The Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) law in the United States has been vehemently disputed in recent years, and the opposing sides of the debate have divergent beliefs about the effectiveness and ethicality of the law. On one side, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention affirms that the current law is working, by declaring, “a Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) of 21 saves lives and protects health” (CDC). To counter this assertion, the organization Choose Responsibility advocates “a series of changes to treat 18, 19, and 20 year-olds as the young adults the law otherwise says they are” (Proposal). The establishment of Choose Responsibility in 2007 is an example of the growing opposition to the current state of the drinking age law and culture (Choose).

In this interview with Stephen Colbert, John M. McCardell explains the ethical implications of the drinking age law and the drinking drinking culture.

While the debate over changing the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one in the 1980s was fueled by the push to reduce alcohol-related traffic fatalities, the contemporary debate has been complicated by new circumstances. The twenty-first century has seen soaring rates of underage drinking and binge drinking, and both realities have had serious consequences. Underage drinking has promoted a widespread disregard for the law and the use of forms of false identification, while the culture of binge drinking is tied to high rates of unintended injuries, fatalities and sexual assault.

The law violates citizens’ rights to personal autonomy and perpetuates a widespread culture of underage drinking and binge drinking, which produces a multitude of negative consequences. The interconnected effects of the drinking age law have generated ethical debates about the state of the drinking culture. Using the ethical frameworks of consequentialism and deontism, arguments about the immorality of the law have arisen in recent years.