Comment Re:Because obscurity... (Score 1) 379
There is no "consent" section of the brain that suddenly comes online on a person's 16th or 18th birthday. There is no bright line between "child" and "adult" at a biological level. There is no scientific consensus, let alone logical proof, as to what physical capacity a person needs to make informed decisions, or how to measure that capacity, or even at what age that capacity tends to arise (see the variation in ages of consent across the US and around the world). Setting a policy here requires more than just logic.
Very good post, but I must point out that there is in fact a great deal of psychological literature on decision-making, and I am alarmed at the number of decisions that adults "make" that are foregone conclusions of programming. This is not the abstract "there is no free will because free will implies uncaused causation" but a much more concrete "the conscious mind spends a lot of time justifying and making up explanations for decisions that the subconscious makes without recourse to reason."
Come to think of it, the "age of consent" is probably closely linked to the age at which our brains really start to behave in that way--perhaps it could be said that only a child is capable of actually making a conscious decision. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few" is a well-known observation, but the basis is that as we age we become more set in our ways and less capable of assimilating new information and thinking in new ways.
That's the theory. Do the facts bear it out? Does it look like we, as a species, tend to make informed and wise decisions? About sex? Marriage? Children? Transportation? Pollution? War? Finances? Ethics? Time management? Quality of life?