The arguments for adolescent liberation are easy to make because they are analogous to arguments made by women’s liberationists. Many decades ago, people could make arguments against women entering the workplace using arguments about their proper role or their physical and mental abilities. In the West and during the twenty-first century, even those who believe that women should stay home to care for children do not desire to coercively prevent them from working or denying them access to education. At least, I’ve never heard someone advocate for this position.
Simultaneously, the idea of complete liberation for adolescents is regarded as absurd. People do not want to see young adults working full-time, voting, consuming alcohol, signing contracts, living alone, or having full medical autonomy. They also do not want to allow young adolescents aged 12 - 15 to have the ability to operate vehicles. If people were asked to justify this position, they would make a generalization that young adults don’t have the cognitive ability or wisdom. They might reinforce this with an anecdote about their own youthful stupidity.
I don’t find these responses adequate. A central core of modern liberalism is that we should not legally discriminate against people because they are a member of a certain class of people. Imagine I said that women should not be permitted to drive because I know a woman that is a very poor driver to the point of it being dangerous. That is not an argument against all women driving. That is an argument against that particular woman being allowed to drive.
Likewise, it is unfair to take away the rights of a young person because of the actions of members of their age cohort. If a 12-year-old can demonstrate the ability to drive significantly better than the average adult, then what possible justification is there for coercively preventing the 12-year-old from doing so? It cannot be on the basis of their competency. And if a 12-year-old has a better understanding of political issues than the average adult, why should they be disenfranchised?
Granted, many adolescents do not have the cognitive ability to make certain important decisions and we shouldn’t allow them too. But the reason we shouldn’t allow them to is because they lack the cognitive ability, not because of their age. Rather than basing the decisions on a poor heuristic like age, we should make the decision on the basis of tests of information, emotional maturity and forward thinking behavior.
Using tests of ability, maturity, knowledge, competency, and so forth has the benefit of reducing type II errors (false negatives) as well as type I errors (false positives). If we develop a good test as the deciding factor, then we will have fewer people above the age of 18 who are not ready to be mature adults being granted the right to make decisions for themselves. Similarly, we will prevent people below the age of 18 from having their rights taken away. I emphasize the second part because I believe it is a much larger issue.
I am not saying how difficult the competency tests should be, just that they are a better method for deciding whether or not someone should be allowed a right. I think that this position seems a bit extreme, but it is just a legitimate application of the core belief of progressivism which is that it is ethically unjust to prevent someone from having rights on the basis of unchosen and superficial characteristics about them. While age is a decent heuristic, if someone demonstrates competency, age is no longer relevant. Analogously, if someone said that women cannot be in the military because they are not physically strong enough and a woman demonstrated that she was just as strong as the men, her being a woman would no longer be relevant.
I find the idea of an "age of majority" test very frightening - if it *replaces* an arbitrary but inevitable age of majority for all people. That could very well decrease, uh, "net liberty" rather than increase it, because suddenly you have (another) way for politicians/bureaucrats/grass-roots moral busybodies to, by their thinking, "protect people from bad choices". For instance: Would people who self-harm be able to pass such a test, a test that's presumably devised by mostly neurotypical experts (or "experts") influenced by mostly neurotypical politicians, in turn influenced by mostly neurotypical voters? My impression of the general mentality of people, even in the most liberal of democracies, is that they are quick to assume that other/different people's freedoms, choices, and preferences are less rational, legitimate and important than their own. I think removing a universal age of majority will only increase the (cultural, ethnic, "neurological"(?), etc) majority's capacity to limit the freedom of minorities and weirdos. Additionally, the ideological zealots' capacity to impose their beliefs on others.
That said, the idea of a test that minors can use to access personal liberty earlier in life seems like a possibly beneficial thing, given that there's a set age when that *will* happen regardless of whether they pass the test(s) or not. (I guess it depends on which personal liberties they could access.) I doubt that it will happen, though, and the principal reason for that is that age isn't permanent. A sexist system that limits the freedom of women provides women with tons of motivation to push for systemic change, because systemic change is the only way to escape the sexism; freedom-limited adolescents in an ageist system can just wait a couple of years until *they* are personally unaffected. (Edit: And for the same reason, I think it's also far less morally repugnant than restrictions based on gender, ethnicity, etc.)
(I hope you don't mind comments on old(ish?) posts! Found your Newsletter recently and I think it's excellent!)
Totally agree (except that I think you're talking about "classical liberalism", not "progressivism").
But few people seem to support that idea - I think if the average person can't imagine some exception (in this case a competent 12 year old) then they assume it's impossible to exist, and see attempts to provide for those exceptions as stupid wastes of time.
I'd broaden the principle to say "any entity" that demonstrates compentence should have full adult human rights - a talking dog, a robot, a space alien, whatever.
This is one aspect of a larger issue - how society deals with entities somewhere between adult normal humans (who get full civil rights) and inanimate objects (rocks; which are chattel property and have no rights whatsoever).
In practice society does recognize many of these in-between entities (animals, children, incompetent adults), but not all of them. Moreover we deal with them very inconsistently (we have animal rights laws and child protection laws, but not following the same set of principles).