Apparently someone likes to downvote posts they disagree with without replying, so allow me to elaborate:
The prefrontal cortex is the section of the brain responsible for executive function, impulse control, and long-term decision making. Essentially, a fully-developed prefrontal cortex is what makes an adult an adult. The prefrontal cortex doesn't fully come online until your early to mid-twenties (this is why all of these rights are generally around the same age, 18-21...unless one wants to suggest that we picked those ages out of a hat).
Most children do not have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. Therefore it is in their and society's best interest to prohibit them from making long-term decisions, since they really don't have the equipment to make lucid choices about the distant future.
So if you're looking for a criterion for voter eligibility, it should be the presence of a developed prefrontal cortex, not age, and certainly not a goddamn civics test (at 17, I would have gotten a hardon at the idea of being legally able to drink if I only had to pass a written exam testing my knowledge of alcohol). Since AFAIK we don't have any real, cost-effective test for whether a person has a prefrontal cortex, chronological age is a passable approximation.
I'm all for classical liberalism, but let's not be naive and throw common sense out the window - anyone who thinks 12-14 year olds should have the right to vote doesn't remember what it was like to be 12-14 years old. Christ, every single person who I respect and consider intelligent and knew when they were 12-14 would have voted for any candidate who promised that we would see boobies during their term in office.
What you wrote _sounds_ really good, and you got upvoted. The trouble is that it's not actually true.
The reason 12-14 years olds seem immature is a social one, and NOT a brain one. I come from a rather different social culture and in my social circle a 12-14 year old was more or less an adult - and we acted that way.
If you assume someone under 18 is a kid - they will act like a kid, if you assume they are an adult, they will act like an adult.
For every kid it was different, the range is about 12-15, but by then there were no longer any dramatic differences in maturity, and further changes are gradual and more importantly life long, i.e. the changes don't magically stop at 18.
By the traditional age of puberty (i.e. not todays accelerated age) all kids are mentally mature. But the social environment in the US isn't conducive to that, instead kids are told you are under 18 so act like a kid.
(And you got downvoted for saying kids don't have a pre-frontal cortex which is nonsense, if you had said less mature I would have let it go.)
And BTW my experience is supported by literature, at least based on an article I read about 2 years ago in 'scientific american mind' (which I tried to find but couldn't).
It's not accidental that the age of majority has crept up and up over the years. Basically people try to set the age so that everyone is mature by that point, but of course 95% of people are mature before that - but are told, don't bother. So they don't and the age creeps upward.
Repeat over the years and it keeps going up. In antiquity majority was 12, about 100 to 200 years ago it was 15. Today you find 25 years old living like teenagers used to.
"The reason 12-14 years olds seem immature is a social one, and NOT a brain one. I come from a rather different social culture and in my social circle a 12-14 year old was more or less an adult - and we acted that way.
If you assume someone under 18 is a kid - they will act like a kid, if you assume they are an adult, they will act like an adult."
That's idealistic, naive nonsense, for at least three reasons I can think of off the top of my head:
1) Take a six-year-old and start treating them as an adult and expecting them to act like one, and observe their behavior (my hypothesis: the child will behave like a slightly-more-mature-than-average six-year-old)
2) Do a survey of people who ran away or were kicked out of their houses at very early ages (let's say 15 or earlier) for traits and psychological health. (my hypothesis: you'll find significantly higher than average drug use, addiction, depression, and other psychological disorders than in a random population).
3) Take a forty-year-old male (who satisfies both of our criteria for maturity: my criterion that he has a fully-developed prefrontal cortex, and your criterion that society "assumes he is an adult" and treats him like one). Now remove his prefrontal cortex. Your argument hypothesizes that he will still be an adult, since the criterion that is important to you - society treating him like an adult - remains unchanged. However, this has actually happened many times. It's called a prefrontal lobotomy, and its effects are well-known - it basically turns an adult into a child. Therefore, the prefrontal cortex has much more to do with what we know as "maturity" than social treatment. (and if you want to be clever and say "well those who get a prefrontal lobotomy are usually severely retarded or mentally ill and thus not treated as adults before the operation," then just remember good old Phineas Gage. Treated as an adult right up until the railroad spike went through his head, and then basically became an impulsive child.)
"(And you got downvoted for saying kids don't have a pre-frontal cortex which is nonsense, if you had said less mature I would have let it go.)"
Wrong; it is a fact that children do not have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. It can take as late as the mid-twenties to come online, and as late as the early thirties to fully myelinate.
Social expectations have very little to do with capacity for long-term decision-making. It's biological - you either have the equipment or you don't. My argument is based on what we know about the brain and on experiments already performed or whose results will be pretty damn obvious; yours is an argument by assertion based on blank-slate idealism and one article in Scientific American Mind which you can't find.
The prefrontal cortex is the section of the brain responsible for executive function, impulse control, and long-term decision making. Essentially, a fully-developed prefrontal cortex is what makes an adult an adult. The prefrontal cortex doesn't fully come online until your early to mid-twenties (this is why all of these rights are generally around the same age, 18-21...unless one wants to suggest that we picked those ages out of a hat).
Most children do not have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. Therefore it is in their and society's best interest to prohibit them from making long-term decisions, since they really don't have the equipment to make lucid choices about the distant future.
So if you're looking for a criterion for voter eligibility, it should be the presence of a developed prefrontal cortex, not age, and certainly not a goddamn civics test (at 17, I would have gotten a hardon at the idea of being legally able to drink if I only had to pass a written exam testing my knowledge of alcohol). Since AFAIK we don't have any real, cost-effective test for whether a person has a prefrontal cortex, chronological age is a passable approximation.
I'm all for classical liberalism, but let's not be naive and throw common sense out the window - anyone who thinks 12-14 year olds should have the right to vote doesn't remember what it was like to be 12-14 years old. Christ, every single person who I respect and consider intelligent and knew when they were 12-14 would have voted for any candidate who promised that we would see boobies during their term in office.