Exactly!
At 18 I was flying in a helicopter, at 20 I deployed to Iraq for the first time. I am entrusted to make split-second decisions that are literally life and death. But I go home I get kicked out of a bar because I turned 21 at the end of that month.
I have a friend who is returning from Iraq soon and he won’t be able to drink legally because he’s only 20. That makes sense why?
Well, for me, it all circles around to responsibility, and at what point does a person become legally and morally responsible for their own actions. Especially those with potentially lethal consequences.
We have an all-volunteer military force - that is no one is forced into military service, in theory. So everyone who is serving in the military is there because they chose to place themselves there. Barring stories of shady recruitment tactics, those people are assumed to be able to make informed decisions, weighing risks, benefits, and their own moral limits - and are assumed to be capable of making those decisions responsibly. So, at 18, the US gov’t assumes that someone is responsible enough to choose to place themselves into situations where the range of outcomes can boil down to kill or be killed.
Which, implies to me, a high degree of presumed responsibility on the part of the people recognized as being able to make that choice.
Every argument that I know for having a drinking age higher than 18 seems to be based on the premise that the gov’t or society cannot trust these same people to make responsible choices when dealing with booze. Usually with drunk driving as being waved as the worst potential decision these people might make. So society as a whole is willing to trust an 18 yo with the decision to risk his or her life (And the lives of others.) in combat, but won’t trust that same 18 yo to be able to choose to not drive while drunk.
I do not see how one can argue that the 19 yo is incapable of being trusted with booze, but can be trusted to know his or her mind enough to accept deadly peril as a job.
It’s not that I think that “If you’re happy to enter a bar you should be happy to fight in Iraq.” But I do think that if you’re trusted to enter a bar, and drink responsibly, you should also be trusted to make a decision about serving in the military, whatever that choice might be. We constrain the choices of minors, or require parental permissions, for many dangerous, or life-defining events. Marriage is one of them, as is enlistment of minors. But, for almost every other aspect of public life, once someone is 18, they’re assumed to be able to make sensible and responsible choices, until they prove to the contrary.
It’s only with booze that this legal and societal assumption is waived.
Most draft dodgers fled to Canada instead of standing trial in the US so they were never actually convicted of anything.
Rumor is that groups at Western Washington University in Bellingham actually charter “booze buses” to head up over the border to hit the bars in Vancouver.
I thought they were all pardoned decades ago.
One valid way to get at an answer to this question is by means of theory or philosophy, as you have done. Another way is by judging the results, which is what I believe society has done.
Or possibly just a judgment that the results of doing this have generally proved acceptable.
The percentage of military recruits who have an accurate idea of exactly what they’re in for has always been small. “I had no idea what I was actually about to experience, but on balance it was a choice I don’t regret” is quite a common conclusion.
Especially since you can see the same reduction in Canada, where the drinking age stayed the same.
The notion that an arbitrary age limit can divide the people who can be trusted to make their own decisions from those who can’t is flawed to begin with. The fact that the drinking age is hypocritical (compared to other arbitrary age limits) and unrelated to the drop in alcohol-related deaths is just icing on the cake: lowering or eliminating the drinking age is the right thing to do from a philosophical and human-rights standpoint, and IMO would be worth doing even if the higher age were related to the reduction in deaths.
I agree there is no magic date when rational decision-making sets in, but in my experience the average 21 year old is somewhat less likely to do something stupid and alcohol-related than the average 18 year old.
Furthermore, the average 18 year old isn’t mature enough to mkae a decision which may end up with getting themselves killed (or killing other people). I am in favor of raising the minimum enlistment age to 21.
JRB
Add Wisconsin to that list as one of the states that you can drink with a parent at a bar at 18. Noting that most taverns are community/neighborhood/block centers, you’d probably see an even ratio of small kids to adults in many bars.
This doesn’t really fly as everyone (even the kids who don’t drink) know exactly which stores are a little more lax in carding underage drinkers or they know someone who’s just north of 21 who will buy for them.
It’s a nice argument, but utterly pointless in real world practice.
That’s interesting, because anybody can just cross the border into Mexico, they don’t even check at Tijuana. And a lot of people (mostly college students) go to Tijuana just to get drunk and party. I guess they need the income more than the Canadians.
Well, for the sake of argument, why not raise those ages to 25, or even 40? Wouldn’t you say that the average 40 year old is less likely to do something stupid, and better at making decisions, than the average 21 year old?
That’s the problem with this type of reasoning. People continue to mature throughout their entire lives, so there will always be some older age that might be just a little “better”. Unless you balance it out with the principle that people by default deserve the freedom to control their own lives unless they’ve proven that they can’t handle it, and unless you’re willing to let a few false positives slip by in the name of providing that freedom, the only logical conclusion is to raise every age restriction as high as it can go.