevent us from implementing those impulses when we do experience them… those structures are wonderful things, and in many contexts they enable us to do much much better than our natural impulses would lead us to do… but to therefore claim that those impulses don’t exist just seems bizarre to me.
I wonder whether what’s underlying the inferential gap here is some unstated assumptions relating to the moral implications of something being a natural impulse. Does it help at all if I say out loud that many of our natural impulses are utterly abhorrent?
I think the word “impulse” is providing more confusion here than light.
Let’s unpack. You have a biologically hardwired desire/instinct to eat. That provides you with a “natural” goal that you may reach through a variety of instrumental ways. Some of them are more acceptable (either from a psychological or from a cultural standpoint), some of them less.
Similarly, there is a desire/instinct to, say, have sex. That, however, doesn’t make rape “natural” as what’s “natural” is desire, not a particular way to satisfy it. There are ways to have sex other than through rape—just as there are ways to eat other than by stealing food and ways to assert dominance other than by punching someone in the face. That’s why distinguishing between the underlying desire and the specific way chosen to satisfy it is important.
No, I don’t think so. Do you have any particular examples?
OK.
So going back to the OP I responded to… when two 14 year olds have sex, is that a specific way, or an underlying desire?
When the OP says it’s common sense not to imprison teenagers “just because of his/her natural impulses”, is it referring to specific ways, or underlying desires?
So would you say that murder is either: 1) a natural inclination of human being; 2) explicitly taught; 3) not regulated by the law.
3 is clearly not the case, so I’m curious to know what would you pick between 1 and 2.
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
It sounds like you disagree with this claim; can you say more about why? (I’m willing to defend it, but right now I feel like someone has incredulously said to me “Wait, you’re saying humans consume organic matter for fuel?”… I don’t know where to start addressing your disagreement.)
There are also contexts in which killing people is explicitly taught, but they are relatively rare and we tend not to label them “murder” and they tend to be legal.
I guess one question is what do you mean by “natural inclination”.
Humans are clearly capable of murder. They also, clearly, engage in it quite rarely (regardless of the degree of law & order around, I might add). Evolutionary speaking, the capability to murder is beneficial, but needs very strong constraints on it—a tendency to murder those (of your species) around you is likely to wash out of the population pretty quickly.
So yes, there is a biologically hardwired ability to murder, but there are also hardwired brakes on it. These brakes are pretty powerful.
Yes, I would agree with all of this.
I don’t think this is true, for most values of “natural inclination”.
Indications are that it’s very hard to reliably convince people to kill. First-world militaries base quite a bit of their training methods and tactics on working around this; training reforms suggested by S.L.A. Marshall and contemporaries took the US Army from about 25% of front-line soldiers firing their weapons in WWII (!) to a ratio of around 55% in the Korean War, and near 90% by Vietnam. But modern tactics still lean quite heavily on indirect fire and other less personal methods of killing enemies.
Even more tellingly, research into PTSD and related conditions seems to point to a stronger link with responsibility for violence than with exposure to personal danger. Granted, shooting strangers in warfare is rather different from, say, knifing someone in a bar fight; but the evidence seems to suggest that people without sociopathic traits need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before killing’s considered as an option.
Yes, I would expect that most people need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before they are willing to kill someone, especially before they are willing to kill complete strangers. If that is inconsistent with something being a natural inclination, well, OK, then I’ll agree that murder isn’t a natural inclination.
As you suggest in your first sentence, this has more to do with the meaning of “natural inclination” than with anything related to my original point.
Trying to get away from the purely semantic issue… do you disagree with any of this? If so, what?
Then it is very possible that we intend with “natural inclination” wildly different things.
I see “natural inclination” as whatever innate impulse is strongly present almost universally in humans, such that not meeting it creates a sense of urgency and/or frustration: eating, company, sex, etc.
That’s why what you say feels to me like “Of course humans eat truck tires for breakfast!” :)
Do you (I hope) intend something much less… coercive.
Barring the socializing influences of culture, I expect typical humans to intermittently experience urges to eat, to socialize, to have sex with each other, and to kill each other.
I also expect that every successful human culture has established cultural norms that govern those urges so that they don’t become too dangerous to the group. Consequently we mostly don’t go around eating whatever we want, having sex with whoever we want, or killing whoever we want… instead, we follow social rules that govern what and when and how it’s OK to do those things.
In some cases we internalize such rules and adopt them as values of our own (“I respect the property rights of others and will therefore not eat food that isn’t mine”, “I respect the bodily autonomy of others and will therefore not have sex with them unless the desire is mutual,” “I respect the social rules that govern acceptable sex partners and will therefore not have sex with socially unacceptable partners whether or not the desire is mutual”, “I respect the lives of others and will therefore not kill them even when they deserve it,” etc.). In other cases we don’t internalize them, but we follow them because it’s more practical to do so.
That doesn’t mean the impulse isn’t there.
That having been said… I would agree that the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not eating for a day is very different from the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not murdering someone who violates me.
But I would also say that the sense of urgency that arises from not having sex with someone really attractive is not very much like either of those, and more like the latter than the former.
This will inevitability turn into a nature/nurture discussion about what is and is not natural. Let’s dissolve it.
Most humans instinctively understand how to inflict harm, possess emotions that can trigger violence under certain conditions, and also have an innate desire to prevent harm from occurring.
Cultural mechanisms can prevent the conditions of murder. Cultural mechanisms can also override the instinct of harm avoidance so that murder can be more easily committed.
I’m going to come at this from descriptive ethics, rather than a prescriptive ethics, because I find that more interesting for this particular case.
The popularly termed “age creepiness rule” (don’t date under age/2+7) appears to be a weirdly accurate reflection of what most OKCupid men proclaim is reasonable (see: male chart, youngest allowable match) and this is despite the human male inclination towards choosing younger mates (as okcupid shows, actual messaging rates differ from declared values)
Let’s just suppose that outwardly stated preferences on OKCupid mimic (at the very least) the moral intuitions of Western men, and that the “age creepiness equation” is not well known enough to actually alter anything.
What would we predict about our laws, given age/2+7?
14=14/2+7
Making 14 the age at which people can start exploring sex without violating the equation.
18=22/2+7
Making 22 the age at which it is inappropriate to have sex with anyone under 18.
Another equation conforming pair which seems to correspond to legally important ages: 16 & 18.
Does this information hold any predictive value for how nations tend to make laws? Does the equation change based on cultural variables? Do you think that the equation reflects anything important about human maturity levels? Does it reflect anything about which behavior would be adaptive ancestrally? Does the equation makes sense from a proscriptive ethics perspective?
My answer to these is generally “yes” with increasing uncertainty and qualifying for each successive question.
I’d be weary of applying these kinds of “rules of thumb” at extreme ends of the scale.
I was less “applying” and more observing the way this “rule of thumb” conforms to many people’s moral intuitions, and its possible implications. I’m not denying that at the older ends of the scale there comes a point at which increasing age does not mean decreasing vulnerability to exploitation. For example, I wouldn’t say 35 and 55 is an immoral pairing, despite violating the equation.
Probabilistically your question makes sense. It doesn’t make much sense if I think about my personal experience. I don’t think my ethics are determined by the law and I don’t give much thought to it when thinking about right and wrong. Then again, I know myself imperfectly. My mom was generally obeying the law and my dad was breaking it. I learned from both of them.
In Finland, the age of consent is 16. I disagree with it, but don’t really care to elaborate how. I find it really hard to be judgemental about sex.