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Comment by CrazyStat | Hacker News Reader

If a law is going to treat 5 year olds differently from 50 year olds then a line has to be drawn somewhere. 18 is arbitrary, but no more arbitrary than any other age you could pick.

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The law could evaluate people as individuals instead of conjuring up some idiotic magic number.

The whole purpose of law is to be a uniform system of justice. At best it could offer guidelines for how to evaluate people: perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc. But the evaluation under those guidelines would still have to be made by humans.

There is precedent for such a system, e.g. minors can petition to be emancipated which allows them to be treated in many regards like an adult.

> perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc.

Yes, that is what I meant. Choosing some arbitrary magic number like 18 and declaring that anyone under that age is too dumb or too irresponsible to decide is about as stupid as declaring that anyone over 65 is incapable of decision making because they might have Alzheimer's.

Ok, but this doesn’t scale well. It takes a nontrivial amount of time to evaluate each person, and it would have to be done repeatedly as they age. You would need an entire government bureaucracy devoted to it. Then people will want an appeals process for when decisions don’t go their way—both parents and children.

99% of people are probably going to use the high school diploma route and not the demonstration route, so that's basically age with extra steps.

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