This might have legal implications.
The age of majority is when individuals become legal adults. In most countries, it is set at 18 years. In Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan, the age of majority is 20 years; in Singapore, it is 21 years. These countries might be more in line with the realities of human physiological and mental development than other countries, where the age of majority is based on tradition (in Iran, it is nine years for females, and 15 years for males).
By this logic, the age of majority might be raised to 25 years.
The voting age might likewise be raised.
The voting age is largely based on the youngest permitted age of military service. In 1971, the voting age in the US was lowered from 21 to 18 years because the age of 18 years was the earliest for military conscription (during the Vietnam conflict). It is as if the American Revolution's slogan "No taxation without representation" had been applied to the ideal of the citizen solder: No compulsory military service without a citizen's right to vote.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1954 State of the Union address, became the first president to publicly state his support for prohibiting age-based denials of suffrage for those 18 and older.[5] During the 1960s, both Congress and the state legislatures came under increasing pressure to lower the minimum voting age from 21 to 18. This was in large part due to the Vietnam War, in which many young men who were ineligible to vote were conscripted to fight in the war, thus lacking any means to influence the people sending them off to risk their lives. "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote," was a common slogan used by proponents of lowering the voting age. The slogan traced its roots to World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the military draft age to eighteen.
This may be politically compelling, but it makes little sense in terms of human physiology, cognitive development and the capacity for citizenship. The voting age should be raised to 25 years.
This insight might also apply to juvenile law. Individuals are tried and sentenced as adults beginning at the age of 18 years. Perhaps there could be an intermediate stage of legal culpability between 18 and 25 years, a legal status more strict than that for juveniles but less strict than that for adults.
This would apply only to crimes of an impulsive, non-malicious nature under the assumption that an underdeveloped brain is not as culpable. If young people get drunk and steal a car and crash it, that is indeed a serious crime, but it would be what one might expect from normal young people with a diminished capacity for reason based on an immature brain. This would be quite different from crimes that are premeditated and sadistic.
Here are a couple of case studies of bad eggs...
The bank robber John Dillinger was a bully and a troublemaker from an early age, despite coming from a respectable home.
The cult leader Charles Manson was born to an unintelligent, neglectful, impoverished prostitute and spent much of his youth in abusive institutions. From an early age he seems to have engaged in all sorts of serious, dangerous and cruel crimes.
These men might have been shaped by their environments, but their remorselessness and the premeditated nature of their crimes reveals their true criminal nature. If they had been born into the elite, they would have been just as evil, but they would have been able to hide it better and get away with it. Evil in some form was their destiny.
So there needs to be a distinction made between spontaneous, irresponsible, non-malicious crimes versus planned, sadistic crimes.
But it could be that judges and juries cannot make that distinction. Ideology and culture render humans unable to make such fine distinctions. There seems to be a tendency for many or most people to look at youthful offenders and either
1) pity them as liberals so often do, regardless of the horrific nature of their crimes, or else
2) condemn them as hopelessly evil as conservatives so often do, even if the young offenders did not mean to hurt anyone.
Ideological blinders simplify policy.
For example, liberals seek to lower the voting age to 16 years.
High school, said Joshua A. Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law who has studied this issue, provides a more supportive environment, especially when twinned with improvements in civic education. He said there is no difference between the cognitive brain development of a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old; they are both capable of the reasoned, deliberate decision-making involved in voting.
But liberals also want to go easy when it comes to criminal sentencing for youthful offenders because "children" supposedly are less capable of rational decision-making. But the basic premises of these two policies are contradictory. Such policies are ultimately based on ideological blinders and on the desire to be generous, not on coherent reasoning. Liberals want to be Santa Claus, conservatives want to be The Grinch.
It could be that other species such as chimpanzees are more intelligent in this respect. Unconstrained by cultural learning and the requisite sense of authority, including adherence to ideology, they are less warped in their thinking.
