Should the drinking age be 18?

Cultural and religious beliefs vary widely about drinking

Question: Should the drinking age be 18?
Position‹3 of 4›: The ideal drinking age depends on the jurisdiction.
Argument: Cultural and religious beliefs vary widely about drinking

People in different parts of the world have very different attitudes about drinking.

The argument

This argument holds that the question of the ideal drinking age cannot be answered universally, because the societies being asked do not agree on the prior question of whether drinking is permissible at all. The range of practice is the evidence. In many places, especially in Muslim-majority countries, alcohol is legally prohibited for everyone regardless of age — a position in which the idea of a minimum drinking age has no application, since there is no age at which drinking becomes lawful. Nor is total prohibition confined to one region or one faith: alcohol has been banned in the past in many Western nations, including the United States. At the opposite end are countries that do not, and never have, set any minimum legal age for drinking. Between those poles sits every gradation of licensing, and the two extremes are not marginal positions but arrangements under which large populations have lived. The historical reasons for prohibitions vary, from religious belief to public health concern, and that variety is part of the point: the justifications are drawn from different sources and are not commensurable, so there is no shared premise from which a single answer could be derived. A public health argument and a religious prohibition do not disagree about a fact that could be settled; they proceed from different starting points about what alcohol is and what a law is for. The decisive observation is that both extremes command genuine support. Even these opposite approaches can receive substantial public support depending on the predominant local culture, which means neither can be dismissed as an aberration that a properly informed population would abandon. If a universal answer would have to override the settled convictions of one population or another, the sensible course is to stop looking for one. It is best to leave the appropriate drinking age, if any, in the hands of each individual jurisdiction — which is to say that the ideal drinking age depends on the jurisdiction.

Premises

[P1]Groups do not even agree on whether drinking is permissible at all, from Muslim-majority countries banning it entirely to nations with no minimum age ever. [P2] These opposite approaches each draw substantial public support depending on the predominant local culture. [C] Therefore, because cultural and religious beliefs about drinking vary so widely, the ideal drinking age depends on the jurisdiction.

Counter-arguments

Critics argue the argument makes a relativist leap: from the fact that beliefs about drinking differ widely, it does not follow that the ideal drinking age is whatever each jurisdiction decides. Disagreement about a question does not dissolve the question — people also disagree about many practices for which there are nonetheless better and worse answers. That cultures differ describes the range of views; it does not establish that all of them are equally good policy. They add that there are jurisdiction-independent considerations a universal or evidence-based standard could rest on: research on adolescent brain development, and data linking particular minimum ages to traffic fatalities and alcohol harm, bear on what age best protects health regardless of local custom. On this view the other positions — that the age should be 18, or 21, or absent — are attempts to answer that question, and pointing to cultural variation defers the decision to local majorities rather than showing that deferral is the correct answer.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics argue that groups disagreeing over whether drinking is permissible shows a diversity of views, not that every jurisdiction's choice is equally ideal; disagreement does not settle what is best. [Rejecting C] Moving from 'beliefs vary' to 'the ideal age depends on the jurisdiction' is an is/ought leap; evidence on brain development and alcohol-related harm bears on a better answer independent of local custom, so cultural variation does not establish relativism about the ideal age.

Proponents cited

Alimentarium
“[Alcohol] has been attributed to divine intervention. [...] The Catholic Church gave wine a sacred dimension, recalling the blood of Jesus Christ. Alcohol can also be a symbol of excess and confusion. Consuming alcohol has psychotropic effects that can be pleasantly liberating or cause debauchery and social disorder. [...] Buddhism and Islam condemn alcohol because it induces a loss of self-control.”
Dwight Heath
“Sociocultural variants are at least as important as physiological and psychological variants when we are trying to understand the interrelations of alcohol and human behavior. Ways of drinking and of thinking about drinking are learned by individuals within the context in which they learn ways of doing other things and of thinking about them--that is, whatever else drinking may be, it is an aspect of culture about which patterns of belief and behavior are modeled by a combination of example, exhortation, rewards, punishments, and the many other means, both formal and informal, that societies use for communicating norms, attitudes, and values.”
Social Issues Research Centre
“In all cultures, drinking is a rule-governed activity, hedged about with self-imposed norms and regulations concerning who may drink how much of what, when, how, in what contexts, with what effects, etc. - rules which are often the focus of strong emotions. Although variations in these rules and norms reflect the characteristic values, attitudes and beliefs of different cultures, there are significant cross-cultural similarities or ‘constants’ in the unwritten rules govern.”