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It depends. There are definitely people who are sketch and seem like they'd go a lot lower if only it was allowed and those people are pedos, but actually spotting them vs just finding someone who is on the younger side hot isn't an easy task so people fuck it up often.
A lot of places (including most US states) do have 16 as the age of consent so they could sleep with whoever! And even many of those that don't have "Romeo and Juliet laws" allowing small age differences.
Now legal vs moral are different questions though. I think 16 year olds are generally mature enough to handle body responsibility and should be treated that way both morally and legally for most things. There are some who are still stupid, but a lot of that is just from coddling our kids too much. For example, many parents will get a babysitter for their sixth grader nowadays whereas sixth grade just a few decades ago were the babysitters
Age of adulthood has always been arbitrary, the point of a single age is mostly for simplicity and being consistent. It's way easier to know and enforce the rules when it's simply "18" instead of having to roll the lottery each time if police and a judge disagree with your assessment of maturity. As for that exact age, it's generally between 16-20 in modern culture. Some do go higher and some go lower but it is mostly in that range. Doesn't matter where exactly, just has to be reliable.
I have several questions of my own:
Assuming consent and good intentions, what actually makes pedophilia immoral? I remember my days as a horny 14 year old; there were definitely some hot women in their thirties I would have consented to banging. Would even a consensual, non-manipulative act of sex with a much older woman showing me the ropes have caused me irreparable psychological harm?
And the thing that makes pedophilia immoral -- why wouldn't it make a larger age gap relationship immoral? Imagine a rich 70 year old white man being with a hot 22 year old -- not unheard of here in the third world. I would think he's got at least as much power to manipulate her as a 30 year old with a 14 year old.
And of course I understand there is a gendered difference between the scenarios, as much as the left may not want to admit it. A 30 year old man fucking a 14 year old girl produces a much stronger ick than the reverse. Why is that?
It's easier for a 30 year old to manipulate a 14 year old than a 70 year old can a 22 year old. In particular, young minds aren't fully developed and are susceptible to saying yes to things they don't actually want to do. This is why "but the kid consented!" is not a good defense, even if true. Further, pedophilia in general causes psychological harm to the vast majority of minors, so even if we grant for the sake of argument the many claimed cases of people saying they would've totally been fine if they had sex when they were 14 (or actually had done so), it would be enabling pedophiles who would then go on to harm the many people who are not fine with having sex at 14 years of age. This is similar to why you can't consent to being murdered, and murderers who only murder "consensual" victims are still murderers who are still imprisoned for murdering people. We also want to discourage rules lawyering, and if we allowed exceptions in the case of consent, that would open the door to endless litigation over whether the 14 year old really consented, which would result in adverse outcomes for many cases because most 14 year olds don't consent.
Ok, I agree with most things you say, but just to clearly separate out the practical rules that must be put in place to protect the median case, versus the purely ethical side of things:
Is it or is it not fine for a 14 year old who wants to fuck a 30 year old to be allowed to fuck the 30 year old? If not, where is the psychological harm coming from?
But why? Why should it be illegal if there's ample documentation that the person being killed actively consented to and wanted to be killed?
No. The harm comes from the 14 year old not knowing what they're agreeing to and being too scared to say no once it starts.
Because we as a society have agreed to grant as much protection as possible to everyone, even to people who are either stupid or mentally disturbed enough to want to be killed, because we generally value human life. There is also the fact that if consent was an exception, so many murderers would claim the "but they actually consented" defense which would drag out the (already unbelievably long) criminal justice process of putting murderers in prison.
Okay, the latter is something I hadn't considered. But the former: what do you mean by "what they're agreeing to"? They're agreeing to stick their dick into someone they wanted to stick their dick into anyways.
I don't see why this is a useful protection to grant.
But we're not talking about the general case. We're talking about the specific case of someone who no longer values their own life and actively wishes for it to be taken away.
This would be trivially solved by requiring a high bar of evidence for this defense. Can they produce the amount of documentation that Meiwes and Brandes had on hand, signed and notarized and what have you? 99.9% of murders are not going to have that on file.
They may have agreed to that. But they don't know about the complex emotions that comes with the act and their minds are not mature enough to handle it. It's more than just the raw physical act that takes place.
The theory goes that suicidal people are not in their right mind and if they were cured of their afflictions would no longer wish to die. By giving up this protection we would be causing thousands or even millions of unnecessary deaths.
We still do everything in our power to prevent suicidal people from taking their own lives. We don't just ignore them and leave them to their own devices or even actively encourage them to kill themselves.
It's not just being able to eventually adjudicate the claim, it's also the amount of judicial resources spent on frivolous claims (especially since, as you admit, the defense would only be successful in vanishingly rare scenarios). Do you know the saying, "the process is the punishment"? How the process for resolving disputes or incidents, and it being dragged out for a long period of time, is itself a punishment? Defendants can cause that sort of punishment too. The defendant and/or their lawyers will do absolutely everything they can to keep the defendant out of jail, and that includes claiming defenses that have no hope of success, but still result in delays and time, effort, and resources spent having to rebut the claim by prosecutors and witnesses.
As I said, allowing this sort of defense at all would result in the second-order consequences of spawning endless litigation over whether someone consented to being murdered, especially if there was a high bar of evidence.
"They totes consented to it, the document was notarized by this guy!" "Hang on, is that notary even licensed? Looks like his license expired." "Yes, but, he got it reinstated, so it's valid!" "Yeah but, look at this recent state law, says he has to renew in a month, and he didn't." "Hang on, what about..." and so on, arguments like that, ad infinitum. It's already hard enough to put away murderers, we don't need to make it harder.
That's only one way to look at it, no? By demanding such "protection" we cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.
If ad infinitum problems crop up, that's a bug of the legal system, not of the moral code behind the legal system. Not every legal system has this issue.
Was the notary licensed at the time of notarization? If so then it's legit. If not no. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes of the court's time with a sufficiently competent legal system.
It's only "unnecessary suffering" if you ignore the suffering caused to loved ones when someone they knew and loved has died. Most people are distraught when a friend, family member, relative, etc. commits suicide.
No, you can't just ignore second-order consequences. Not every change you make to a system is isolated and affects only that one particular area of the system. Laws can interact in sometimes surprising ways. For example, if a state legalizes marijuana, then cops can no longer use the smell of marijuana alone to establish probable cause for searching a vehicle. Or if it's legal in a state to carry a concealed firearm (especially permitless carry) then cops can no longer "stop and frisk" a suspect based on someone saying they're armed, unless they also say they're committing a crime in some way (the standard is armed and dangerous).
Fixing the problems with using notaries as the basis of evidence is not so simple. If we allowed murder in the case of consent, there would be a huge incentive to create fake notaries or otherwise fake documentation supporting the murder. After all, it's easier than getting away with murder by killing witnesses, covering up evidence or the other usual means of doing it. And it's not like the victim can even testify against them. The short story "Infodeath" by Ben Sheffield provides a good example where (spoiler alert) someone gets tricked into signing paperwork saying they wanted to commit suicide by lethal injection, then gets forced to have said lethal injection, and dies nonconsensually.
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