Can you imagine one case where an 18-21 year old was at a party where people were drinking and they said “I can’t have that beer because I’m underage”.
I'm against having the drinking age being above the "adulthood" age, and I KNOW lots of kids violate these laws, but it is absurd to say that every single person violates them given the chance.
Me.
Plus various other, similar situations.
(I am in complete honesty unsure whether to regret it.)
My sense of “honesty” isn’t dictated by the government.
Now whether I obey the law is determined strictly by a risk/rewards calculation
But those are still entirely different.
> Now whether I obey the law is determined strictly by a risk/rewards calculation
That's the most intellectually dishonest answer I've seen to "I followed the law in a specific scenario".
Have you ever downloaded a movie off of bit torrent?
Do you think that Black people should have moved to the back of the bus in the 60s because it was the law?
There were laws on the books in many southern states until recently making homosexual sex a sin. Should that law have been followed?
There were laws against interracial marriage until the 60s and Utah is just now debating whether a law against premarital sex should be taken off the books.
Would you speed if the penalty was $1000 a mile over?
What’s the moral difference?
And in either case there shouldn’t be anymore of “a debate” about how two grown people decide to have sex and who they should marry than whether a grown person should be allowed to drink.
That 18 year old college student who the government doesn’t deem to be mature enough to drink is mature enough to vote, fight in the military, sign for a student loan that can potentially put them in 10s of thousands worth of debt, etc.
Some people who know me have joked that I would hate learning to drive (here in the US) because of the issue where most drivers break the speed limit most of the time and expect others to do the same. I think I could get used to it or find a way to deal with it, but it's possible it would stress me out for a while at the beginning.
As I sorta-mentioned, I'm not sure my original level of tendency to follow the rules is actually adaptive here. The point was more the existence proof. And between cultures it may vary even more widely than this.
You've gone from “implying that an attitude is out of the acceptable/plausible range” to “implying that the visible counterexample doesn't understand why anyone else might hold a different one” in the span of three posts.
I can imagine several reasons why this might be a hot-button topic for you, especially given what you've just said, but I am not putting my nature up for attack here. If you expect me to have a generalized disregard for or incomprehension of people who don't share my tendencies, I don't think it's true, though I don't expect you to believe me. If you feel like my attitude or existence is a shock or an affront, I'm sorry. If you resent feeling stuck with the institutions that surround you because they're not serving you well, I'm sorry. I would ask that you not extrapolate my personal attitudes about alcohol and speed limits to assuming that I follow social institutions “unquestioningly”, if that's what you were doing, and especially that you not extrapolate it to much wider and deeper issues.
This will be my last comment on this topic.
That was more aimed at the statement (that you didn’t make)
That's the most intellectually dishonest answer I've seen to "I followed the law in a specific scenario".
My apologies. I attributed that statement to you.
(I'm eliding and slightly distorting a lot of surrounding details both because my memory of the time is often fuzzy and because I don't feel inclined to detail too much of my ancient personal life here. The central points, however, I'm clear on.)
It might be worth adding, to circle back toward the original topic, that while I notice that this isn't “normal” in much of the US (where I live), people around me have wondered whether I got this tendency from somewhere else. (In fact, I had one (non-Japanese) Asian immigrant parent, and while that one was quite chaotic about following the local laws, it's possible that more indirect connections had strong subtle influences.) Some societies are much more regimented and/or conformist, and Japan is frequently described as both (not that I would know what bearing it has on these specific questions). The “natural pattern of rule breaks” is not universal, neither in cultures where it's nearly-expected, nor between cultures.