I'm writing today about something which has occupied my mind for a couple of weeks now. As I write this I am watching a rather interesting BBC documentary on codebreakers at Bletchly Park in WW2 so this may not be the clearest post in the world (incidentally it's fascinating and I'd check it out on iPlayer if I were you).
The subject of this post is around the issue of when government legislates for a legal limit in some case. The problem being that in these cases, the limit is alwasy going to be arbitary. The most obvious examples are the age limits imposed upon sexual consent, and the ability to drive (the limit on alcohol and tobacco consumption is less arbitary as these are often based on the evidence of the effect these have on the physiology and neurology of teenagers). The problem with these kinds limits can be framed like this:
We know that we don't want people using supposed consent to defend themselves against the charge of sexually abusing children. We know that children are vulnerable, that they do not understand the implications of sexual contact, nor are they developmentally able to psychologically and physically deal with with sexual activity, so we want society to have a limit to the point at which we can say that below a certain age, there can be no such thing as sexual consent.
However, we also know that teenagers develop at different stages, so that, by the age of 16, many teenagers will certainly not be psychologically prepared to become sexually active, and there may well be 14 or 15 year olds who are mature enough to deal with the implications of having sex. Certainly it's absurd to suggest that all people, on the dawn of their 16th birthday are suddenly changed from immature children to mature young adults, all we know about how puberty progresses contradicts this.
So, we are left with the situation that we certainly want some limit so that the law can distinguish between an adult who can rationally consent and a child who cannot, but putting this limit in place necessarily does not apply to all teenagers at all times, and perhaps criminalises perfectly healthy relationships - some politicians even feel that these kinds of relationships should be prosecuted simply because it's the law.
Its obviously absurd to suggest that just because something is the law that it is necessarily ethical - or to put it better, to suggest that because there is a legal limit to something, that limit is an unassailable moral limit. There are numerous examples throughout history of unethical laws being enthusiastically enforced by governments using the defence of "well, my hands are tied, it's the law".
Obviously, we don't necessarily want teenagers to be having kids left right and centre, that is not going to help anyone, but the fact is that not all sexual contact under the age of 16 is going to be damaging. The law is there to protect the young from the potential maniupulations of older people but does nothing to talk about what I'm going to call here as "age-appropriate relationships" - that is to say relationships that happen within an age-specific peer group. Obviously there are problems with this definition in terms of limits as well, but if we go by the webcomic xkcd's formula of half-one's-age-plus-seven, then we can have a working definition of a reltionship, under the age of 16 which is less prone to the possible manipulation which we suspect from relationships involving teenagers and far older people.
So, you may well have cottoned on to the point I'm trying to make, that instead of just having a lower limit of age of consent, having an upper limit of how much older than a teenager someone can be before a suitable relationship can be considered by society might be a better setup. But of course, this limit will be just as arbitrary as the previous one, and doesn't take into account the possible differences in terms of maturity between people within the half-age-plus-seven bracket (which, if you work it out, has a natural lower limit at 14).
To move on to another exemplar, there is another legal limit, not based on age, which posesses different problems - the example of what constitutes "reasonable force" in cases of assault. No matter who you are in society, in theory at least, you have a right to defend yourself if you are attacked, if you use reasonable force. This means force enough to fend off your attacker without being "excessive" or "gratuitous" - however these defintions are obviously context dependant - what is defined as force reasonable to fend off an attacker is dependant on what the defender believes is necessary to remove the threat in the moment. However, when defenders feel that to remove the threat against them, a certain amount of force is needed, an amount of force that perhaps others would disagree with, then juries may vary wildly in their decisions on the same actions. The decision is bound to be a judgement call in some cases.
So the legal limit of "reasonable force" is in reality, a subjective limit - one in which many people are bound to have different opinions about. But the sexual consent limit is almost the opposite, it's an arbitrary absolute limit based upon a general average of people's rates of development. So the law has problems both ways when presenting limits to things - either you have an arbitrary absolute limit which leaves out the inevitable outliers of the bell curve, or you have a limit based on "common sense" which ultimately leaves itself very open to interpretation, and so will eventually be inconsistant in some way.
I'm not entirely sure there is any real way out of this dilemma, though I'd welcome suggestions, my instinct is to say that if we are to have arbitrary limits, then have some leeway either side of them, and if we are to have "judgement call" limits then we will have to have some rigorously outlined definitions do judge them by - not a perfect solution but the best that can be done as far as I can see.
Theoretical ponderings and hugs,
Gabe
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