Reply #22: I'll be the first to call myself a moral relativist.

[Goldmund]

Also, the line is not "semi-arbitrary". The line is drawn by biology. 9 year olds can't have kids and don't have direct sexual urges, and 14 year olds do. 9 year olds don't fantasize about sex, 14 year olds do.

That said, I agree that she should be prosecuted if she broke the law, since that's how our society works. After all, there's no metric to quantify the level of maturity and we as a society are forced to draw semi-arbitrary lines like this (many 14 year olds are mature enough to drive, and many 22 year olds aren't, for example -- but until we have a sci-fi "maturity meter" we have to draw the line). But that doesn't automatically trigger a moral outrage in me.