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Would you support a mandatory retirement age of 75 for US House, US Senate & US Supreme Court Justices and if not why? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (8 children)

No, because that's literally agism.

I understand that it's tempting to think that old age necessarily means degraded mental faculties, but there is no scientific link between the two. There are people who develop Alzheimer's in their 30s, and others who remain lucid into their 100s. Tomorrow there could be a scientific breakthrough that doubles the average lifespan of every human on earth, and we'd be sitting here with an irrelevant age limit on the books like simpletons. The abilities of the person are what matters, the number itself is a red herring (in the same way that the color of their skin should not be used to infer anything).

If the issue is term length, then put a term limit on the position. Otherwise, democracy means the people will elect the wrong people sometimes. We're in a unique situation where the baby boomer generation has more voting power than the rest of the population, but this issue will resolve itself.

Edit: the AARP's position on the matter

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Absolutely none of this is true.

Alzheimer's is only one specific disease that leads to rapid mental breakdown. There are many forms of senility, all of which including Alzheimer's become more likely as you get older, which means that
There is absolutely a strong correlation between age and degraded mental facilities. If I gave you three citations I'd be leaving out hundreds more citations.
There won't be a scientific breakthrough that doubles the average lifespan of every human on earth. There are so many flaws with this idea it's exhausting just to think about it.
Mandatory retirement ages are in use all over the place. Judicial appointments have this in place already in 18 states. Executive boards can legally have this rule in place as well. Any situation where old age in a job is a safety issue creates an exception in the form of an unmet bona fide occupational qualification. I would definitely argue that old men who create policy for hundreds of millions of people create a safety risk for those people if they aren't mentally qualified to do the job.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

There is no necessary correlation. Everything you are saying is representative of today, but not universally true. That's my point.

It would be identical to say that a certain skin color is strongly correlated with high imprisonment and low economic status, so therefore we should ban certain skin tones from running for office. Those correlations may be true today, but there are reasons that have nothing to do with the actual skin color that make it the case. Similarly, there is nothing about the number of times you've gone around the sun, or the length of time you've been alive that necessitates your cognitive faculties to degrade.

There won't be a scientific breakthrough that doubles the average lifespan of every human on earth. There are so many flaws with this idea it's exhausting just to think about it.

But there will continue to be scientific advancements that extend our life expectancy by a small bit every year, for an indeterminate amount of time. Which is why raw "age" is not a good measurement to use.

The basis for everything I'm saying is that age is a protected class in the US, which is why forced retirement in general is illegal.

Yes, there are many instances where institutions get away with it anyway, but as the AARP puts it:

Numerous scientific and medical studies find no need for this age-based discrimination.

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