> I’ve meant “bright and clear line” in the legal sense this whole time, yes.

Let me quote you:

> But here's the thing: the law can't take that into account. The law needs a bright and clear line, so you can know how not to break it. And so even though there's not really a difference between 17 years 364 days vs. 18 years, one can consent to sex with an adult while the other cannot.

So ... your argument was what exactly? That the law could not possibly spell out a more complicated rule than "below 18 is illegal", because ... it is impossible to do so in the English language? Or what?

That the law needs an objective way to determine whether or not one can consent to sex. It can’t be e.g. “has reached puberty” as another commenter suggested, because there’s a huge gray area where it would basically be up to the whims of the jury whether or not you were breaking the law. We use age because it’s an objectively measurable proxy for maturity, and it’s more or less correlated.

As it happens, statutory rape law is already more complicated than a cutoff at 18. There are often exemptions for people who are married, or close in age. But the line is still objective — a “bright and clear line”, so to speak.

So, you would agree then that it would be better to have a law that, say, made the transition from "illegal to have sex with" to "perfectly legal" gradual, as long as the rules are clearly spelled out? That is, a law that tries to avoid the situation where a very minor difference in objective reality corresponds to a massive difference in consequences?

If that is what you meant to say, you really didn't explain that well in your original comment, as you explicitly claimed that the law could not take details into account, rather than that it should specifically avoid subjective criteria. After all, it is perfectly possible to take into account the fact that not all people of the same age have the same maturity without resorting to subjective criteria--such as by making the transition from legal to illegal sufficiently smooth in terms of possible punishment that the punishment statistically scales with the probability of the sexual interaction being with an immature person: While that obviously does not perfectly match the consequences to the actual maturity of each individual, it would give a much better correspondence between punishment and the abusiveness of the relationship overall than a hard cut-off, while still being based on objective criteria.

Now, you are right that the law is actually usually more complicated than a single hard cut-off, but it seems that it's often still doing a poor job due to lack of nuance.