"You seem to think that there are only two alternatives: a girl can choose to have sex with an adult, or else she is a defective blob of protoplasm who can't think."

Nope, its you who demonstrates repeatedly that her ability to think needs to be checked by AoCs, parental veto &tc. Perhaps you could cite a single instance where I have indicated that her "no" should be overridden?

I'll wait.

But you do project too much.

And the funny bit is that when I do defend her agency you claim I'm reasonable when I defend her "no" and irrational when I defend her "yes."

Again, that's projection. Her right to say either means that its not about us, and it never was.

"I emphasized the potential harm caused by pedophiles and omitted discussion of harm from other sources including LEOs. Here I am explaining why it will play out in life that an age of consent has positive effects."

I can see that. The LEOs are relevant when they bolster your argument and disappear magically when they contradict it. But since you keep trying to make them relevant, I'll keep referring to the effect they have on suppressing actual choice ( as seen than more than a girl's right to agree with those punishing her. )

"I have no doubt that you'll gently keep your toddler grandkid from marching out into traffic as much as I will, but I still haven't heard any justification from you that fits within your grand theory of absolutes."

I've explained in depth over the years at regular intervals. Usually I'm more merciful and just keep falling back to citing the concept itself and leave others to do the research.

Its called legal conservatorship. Its the way that real people with full rights prefer to treat themselves so as to allow someone else to protect them in the event that some temporary derangement renders them incapable of looking out over themselves.

Its true that the lazy and unethical way is to declare entire classes incapable by demographic; after all Women are clearly Women and Blacks are clearly Black. But when a class has ceased to be property, members of it are still to be protected from demonstrable harm to themselves.

The problem with turning protection into a property-rights issue is that there is no means by which property ceases to be property other than arbitrary manumission. But all moral thinkers know that the person was free long before the master declares that they are free. That in fact, they were never property to begin with.

Now conveniently ( from a Utilitarian POV ) children with decent parents tend to go along with reasonable rules like that. As Hajduk points out, wandering onto train tracks was never appealing at any age. So kids tend to reserve their willpower over the arbitrary things which are not a matter of life and death, bed times, meal times &tc.

But here too we must note that none of these are remotely the sort of self-harm a judge would award a conservatorship over.

You keep on equating sex with death. Maybe you aren't as sick as your statements about sex make you out to be, maybe you're just a fearmonger. But agency and freedom work. No need to pretend that Human Rights is some sweeping pie-in-the-sky scheme when we all "get it" when applied to everyone except for kids. Is it naive to reject double standards? Is it absolutist to grant the same humanity to all regardless of class? From your statements about women, handicapped and the races, I see that you tend to reject such "universal" declarations. I'm afraid I don't share your misanthropy.

"You can't claim that consent reflects choice in one direction and doesn't in the other."

"Sure you can. Some things in life are asymmetric. There's a bias towards maintaining the status quo. For instance, if the police cut someone down who's trying to hang themselves, they will likely commit them involuntarily for a brief while, in the hopes that their suicidal impulse was a passing phase. Killing yourself disrupts the status quo, so we have asymmetric rules regarding it. They won't ultimately keep you from killing yourself, but they at least delay it a little. That seems quite sensible to me. You won't get much sympathy for the idea that the police egregiously violated your rights by interfering with your suicide attempt."

Jayzus, you really need to crack a book on ethics some day.

The fleeting suicidal ideation is seen as a temporary derangement of the senses. What the cops are doing in detaining is that little thing called conservatorship.

The laws regarding choice are in no way asymmetric. They simply recognize that there are times where inebriation, intoxication, brain damage or madness temporarily remove a moral agent from consensus reality and render them a moral patient. ( Yes I know these are big words, but ethicists have asked and answered your questions long ago. ) But the default is the comprehension that, absent such a factor, no particular class of person is defective.

And more significantly, it is not the choice that renders them defective, it is the defect that nullifies the choice. As harmless as it is, we know that the lunatic talking to God is not thinking clearly when they are picking daisies.

But in the real world where things are more complex we know that "suicide" isn't just one thing.

When the party can demonstrate a sustained reasoning process which leads them to choose to end their life ( say, chronic incurable pain without mental impairment ) more and more countries are seeing it as a valid choice. This is because they know that "disrupting the status quo" is a non-issue in matters of choice.

Heck, you do more to disrupt the status quo when you take a job in another state than you do when you hasten the end of a long incapacitating illness.

And its not about the sympathy either. ( Argumentum ad populum much? ) Because the planet doesn't revolve around my ego.

As it stands legally assisted suicide is becoming more common. And in those States and countries you won't find much sympathy for asking that police intervention keep someone suffering excruciating pain as long as medicine can prolong their life.

But its not a popularity contest. Ethics rarely is.

Crack a book sometime. You might just discover that what you cite in support has a name, and has obvious practical applications which support alternative points of view. Reinvent the wheel in complete ignorance and you just might forget to add the axle, or fail to comprehend that it rolls forwards AND backwards.

Dante