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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank
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To: The Philosopher who wrote (20620)8/4/2001 8:28:47 PM
From: Dayuhan  Read Replies (4) of 82486
 
Every choice involves a decision. The choices of a 5 year old may be based largely on emotion and impulse, but the same can be said of many 50 year olds.

You still have yet to address the main point of the posts, which is that whether you call it choice or decision, whether the brain is sufficiently developed or not, the issue of whether or not a given 17 year old will have sex is in fact ultimately resolved by the 17 year old, not by parents or the state. Parents or the state may try to appropriate the decision making process, but the 17 year old still has the option to ignore both.

We all know this, which is why we teach our children to make decisions. We assume when we teach them that they will be making better decisions at 30 than they will at 15 (we aren't always right). We don't strive to give them full and complete powers of reasoned decision making at any given age. We strive to assure that their decision making ability at any given age is sufficient to manage the decisions that they will have to face at that age.

As soon as a child is old enough to play unsupervised with friends, that child will face situations where friends want to do something that parents forbid. The child has to decide whether to obey the parents or follow the peer group. Some of these situations may be quite complex and involve varying levels of risk and reward. Ready or not, the child still has to decide.

A teenager may have achieved only 80% development of the decision making sectors of the brain, but with proper training that teenager will still be able to make consistently better decisions that a person with a fully matured brain that has never been taught to make decisions.
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