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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (20666)	8/5/2001 9:00:40 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

1) One could drug them to dissipate their sexual urges. Did you ever read Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House", Karen? The possibility has been explored, on the fictional level anyway. 4) Or they could be brainwashed. Perhaps that's more what the folks here who think kids can avoid a decision about sex have in mind. Here again, modern technology could probably produce a device or technique or a combination of the two that would be effective. In another fictional treatment, there was always those junior anti-sex leagues. Funny thing is, the original article I noted on this topic, washingtonpost.com , seemed to imply the abstinence approach was being considered somewhat more broadly than subsequent discussion here. It wasn't just for sex education, W's pals seem to be pushing for a general wind-down of family planning in the convention birth control sense in favor of the "just say no" approach. Right from the top: The Bush administration is making a fundamental change in how the federal government approaches issues involving reproductive health, scaling back efforts to promote family planning and contraception while aggressively promoting "abstinence-only" programs. Their confidence in their ability to reengineer human nature is touching.

To: Lane3 who wrote (20666)	8/6/2001 6:35:43 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I suspect that your tongue was at least partially in cheek when you made those suggestions; I'll play the straight man anyway and point out the obvious problem. Since we have elected to give our children legal adult status at age 18, none of these restraints could be applied beyond that age without the young person's consent, a consent that I expect would be rare. Then we'd have a bunch of 18 year olds, protected from the decision making process due to physical restraint, suddenly free to indulge as they pleased. I can imagine the results. I did have a few more thoughts on this whole brain-maturity subject. First, let us take it for granted that, as The Brain Scientist tells us, the decision-making capacity of a 17 year old is not fully developed. I see no reason to doubt this. "Not fully developed", however, does not mean nonexistent. A 17 year old certainly has some decision-making capability, even if it is not fully developed. Since a 17 year old is fairly close to full physical development, one would guess that these faculties are reasonably close to full development. Let us say, for purposes of illustration, that the decision making capacities of an average 17 year old are about 75% developed. Now let's look at adults, with fully developed decision-making capacities. The key word here is "capacity", which suggests potential decision making ability. That potential may or may not be realized, and many adults, despite having a fully developed capacity for fully reasoned decision making, do not actually use that capacity to its full extent, or even to a minimal extent. The empirical evidence of this is so overwhelming that I do not feel any need to support this contention. If an adult with the capacity to play with 100 marbles actually plays using only 30, and a 17 year old with the capacity to play with 75 marbles actually plays using 50, the 17 year old is still playing with more marbles than the adult. This is the only explanation I can think if for the observation (and if science doesn't consider empirical evidence, it isn't science) that many adults, despite having fully developed decision making capacities, still make poorly reasoned decisions decisions, and many 17 year olds, despite having less than fully developed reasoning capacities, still make well reasoned decisions. To illustrate, we may use The Brain Scientist's own illustration, that of the 11 year old whose physical development will not permit pitching in the major leagues. It's not a very good analogy if we're comparing it to the capacity to make decisions regarding sex (few children will ever pitch in the majors, almost all will make decisions regarding sex), but we'll look at the larger picture here, and use something The Scientist will surely understand, since it is His own. It is true that no 11 year old will ever pitch in the majors. But who will pitch better, a star little leaguer with extensive coaching or an adult that has never thrown a ball? The kid, obviously. It could also be pointed out that a young person who has not commenced athletic training by age 11 is probably never going to pitch in the majors. An 11 year old may not be able to pitch in the majors, but that doesn't mean that 11 year olds can't be taught to pitch to the limits of the limits of their physical capacity. And if we expect a person to ever be able to pitch in the majors, we'd better start training them as early as possible. It should be noted that we do not expect 17 year olds to sit in the major leagues of decision making. We don't ask them to be Secretaries of State, or CEOs. We just want them to be able to make key decisions regarding their own mental and physical health and safety. Very important, but hardly major league. I do not think it possible to seriously argue that a child cannot be taught by age 17 to exercise a degree of decision-making capacity sufficient to responsibly decide whether to have sex or not. I'm interested to see if anybody tries. I'm also interested to see what alternatives they can cite that you haven't already cited. Chastity belts, drugs, and physical segregation, while potentially effective, do present certain practical problems.