Should the age of majority be raised, lowered, or left alone?

Question

I'm doing a constructed response and our prompt is, should the age of majority be lowered to 16, raised to 21, or left alone at 18. Why?

Answer 1

First, you really need to understand what Age of Majority means. Age of majority is a legal definition that means that a person is legally an adult, and responsible for the majority of his or her actions. No one can be held legally responsible for all of their actions, for example, getting sick or dying is out of all of our hands. Therefore, the law considers us responsible only for the majority of our actions.

Based on this rather basic definition, we have to look at the history of the Age of Majority laws and look at what has dictated the age set, and what they govern over.

Age of Majority has been steadily declining for years and years and years. In some countries, it's down to 14. (Uzbekistan, Puerto Rico). Age of Majority governs the age you can, most importantly, vote, drink alcohol, drive a motor vehicle, have s*x and be tried as an adult.

Now, it seems to be that in the States, you can drive at 16, but you can't drink until 21 and you can vote at 18. Age of Consent varies from state to state and the age you are tried as an adult varies of severity of crime.

Voting is perhaps the core of this debate, if the age was raised, there would be without a doubt a lot of upset across the States and with Human Rights activists globally. Removing a freedom people previously had is never a good thing, especially when Voter Apathy is such a problem. Moving the age up to 21 is a definite no.

Moving the age down to 16 sounds like a good idea, but you have to consider that a lot of 16 year olds have absolutely no idea about politics, and probably will not vote, or will vote because it's a new thing and will just vote for whoever makes the prettiest campaign videos. Which is not what we want either. So this should be ruled out.

So by eliminating the other two options, I can only conclude that 18 is the perfect age for the Age of Majority, as most of the world seems to think.