Why older people should be allowed to change their legal age
aeon.co
aeon.co
If I change my age to 12, do airlines have to sell my half price seats, but it becomes illegal for me to buy alcohol and drive? Would it become child pornogrograhy to distribute naked photos of me? Do older photos become retroactively illegal?
If I become legally older, can I start withdrawing a pension?
Maybe we should disconnect age from the legal system, and say no company can ask. But if we did that then there wouldn't be any need to adjust your legal age anyway.
It can't hurt to rethink some of those old assumptions. Of course changing your age is a stupid idea. But maybe identifying certain developmental phases and making it possible, in extreme cases, to assign someone to a more appropriate phase, might make it easier for the law to treat them the way they actually are, rather than the way the average person of their age is.
In programmer terms: don't rely on a magic number, but capture what the number means.
I'm not saying this is a good idea, just that it's a better idea than changing the actual age number like this article proposes.
The implementation is messy and imperfect for those fringe special cases but it is an exeception handler.
What if that guy moved his birthdate twenty years into the future, but his mother had died when he was fifteen? His birth certificate would no longer make any sense, because he’s be born from a deceased woman. What of the fiscal benefits his family received as a result of his birth? Do they get returned?
This is dumb beyond belief.
It is much better to try be civil and debate (use/respond to arguments in logical way) if your aim is to change people's minds about the issue you felt need to comment.
Saying that something is dumb as bricks when it is indeed dumb as bricks is actually a valid, factual, and neutral observation.
Case in point: having read the article in it’s entirety I raised an exception that is consistent with the proposal (that one can only decree oneself to be younger), averted all the obvious riffraff (such as one merely declaring oneself underage in order to avoid prosecution & cetera), and raised an objection (incompatible chronology of individual’s birth certificates and mother’s death certificate) that the author had not addressed.
If you are so sanguine about debating soundly, please indicate how you would address the situation I conjectured.
Someone who want pension
> redefine "old"
Sorry, pensions again. So you propose that we up pension age to 87 because laws were written when percentile of 60-years old was where is is for 87-years is today?
Then I can spend my days competing in the 70+ age bracket of sporting events.
Aside from employment, the stated age on an ID is rarely a limiting factor once the lower limits of driving, drinking, consent, and voting are passed. On the contrary, past 65 people are eligible for lots of discounts.
There's a lot of subjectivity hidden here. As determined by a doctor? Which doctor? What criteria? If a 40 year old has debilitating congenital tremors, but has the "mind of a 30 year old", who gets to accept or reject their age change request? Their body might not be in "better shape than would be expected", but it's due to a lifelong condition, not age.
Changing your actual age is obviously a silly idea, but instead of making age less dependent on when you are born, it makes more sense to legislate less on this number and instead make the categories, or phases of life, we want to identify by this number more explicit. Once we've done that, we can make it easier to legally put people in a different category without messing with when they were born or turning age into a meaningless number.
The man with the lawsuit doesn't even have a legitimate argument for changing his age, why can't he just lie on dating apps like everyone else?
What if the person wants to be 20 years younger, but is "actually" only 10 years younger? Is it going to be determined by a sort of medical exam?
What if they want to keep changing their age up and down every year for whatever reason?
I just don't see a good way for ensuing "fairness" and non-manipulation.
Very glib:
>>Perhaps you will say that what is appropriate for frozen people in a hypothetical scenario is not appropriate for real people in the real world. Nevertheless, the difference between thought experiments of this kind and cases in the real world is only a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.
If you want to prevent or remove discrimination, then do that by fixing the system, creating tests for proficiency and ability not creating arbitrary constructs that seek to confuse users into submission.
Bizarre.
What needs changing is the preconceived mindset that working life ends at last century's retirement age. Society still suffers from a scaling misconception.
With better medical technology, people are living longer and healthier lives. The law has to begin acknowledging that.
That being said, I'd concede that these kinds of social campaigns do seem to be motivated by admirable levels of compassion and open-mindedness.