In theory - it seems totally reasonable.

But in practice it:

And I'll add that I don't really see how you can devise tests to judge what needs to be judged in any sort of practical and accurate way.

FWIW, here is why I think sexual age of consent is different. Age of majority laws really have two components; they say "you can't do this yet," and "adults can't enable you to do this yet." Despite what 90's cartoons tell you, adults almost certainly won't tell you "take these drugs" unless you want to. Change that to "have sex with me" and they might.

Three points:

(1) Designing any of these tests to actually correspond to the relevant set of traits would be very, very difficult, not least because the relevant set of traits is so complex for some of these behaviors as to be virtually undiscoverable through standardized testing procedures. Try to write a multiple-choice test that gets at: Would allowing this specific person to have a sexual relationship with someone twice as old cause serious psychological harm? (Not enough info!) Further, the process for generating test items, choosing assessment metrics, and determining acceptable rates of "competency" would almost certainly become highly politicized, since many of these behaviors implicate value judgments, making the tests worse at their assigned task. Don't forget that paternalism is not the sole (or even the primary) justification for some of the prohibitions you've cited; morality is.

(2) Discovering the costs of negative externalities associated with certain of these behaviors is itself costly, not least because we don't have good data sets about, e.g., what happens when you let a certain subset of American 16-year-olds snort cocaine, so pricing the tests accurately would be very difficult.

(3) There is substantial societal value in the arbitrariness of the existing system. It both (1) creates an impression that, although arbitrary, the system is fair in that it applies the same arbitrary cut off to everyone, reflecting an agreed-upon social consensus about the age-appropriateness of certain behaviors and (2) prevents the cultivation of social resentment of others who are able to to operate outside the law by virtue of superior achievement. People really dislike it when you tell them that, because of someone's special maturity or wisdom or etc., that person is not governed by the same system of legal rules as everyone else. It is bound, as others have noted, to create class resentment (and I would be willing to bet that the tests would break unevenly along race and gender lines too).

That's no-one or close to no-one. All the tests do is demonstrate you can give th examiner the answers they want. Which is going to mean regurgitating nonsense.

How about before anyone sets such a test they have to pass a test set by top academics to demonstate they have mastered the subjects?

In relatively extreme cases I would suggest some kind of personal evaluation by a human judge. But in situations where the test taker is only barely younger than an age which imposes no restrictions whatsoever, I don't think a particularly high standard is required. If we've decided the average 18 year old is just capable enough to consent to sex but the average 17 year old just below that threshold, it shouldn't take too much evidence to suggest a given 17 year old is likely to be as capable at the average 18 year old.


Sure. You're never going to have unbiased examinations. But that doesn't mean they can't be useful.

Indeed, but that doesn't mean there aren't a number of activities most of us would support some kind of paternalistic intervention in.


But my point is more that, even if it's hard to get right, it doesn't really matter - as long as the option exists, it adds value for some people, even if we erred way on the side of caution in estimating social costs.

Spiters gonna spite, I agree. I don't think it'd be very significant so long as it's not used too extensively or for something like voting. The existence of driving tests or SATs hasn't caused widespread animus as far as I can see (although I recall there have been some concerns about racial bias in the latter).

Are all these tests going to be given in English you racist?

How about a 16 year old? Etc.

I think you understand that the problem here is that you've exited the framework where you credibly can rely on the integrated social judgment already reflected by the arbitrary age cut-off. This game has no Schelling point. In other words, if it's the case that you're willing to grant that really what these cut-offs are getting at is underlying characteristics of individual people, and people should therefore have the option of showing that they have the requisite set of characteristics, that standard has to be applied across the board. Otherwise, you're implicitly conceding that the legal norm whose value you're appealing to is nonsensical (or at least seriously inaccurate).

I still would like a direct answer on how ability to correctly answer test items is going to correspond to ability to actually behave in the real world in a way that's consistent with social norms. Especially for problematic cases where the test-taker would have a high incentive to disguise motivations. How many 16 year olds are capable of figuring out how to game the SAT? How many of them are capable of succeeding in school despite a coke habit?

I'm arguing that such tests going to be both profoundly intellectually flawed and, worse, flawed in a politically biased way.

At what point should we try to price the test correctly? How do you determine the initial price? Even if you want to err on the side of caution, how do you know it's high enough? If the cost is too high, will enough people take it to justify the costs of administering it? Should the costs of research dedicated to discovering the negative externalities be assessed against the test-takers? Etc.

I think you're being far too dismissive of the social value of facial equality under the law, even when obtained at the price of arbitrariness. These sorts of blanket norms promote social cohesion and promote behavior consistent with recognition of formal equality.

Also, driving tests are not a valid counterexample since they incorporate both a test and an arbitrary age requirement, i.e., you have to be x years old before you can even take the test. Neither is the SAT, since it is not a test for the acquisition of a legal privilege.

Nichlemn, I like the idea. I think it would be better than the status quo. But getting rid of paternalistic laws altogether would be still better and easier.

Wow. This rivals those steelhouse proposals.

The kinds of kids who would do very well in these types of exams are probably more easily manipulated by adults into sexual relationships than average kids. Not only that, anyone who's already being coerced or manipulated into those relationships would tend to do much better on these exams, by virtue of having an adult who's extremely motivated to help him/her pass the exam.

Almost any test that doesn't challenge expertise at a suitably high level is a test of motivation. A young person who's strongly motivated to pass the "sexual freedom" test almost certainly requires more protection from manipulative adults, not less. A young person who's surrounded by adults who are strongly motivated to help him/her pass the exam, even more so. This whole thing is designed to allow creepy adults to serially prey on 13 year-olds by learning how to teach kids to pass this exam, while doing nothing for the young couple awkwardly caught by an arbitrary cutoff that just couldn't wait a couple of months.

Even worse, I expect the bureaucracy in charge of this to be manned in large part by predators, who would use their power to seduce children. Not many other people have a strong reason to want to be involved with such a creepy process.

The tests for 16 year olds would be more stringent, 15 year olds further so, and so on.

In cases like "16 year old wants to use cocaine", the required competency shown would take more than just scoring well on a written examination. It would require a very thorough psychological examination to overcome issues of "gaming" the test.


If supermajority political support and/or were composed by something like a panel of judges, is this likely? And if even that can't result in minimal bias, why should we trust any laws at all?

At the limit, it could be run such that any test, no matter how obscure, could be run if you're willing to front up all the costs it would take to administer your special case. "General" tests would need some kind of viability threshold.


Well, I disagree, but I'm not sure how we could test this subject to the limitations of an internet debate.

True, but I don't see how an age limit discharges it from all the other issues that are supposedly so problematic with government-run competency tests, any more than saying you had to be 16 in order to take the cocaine test would. Driver's tests could be biased in ways that have disparate impact (for instance, testing skills in such a way that favours those in suburbs vs urban areas), but as far as I'm aware there have been no complaints of anything like this. I don't see why you couldn't have other competency tests be similarly unbiased, particularly if they required supermajority support to be implemented and/or were composed by something like a panel of judges.

You don't see how testing for a physical skill like driving a car and knowledge of basic facts like driving laws are completely different than a test of something like maturity? Even knowing the 'facts' about drug use or sex or whatever is totally separate from actually understanding and internalizing the risks.

In cases like a 13 year old having sex with a 40 year old, the test would need to be extremely thorough and involve extensive psychological profiling. But even we decided that cases like this were just too difficult to bother with, that doesn't mean a more moderate proposal wouldn't be worthwhile. Allowing a 17 year to have sex upon passing a simple test examining knowledge about safe sex practices hardly seems like it would be ripe for sexual predators, especially relative to other countries where the age of consent is lower anyway.

It doesn't really matter how moderate the proposal is, if testing has no correlation with anything reasonable. I'm sure that a number of pedophilic psychologists would love to do extensive psychological profiling on 13-year olds.

Why not just allow 17-year olds to have sex? That seems considerably less creepier and significantly less prone to abuse than assembling a bunch of adults with questionable motivations to come up with tests and administer them to declare teenagers fit to have sex.

Well sure, and maybe some psychiatrists who declare whether a murder perpetrator is fit to stand trial could be secret psychopaths who endorse the crime and want to keep the perpetrator out of prison, but that doesn't make psychiatric testing useless.

I'm not arguing for a particular age, but as long as you're going to select some arbitrary age for a cut-off, I support giving some means of exemption.

Wow, wow, this is a terrible comparison. Insanity plea is an extremely rare situation without any real potential personal gains for 3rd parties - no one has any reason to believe anyone has the incentives to self-select themselves into the situation for personal gains. Pedophiles on the other hand have everything to gain from the power to declare troubled underage kids fit to have sex. Sexual abuse of children almost always involves power dynamics (parents, priests, teachers, etc) and your mechanism gives huge amounts of institutional power over children to pedophiles, funneling especially vulnerable kids into the arms of their potential predators. Should some vulnerable child be so eager as to allow themselves to be "extensively psychologically profiled" what else do you think he/she can be persuaded to do? What types of adults would be interested in the profession of vetting 13-year olds for sexual fitness?

This is even worse than your initial proposal and I don't even know what you're trying to go for here. Are you trying to design policies to give smart predators unlimited ability to sexually abuse children? Because this is what it is.

Either you use sufficiently objective criteria and the result at best is meaningless and at worst correlates with increased vulnerability, or you use subjective criteria and create a matchmaking service for predators and vulnerable children. I don't know why you created this thread but this seems more like a pedophile's fantasy than a serious policy proposal. Lowering the age of consent to something like 12 is much safer compared to this nonsense.

The age of consent is much higher nowadays than in the past. Historically, societies have treated more educated kids with greater institutional support as though they are more vulnerable to abuse, not less. Why is that?

I don't see the problem with paternalism as a system overall. There are some limits I disagree with (21 drinking+gambling, 16 driving, 18 voting in combination doesn't make sense) but as a system, it largely fits the purpose of setting some sort of basic limit without infringing too much on liberty. Obviously there are exceptions, and there are rules that govern the exceptions, and sometimes people slip through the net, but overall, I don't see what can be done to improve or replace the system.

You think a judge has a personal incentive in allowing an underage kid to have sex with someone else? Yeah, maybe he might fantasise over it, but we're not going to get very far with the legal system if we operate under the assumption that judges have strong personal motivations for all their decisions.

Sure pedophiles would have a personal interest in it, and that's why you would judges would need to be very careful when there's a good chance one party can "coach" the other. It would be an exceptional case indeed that allowed a 13 year old to have sex with a 40 year old. It might never happen. Maybe it's so unlikely that there would be no point in hearing it. But few cases would ever be near that extreme, they would merely consist of taking into more account more information than just age in deciding whether someone has sufficient ability to consent.


Why? I mean, age is the current objective criteria used and I don't see you objecting to using it, despite it having problems like another any proxy. Surely age is not the sole criteria correlated with maturity?

Why are you so confident that the ability for judges to use discretion must necessarily result in horrible abuses?

It seems pretty obvious this is due to greater privilege on behalf of those kids and not greater vulnerability.

You keep moving the goalpost. At first, it's a test. Then it's psychological evaluation by a psychologist. Now it's a judge? What expertise do judges have in this matter? Either you have random people judging randomly, in which case you might as well not bother or experts applying their expertise, in which case pedophiles will become experts.


So it's a specific couple that has to apply for the exemption, not the child? Who represents them in court? Again, at best, this seems rigged for adults preying on children, not minors awkwardly caught by arbitrary age limits. The latter will have no resources or motivation to learn to beat the system, whereas serial predators will have the system figured out soon enough.

In many jurisdictions, marriage provides you with the exemption anyway. Marriage with parent approvals seems much more reasonable than your nonsensical moving goalpost designed for smart pedophiles. Also, if your case was truly exceptional as to warrant exemption, the legal system can choose to acquit you. So yes, judges and/or juries already have this power and the present system is far more difficult to manipulate for predators.


Age doesn't have problems like your proposals. Name any other criteria that's strongly correlated with maturity that isn't vulnerable to manipulation. The problem with every single proposal you come up with is that normal people have no reason to be part of such a creepy system, which means it will be run by pedophiles for pedophiles. Say we didn't have laws protecting minors and you had a match-making site for adults to meet 12-14 year olds. And every match has to be approved by the site's experts who specialize in "healthy" sexual relationships between adult and minors. What kinds of adults would sign up? What kinds of people would be the experts? This is the system you're trying to create.


What does privilege have to do with being denied sex as a minor? As a society, we've much more readily accepted the risk of sex as adults, or even premarital sex between minors. We're more sexually liberal than traditional societies in the past. The only difference is that we think children are for some reason at greater risk of sexual abuse and/or you need to be older to be considered an adult in this sense. Why do you think that is?

The answer is that we're increasingly putting the care of children in the hands of strangers due to specialization and kids are increasingly forced to unconditionally accept the authority of adult strangers while suppressing their basic intuition, leaving them vulnerable to manipulation. Furthermore, the complexity of the modern society is such that it takes many more years to understand the world sufficiently well to function among adults, which means years of development are still ahead of us even when we're 16, with plenty of time to regret our past. Greater emphasis on formal education and competition also means children have much less genuine, unfiltered interaction with the adult world.

Note that age of consent is historically designed to deal with strangers - incest laws have always been around separately.

I could have passed an "alcohol test" at age 13... a multiple choice test doesn't prove you are ready to handle anything it just proves your ability to memorize knowledge. Or as people have said, your ability to take tests.

The sex test would never work. You could never come up with enough testers to handle the large number of testes.

If it seemed like a lot of the evaluators were pedophiles, that would provide a large incentive for non-pedophiles to become evaluators out of concern for the children.

Why do you assume the system can be so easily beaten? Just keep raising the burden of proof until "gaming" becomes difficult.

From what I understand in the US some 18 year olds get punished for sex with a 17 year old partner, so it seems highly dubious that the legal system puts much emphasis on non-age measures of maturity.

Intelligence/academic performance. More intelligent youths are less likely to have sex per se, but I'd wager than when they do it's more likely to have been with greater understanding of the consequences. It's by no means the be all and end all - obviously that doesn't mean a 12 year old can have sex just because she's smart, but that a smart 17 year old has at least as much ability to consent as the average 18 year old.

Obviously the site would have a conflict of interest, because it would be advantageous to its business model to have overly lenient "experts". But why is it would be so difficult for the government to have them? Clearly both pedophiles and anti-pedophiles would have an interest in becoming experts, and the latter far outnumber the former (who could be partially screened out in the selection process anyway).


Wealthier parents have more resources with which to protect their children.

What does this have to do my proposal? If it's that "kids can be manipulated", well, so? Why can't tests take into account the likelihood of manipulation and adjust the burden of proof accordingly?

Great point. In practice, age may well be the best indicator of the characteristics you needs to consent to sex with an older person. It seems very hard to think of a procedure that is less error prone than age of consent laws, particularly wrt the graver error (false positives).

Even for issues where there isn't such a strong incentive to manipulate the test, designing and administering a test that would actually outperform age based rules would be difficult and very expensive...and if test takers have to pay for it themselves, the benefit accruing to those who can afford it is probably outweighed by social unrest.

I kind of want to see the 14 year olds for heroin test.

So you would have people who would reject every case as evaluators? What's the point then? We already have this system.


We already have this system.


And they'd be punished under your system, so other than some pedophiles being able to take advantage of more children without legal consequences, what benefit does your system have over the current? If you have minors who are in love or whatever and the age of consent law is this ridiculous barrier to their true love or something and their parents agree, they can get married.


I'd snap take the other side of this wager. Being good at studying trivial things in structured environments can lead to autistic thought patterns and poor understanding of self, combined with an inflated sense of understanding of the world. This is partially why we see so many ******ed policy proposals here, because they don't sound as ridiculous in classroms and model congress/parliament, where everyone's equally divorced from reality.

Furthermore, it's not because adults are better able to deal with consequences of sex that they are allowed to consent to sex, it's more that society can't police and save everyone and there comes a point where we have to let go. Sex is traumatizing and somewhat emotionally damaging for most 16-year olds and it would seem that smarter 16-year olds are on average more important assets for society to protect. Why should society hand over its most promising assets to pedophiles?


We already have this system and yes the latter far outnumber the former, which is why the rejection rate approaches 100%.


What does this have to do with age of consent? We also have more resources to protect young unmarried women from dangers of premarital sex. Yet we seem much less concerned.


We already have this test - it's called trial by jury. Tests can only take into account things test makers want to take into account. There's no reasonable middle ground when you have a highly contentious issue. Either you have pedophiles write the tests to help one another prey on children, or you'll have concerned citizens take over to ensure that no one gets through. The latter is what we have right now. There aren't many non-pedophiles concerned about the tragedy of pedophiles not being able to legally have sex with intelligent 13 year olds, which is what you need to have the middle ground. The present system at least benefits from people without agenda being involved in it, because the system isn't designed specifically for the issue. The harder you try to make the system fit the issue specifically, the more you will attract people specifically vested in the issue.

What exactly is the social problem you're trying to solve here? What does society gain from your system?

Nich, for the record, I 100% agree with Phone Booth here. You've gone off into the darkness, bro. Come back to the light.