Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Relatively immature, Mr Pedant.
No pedantry there, you were just wrong. Your little spiel was that a 16 year old was an adult and not immature except via modern society. You're wrong. Society is just starting to catch up to the reality of biology.
Um... Given that we were talking about age of consent, the comparison to age 18 was assumed. My mistake for making the assumption that you got that without having to be explicitly told. Next time, I'll make sure to add a couple extra paragraphs to explain this to you.
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The amount of maturity does not appreciably increase between the age of 16 and 18.
This would be a better argument for prohibiting relationships between 25 and 18 year olds than it is for allowing them between 25 and 16 year olds. I'm not advocating for such but saying "the undeveloped brain of a 16 year old is close enough to the undeveloped brain of an 18 year old" makes no sense.
Why doesn't it make sense? The whole point here is about how it's legal for a 25 year old to have sex with an 18 year old, but not a 16 year old, and to ask whether this really makes any sense at all. I'm not advocating a solution, just pointing out that from a natural developmental point of view, 16 and 18 aren't that different. What makes most of the difference between those two ages isn't biological, but sociological. A 16 year old is less likely to make mature choices, not because he's significantly less mature physically, but because he is less likely to have as much experience with responsibility. The older someone is past the age at which we arbitrarily define him/her as an adult, the more responsibilities they have taken on, the more adult choices they have made, and thus the better equipped they are to interact with others in an adult manner.
If we declared the age of adulthood to be 15, within a generation or so, we'd see 15 year olds acting with about the same level of maturity that we see 18 year old acting with today. More significantly, we'd see 18 year olds acting more like 21 year olds today. We'd push the point at which maturity is gained up. My point is that with the exception of the very early teen years (adolescence maybe), maturity level is most affected by environment and not biology.
Again though, I'm not advocating anything, just making an observation. The idea that a 16 year old is incapable of granting consent for any reason other than legally, but an 18 year old can is patently absurd. They're both more or less equally capable of doing so, and what difference there is between their abilities to make rational choices regarding consent is far more affected by social influences than physiological ones.
Edited, Oct 3rd 2014 6:53pm by gbaji