Legal Limits and Recreational Outrage
Thoughts inspired by "Skater's photo explodes in Outrage," but of wide application in all cases where people confuse legal and personal morality... subsuming their moral sense to a legal standard, oddly enough even in non-legal contexts. In this case, pretending that the literal calendar age of a person is significant because it would be significant in an entirely different context.
That's craziness. Imagine a fight with your spouse about whether they drove home drunk with your child. Would any normal person in that context care whether they were .001% over or .001% under the legal limit? No... because life is not a court-room. You don't drive our kid around when your speech is slurred and you reek of booze... a Breathalyzer is not needed to have that discussion.
http://www.thestar.com/sports/2013/03/18/teenager_skaters_photograph_explodes_in_controversy.html
The above photo may or may not be shocking to someone. The fact that the skater pictured is 17 versus 18 is, however, not relevant to a sensible individual moral judgment.
The law does not hold that 18 year olds are actually categorically different from 17 year olds in extra-legal ways. The law does not hold that all 18 year olds make smarter decisions about signing contracts than any 17 year old. The law does not claim that everyone who drinks at 21 does so more responsibly than any 20 year-old could.
The law must draw bright and reliable lines because it is the law. The law must be predictable, and not be a matter of an infinity of prejudiced ad hoc decisions.
But those lines are not substitutes for sane individual moral judgments.
I am pretty upset with anyone who knocks back a bunch of shots and goes for a drive. It is bad behavior. If one such person blows a.079 and the other blows a .080 it does not change the irresponsibility and badness of what they did. But it does change the view of the law because the law has to draw arbitrary lines.
The law has no choice but to rely on blood alcohol or age or whether a form was signed before or after midnight as a bright line.
At some point in life a person can sign a contract and that has to be a flat, simple age standard.
But nobody felt immense wisdom flow into them from above on their 18th birthday. The tick of a clock does not really make one a different person.
If the picture is pornographic then it ought not be on the front page. If it is not pornographic, there is nothing categorically different about this young woman's anatomy or presentation to put the picture in the Jon Benet Ramsey category... it is not the sexualization of a child as a moral category mismatch.
Any malignant attitude one might think the photo advances in and of itself as an image would be advanced equally whether the skater was 17 or 19.
The newspaper editor will not be arrested for distributing child pornography, so it is quite irrelevant whether the young woman is 17 or 18. That is a legal demarcation that applies only to legal proceedings, and does NOT APPPLY IN THIS INSTANCE.
If one thinks it applies, present a legal argument to that effect. Because outside of a legal context the distinction between 17 and 18 has no meaning.
To internalize the standards of a law into a context where the standard of the law does not apply for the purpose of being outraged is recreational outrage at its worst.
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