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

It makes no sense to talk about a universal ideal drinking age when different groups of people do not even agree on whether it is permissible to drink alcohol at all. In many places, especially in Muslim-majority countries, alcohol is legally prohibited for all people regardless of age. Alcohol has also been banned in many Western nations in the past, including the United States. While the historical reasons for these prohibitions vary from religious beliefs to public health concerns, they present a stark contrast with standards in many other nations, which do not and never have had a minimum legal age for drinking. Since even these extreme opposite approaches can receive substantial public support depending on the predominant local culture, it is best to leave the appropriate drinking age, if any, in the hands of each individual 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.”