Thanks for taking the question seriously.
My basic moral principle is founded on the the basic wonder of life and the individual's free pursuit of happiness in that
life. Pretty much laissez faire so long as you don't injure in the process another individual pursuing his happiness.
We're pretty much in agreement so far.
As for children, the need to protect children is not a moral principle but a supporting requirement. If you have a principle
that it's moral for individuals to do whatever they please among themselves as long as they don't injure anyone, then
you need the concept of consent, which requires the capacity to consent, which requires adulthood, at a minimum.
There we separate. An age-specific age of consent inplies that on one day a person is unable to give consent but on the next day he or she can. That's not how life works. Some 13 year olds are more capable of giving informed consent than some 30 year olds. I don't assume that children necessarily have any less capacity to consent than any other people. Sure, up the point of the mastery of language they can't consent in words, but there are other kinds of consent. An infant can consent to suckling, or can refuse consent.
For chldren who are realistically too immature, whether from age or other reasons, to give consent, we give parents the right to grant consent to and for their children in virtually every area of life. Medical care, education, residence, food, use of alcohol in the home, on and on. We trust parents to consult their children to the appropriate degree. It's only in a few areas, one of them being sexuality, that we deny parents the right to consent for their children. I find this logically inconsistent.
The decision when a child becomes an adult is entirely an arbitrary decision which varies widely by culture. If we are truly libertarian, I argue that we have to abandon arbitrary age distinctions and allow children to consent to whatever they want to whenever they are capable of it. Anything else is demeaning to people who are perfectly capable of giving consent but are considered legally in the same catagories as infants and idiots.
On another front, BTW, I go a bit further than you do, I think, in the definition of injury to others and to society, but this isn't the place for that discussion. I just mention it since it was part of your post. |
