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Okay, now tell me why you can't (or wouldn't) make all these same arguments about a 10-year-old who has hit puberty?
10 year olds have a serious intelligence deficit compared to adults. 10 year old pregnancy is extremely harmful. The cohort of men attracted to 10 year olds is a small percent of the population, and they tend to have other mental illnesses. Even as a smart person, I personally don't think I could have consented to sex at only 10 years old. I didn't understand it enough. I don't believe any of these are true at 15.
I don't find this argument convincing. Your entire premise is that 15 is arbitrary and most 15-year-olds (according to you) are physically and mentally mature enough while most 10-year-olds are not. This might be true. But it's clearly a sliding scale: some (very tiny) number of 10-year-olds probably are physically and mentally mature enough, while there are a not-insignificant number of 15-year-olds who definitely are not.
Every age-of-consent argument boils down to this: yes, the number we choose is somewhat arbitrary. You're saying 18 is too old but 14 is too young. You may or may not be correct, but there will always be someone saying "Aktually most 14-year-olds nowadays..."
While I wouldn't lose sleep over lowering the AOC to 15, nor am I losing sleep over it being 18. And I would pretty seriously side-eye a grown man with a 15-year-old girlfriend, however full of hip and round of breast she might be.
(Also, I think you probably are our previous ebophile poster.)
Elsewhere in the thread I said I supported a "common law age of consent," where the aptitude for consent is judged by a jury in a trial that charges rape or sexual assault, where the prosecutor brings evidence that the victim lacks mental capacity. My priors are that in 99% of cases involving 15 year olds that are successful now, the state will be unable to meet this standard. But in 99% of cases involving 10 year olds, they will be able to meet this standard. It's fine with me to have 1% outliers, after all, people differ a lot in intrinsic qualities other than age.
The problem here is that most cases over 15 result in serious harm to a man, and little to no harm to the girl. If the age is lowered, you will introduce slightly more mild harm to girls and decrease serious harm (prison, felony status, sex offender registration) to young men while also causing positive externalities like the expansion of young male dating pools, increases in young marriage and increases in the TFR. The issue is therefore asymmetrical; an age of consent of 18 is plausibly far less optimal than an age of consent of 15, when it comes to the amount of harm and negative externalities either causes.
I'm really struggling to envision how this would work in practice. A 20-year-old man has consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl, but it's okay because "she seemed really mature for her age"?
How would this synergise (or not) with other rights only afforded to people who have reached the age of majority? 15-year-olds can vote, drink alcohol, smoke, buy guns etc. provided they can demonstrate that they're unusually mature for their age? Can you imagine the administrative overhead involved in having a public body vet the emotional maturity of every 15-, 16- and 17-year-old in the land on a case-by-case basis?
But somehow I suspect you aren't half as emotionally invested in extending the franchise to "emotionally mature" 15-year-olds as you are in decriminalising grown men having sex with minors.
Prosecutor charges defendant with rape or sexual assault and argues with evidence that the charge applies because the victim lacked the cognitive ability to consent to sex, due to being too young of a child.
It would be okay because she was not mentally handicapped. Normal 15 year olds understand sex.
I think all of those are fine for 15 year olds as long as their parents can veto it. In fact that's how it was for a long time until the late 20th century. They used to have smoking rooms in high schools (for students) and they would bring their rifles to school and so on. What is more important is whether they can not have their parents be their guardians. I think there should be the ability for smart 15 year olds to become emancipated in cases where their parents lack ability, are abusive, or are just too different from their own tastes. This is very rare, however, but courts already hear emancipation cases. Most 15 year olds probably don't want to be emancipated since they get along with their parents and depend on them. In fact the opposite is more frequently the case, many parents keep parenting until their child is in their early 20s, which is probably why the age of adulthood in the US used to be 21. This happens because their 18 and 19 year olds are still dependent on them and don't trust their own judgement. For example, I bought a gun when I was 18. Looking back I definitely did not need it and I was glad my parents took it away from me. I went to college and they found I had a fake ID when I came back for the summer and that got taken too when I was 19. A lot of girls had tracking apps on their phones for their parents during freshman year of university and when I was 21, a friend wanted his freshman girlfriend to come live with him in a different city while he did an internship, but her father wouldn't allow her.
As for the franchise, I don't care at all because I don't vote. The reason for that is that I don't accept mass democracy as a political system, but that's a totally different can of worms.
Libertarian discussion of this idea
So, 5 years old who leaves home to move in with nice uncle who promises him as much chocolate as he wants to eat, is adult citizen with full rights, while 50 years old who is living with mom is still legally a baby?
Very cool. Misesistan is going to be interesting place. Perhaps not to live in, but certainly to watch from the other side of the world.
For what it's worth I don't think Ludwig von Mises would have supported this. Mises Institute's Mises is really Murray Rothbard wearing a Mises mask.
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