Rights and Responsibility Go Hand in Hand
I don’t disagree that there is a fundamental difference between right and responsibility or how you define each, however, the two go hand-in-hand. In other words, either someone has reached the age of majority or not. If we say, on the one hand, that owing to age one is responsible for one’s actions to warrant capital punishment, then we are saying that they are responsible enough in their decisions to forfeit their life in the case of a bad decision. In short, we are not going to distinguish between an adult and an adolescent in this matter.
Yet we then turn around and say this same individual, whom we have judged responsible enough to go to the electric chair, is not responsible enough to reap any of the privileges society offers when one comes of age — such as drinking, voting and marrying. Sorry, either one is fully responsible for one’s actions or one is not. If one is, then why the prohibitions?