There's a lot of discussion at the moment about whether the franchise should be extended to 16 year olds. I think that's a reasonable enough proposition. If the franchise is about giving fair representation to different interest groups capable of evaluating what those interests are, including 16 year olds doesn't seem like a bad idea (particularly if we are honest about the reality of how capable everyone else is of making sensible and reasonable decisions about their own interests). There's an element of value judgement here, for sure. But before we get into that, it's worth noting which arguments we should ignore, because this debate certainly seems to throw up a whole series of them.
The first kind is the 'slippery slope' argument: the argument that a policy in accordance with a particular principle can lead down the 'slippery slope' towards the most extreme interpretation of that principle. Think of people arguing that votes at 16 might lead to votes at 10. When I did debating at school, we were more or less taught never to use this argument. I think this is perhaps overdoing it a bit, but it does have a problem. The argument relies almost entirely on a metaphor to be convincing. Slope imagery aside, why should votes at 16 lead to votes at 10? There isn't any obvious reason why this would happen. Given that the rhetorical effect of the argument relies on the conclusion's obvious absurdity, it would seem reasonable to assume that one would in fact not lead to another. For slippery slope arguments to work there has to be some kind of actual mechanism for A leading to B, which unless you are talking about whether to go for a winter's hillside walk involves more than invoking a metaphor.
A variation of that argument is a kind of false reductio ad absurdum. "If you gave 16 year olds the vote, you might as well give it to 10 year olds!" Or, on the other side, "If voting is about political knowledge, which 16 year olds supposedly don't have, why not restrict it to those who can pass a politics quiz/in IQ test?" The answer to those both is twofold. Firstly, there might be other, completely different reasons not to (restricting the franchise based on tests would almost certainly harm the worst off, 10 year olds might be a whole lot less responsible than 16 year olds etc). The second problem is this argument overlooks that we may be talking about a continuous scale of trade offs, where a somewhat arbitrary decision has to be made. Having an opinion about where a line is drawn that is arbitrary at the margin (why, other than convenience, not one day after your 18th birthday?) does not imply that you can't usefully discuss substantial changes, or that doing so implies that you don't think there needs to be any lines in the sand at all. Think about setting the speed limit on a motorway. There are a series of trade offs to be made about fuel efficiency, traffic, safety, people getting to where they want on time etc. You have to set a limit somewhere. In the the UK this means 70 mph. The fact that it is precisely 70 mph is kind of arbitrary- it's a round number. But neither the arbitrariness of the precise number, nor the the fact that the question may involve value judgements, mean that you cannot construct meaningful arguments about a substantial change. There might be legitimate reasons to disagree about a 60 mph speed limit vs an 80 mph limit, with neither position implying an even lower or even higher one, and nobody would argue that either of these positions imply support for no speed limit, or no driving whatsoever.
The third kind of bad argument is the argument by analogy. "If people are responsible enough at 16 for that to be the age of consent, surely they are old enough to vote!” Or on the other side: "If people cannot marry without parental permission at 16, surely they should not be able to vote!” What's wrong with this kind of argument is that its persuasive force relies on the assumption that things are the way they are because there is some kind of decent rationale to them. That, as Hegel said, the actual is the rational. In reality these facts are historical baggage often as questionable as anything else. There is little reason to think they reveal some kind of profound truth as to how things should be, or, in the case that they are justified, that those justifications equally apply, or even that there is any great value in trying to force our attitudes to have some kind of overall coherence.
The final bad argument is that those advocating a particular position on votes at 16 have bad motives. "Labour only want 16 year olds to have the vote because they think that they will vote for them", or "Conservatives only want to deprive 16 year olds of the vote because they won't." Both are probably true, but equally irrelevant. There is no reason why a good policy can't come from bad motives. Indeed, historically the extension of the franchise is a great example of this: much of the parliamentary wrangling over women getting the vote pre-1914 were precisely about whether women would be more likely to vote Liberal or Conservative. The fact some Liberals were well disposed towards extending the franchise because they believed it would help them electorally did not make doing so a bad policy.
Once the bad arguments are left to one side, what we are left with is a more prosaic judgement. Are people old enough to make political judgements at 16? I think yes, based on admittedly limited experience (and frankly thought). Less so than people aged 30? Perhaps, but not so sufficiently so to disqualify them from the vote. Do they have legitimate interests, as stakeholders? Sure. In some ways less than people over the age of 18, but in others more. They certainly have unique interests that deserve representation (think education policy), and a direct, if not greater stake, in large national decisions like Brexit. Could somebody reasonably come to different conclusion? Sure. Contrary to popular debate, this isn't a grand question of principle. It's a value judgement about whether to shift a somewhat arbitrary line in the sand.
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