One more YR snippet

And finally I'll copy this response to two questions, the first about the difference between taking away a toddler's agency to stick his finger in a light socket and taking away a young adult's agency to appear in porn, and the second about age-of-consent laws in general:

I think we can distinguish between a mind so immature that it really can’t make decisions that are rational, explainable through some logic and set of priorities, and one that can. That is, between a mind which is objectively lacking knowledge or reason, and one which has the necessary knowledge and reason but applies them in a way that another might find distasteful.

A toddler who’s about to stick his finger in the socket doesn’t know what he’s doing. He may not know that electricity lives in there, or that live wires are dangerous to touch, or he may not be able to make the logical connection to conclude “it would be dangerous for me to touch these wires”. He’s not making a value judgment or weighing risk against reward.

A sober 20 year old woman who’s about to appear in porn, however, is not missing the knowledge or reasoning capacity needed to make her decision. She knows what porn is, what she’ll be doing, and what she’ll receive for it. She knows that she may regret it later, and she’s weighing that risk against the immediate reward, using her own tolerance for risk. You can argue with her priorities, but that’s a matter of opinion; her decision is still informed and rational.

As for consent laws, it’s hard to take a firm position because of the woeful state of sex education in this country. Fundamentally, I think the key things a person needs to know in order to give informed consent are what sex is, what it can lead to (pregnancy, disease, emotional impact, etc. as well as secondary effects of those), and how to prevent or deal with those consequences. Those are fairly open-ended topics, and many pages have been written about them.

I think the age of consent should at the very least be made an even 16 across the country, but it doesn’t make sense to go much further than that until addressing the fact that a lot of teenagers, who may be quite capable of grasping those elements that put the “informed” in informed consent, still have not learned them. That makes it difficult to set a lower age without causing a lot of false positives. (Ideally, we could test on a case-by-case basis whether informed consent was given, but that isn’t practical.)

However, short of lowering the age, I do think the laws can be improved in other ways. They should include an exception for couples who are close in age, where one is just above the line and the other is just under, and when both parties are below the line, neither should be found guilty. Also, the law should not presume that a younger person’s consent is entirely worthless; a case of actual rape should be treated far more harshly than a de-facto consensual sexual relationship, without having to rely on a judge being sympathetic to the 19-year-old with the 15-year-old girlfriend.

Youth rights snippets

Over at Alas, a blog, they're discussing the idea of raising the legal age to appear in porn from 18 to 21 -- in a misguided attempt to save adults who aren't "really" adults from making a decision they might regret later. My comments there touched on some basic points of my youth rights philosophy that might bear archiving here:

The way we treat minors as immature and incompetent, right up to the moment they do something bad, at which point we want them to take full adult responsibility for their actions, is shockingly hypocritical and it needs to stop.

In any democracy, the government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. The principle at the heart of “no taxation without representation” is that laws can only be legitimately enforced against people who are given a chance to vote, to decide what those laws will be. If minors aren’t allowed to vote, then it’s unjust and offensive to hold them responsible for breaking laws, at least to the same degree as we’d hold an adult - which is why we have a juvenile justice system anyway.

This idea of raising the age of consent for porn to 21 is just stupid. When you turn 18, you can lock yourself into a mortgage, start a pack-a-day habit, or ship off to die in Iraq. How can anyone possibly be mature enough to do that, but still too immature to get paid for a few nude photos?

...

The problem is, they won’t mature if we don’t give them an opportunity to. If we raise all the ages from 18 to 21, I think we’ll find that 21 year olds become as “immature” as 18 year olds are today. You can’t lock someone in a box for three years, away from any important decisions, and expect them to come out 3 years more mature at the end of it. Adult judgment doesn’t spring forth from the developing brain in a vacuum; actually practicing judgment and exposing oneself to situations that call for it play an important role.

...

As a youth rights advocate, my primary concern is ensuring that young people do not have their agency taken away. Taking away 20-year-old Mary’s right to make decisions about her own life, in order to confer a potential benefit on 40-year-old future Mary who might regret those decisions, might be “feminist” but it’s in direct opposition to youth rights.

...

The idea that decisions can’t be made correctly by a brain which will continue to develop is based on the assumption that there’s an ideal, “finished” brain that makes decisions in one particular way, and any other brain’s decisions are necessarily flawed.

But any two individuals will approach the same problem from different angles, applying different logic and priorities, and perhaps come up with different answers. People of any age are capable of reasoning and making informed decisions, even if they come up with different answers at different points in their life. If I choose A and my neighbor chooses B, that doesn’t mean my neighbor is incapable of decision-making; just like if I choose A today and would’ve chosen B ten years ago, that doesn’t mean I was incapable back then… or does it? Those who say young people can’t make decisions seem to think it does.

And I think that’s really what it boils down to. If you ask an 18 year old whether they want to appear in porn, you’ll get an answer, and if you ask why they gave that answer, you’ll get an explanation. No one claims 18 year olds can’t answer the question — they just claim 18 year olds will answer incorrectly. Why? Not because there’s anything wrong with the explanation, but because they might answer or explain differently when they’re older; the answer and explanation given by an older person is presumed to be the right one, which makes any other thought process wrong by default.

...

Are you suggesting discrimination is OK because people don’t stay at the same age forever? It seems to me that only makes the discrimination more insidious, by constantly adding newly-oppressed people at one end while depriving the group of motivated activists at the other. Would sexism be OK if every year, a number of women were permanently granted “honorary man” status?

...

You, at age 40, might look back and think some decisions you made at age 20 are stupid. But at the same time, you at age 20 might look ahead, consider a decision you might make at age 40, and think that would be stupid, even if you know your opinion might change over time.

Everyone’s opinions change over time, in every aspect of life, but they’re still opinions. As long as 20-year-old-you wasn’t missing the knowledge or reasoning capacity needed to make the decision, the difference can only be due to a different set of priorities. And the only way you can conclude that 40-year-old-you’s priorities are objectively the “right” ones is if you’re simply biased toward older people.

Oh noes, the sun wouldn't rise without copyright!

[copied from LJ]

One might say that the ridiculous lengths someone is forced to go in order to defend an idea are a measure of how bankrupt the idea itself is. If that's true, then copyright just filed chapter 11. Feast your eyes on that thread, in which "mr_matticus" provides these startling revelations:

• There can be no privacy without copyright. Everyone's private medical records, etc., would be public information, and there'd be no way to pass a law to protect them.
  
• There would be no universities without copyright, because the only way for a professor to make money is by selling books and papers.
  
• Stocks are a form of "intellectual property".
  
• If I have a signed contract with someone who agrees to pay me for writing something, and they refuse to pay after I've written it, that contract is unenforceable. Therefore, the only way to get paid for writing anything is to sell copies.
  
• Efficiency is a bad thing, because it can eliminate jobs.
  
• Forcing people to constantly reinvent the wheel is a good thing, because it provides jobs.
  
• Every single factory worker whose job was made obsolete by automation got a job in the "information economy", i.e. selling copies.
  
• There will never be another new job created, ever. If someone's job is made obsolete by information efficiency (i.e. if he no longer needs to write something because he can use one that's already been written), he will have nowhere to go.
  
• There is no originality in programming; most programmers "don't do anything worthwhile". Every line of code I've ever written has been written by someone else before. In fact, every function in every program I've written has either been pasted from another program, or will be pasted into another eventually.
  
• Without copyright, employers would hire cheap overseas programmers who can do the same work for less than an American. However, because copyright exists, that could never happen today.
  
• Without copyright, only the single most skilled programmer in the world has any hope of making money. The only reason there's a market for more than one programmer is because of copyright.
  
• Without copyright, employers might simply write a program to write new programs, and then no one would ever get paid for writing software again, because machines could write it themselves. The reason this hasn't already happened, of course, is the existence of copyright.
  

You might think I'm making this up. So would I, if I hadn't participated in the thread myself. Perhaps I've fallen for a very, very dedicated troll... but I think this is just the natural result of trying to defend a fundamentally indefensible philosophy.

Welcome

I've decided to use this blog for my philosophical writings on copyright, youth rights, and similar topics, as opposed to my LiveJournal which is mainly for ranting, personal tidbits, and pictures of kittens.

The next few posts will be content I've written elsewhere, copied to give this blog somewhere to start.