At Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin concludes with a statement that should be so obvious as to not need to be said, but it does.

Ultimately, we should try, as much as possible, to base government policy on reason and evidence. That means resisting calls to give special credence to the views of the young and crime victims, except in the rare instances where they really are likely to have valuable insights on policy. Indeed, it pays to be skeptical of all emotional appeals that are more likely to short-circuit our judgment than improve it.

But appeals to emotion have become the advocates’ stock in trade. It’s de rigueur to begin an article with an anecdote, not as an example but to evoke an emotional response that compels the reader to feel that something must be done. And when it comes to bringing a sad tear to our eyes, no one does it better than children.

Recent events, such as the national school “walkout” to promote gun control, raise the question of how much credence we should give to the political views of young people and crime victims. If large numbers of high school or college-age people support a view and protest in favor of it, does that make it any more likely to be true?

The question isn’t about their pain, their “moral authority” to express their feelings about an issue. It’s not about their right to speak out. The question is whether they have anything of value to contribute to the policy, or they’re just kids feelings the way one would expect kids to naturally feel under the circumstances.

What is true of children is – though to a much lesser degree – also true of many young adults in their late teens or early twenties. They too are, on average, less knowledgeable and have less developed judgment than people at later stages in the life-cycle. For many years, surveys of political knowledge have consistently found that it correlates with age. The young, as a general rule, know less about government and public policy than other age groups. For that reason, they are also less likely to have valuable insights on how to address difficult issues.

One of the common retorts by youth to their elders is that they’ve failed to fix problems. Indeed, they created the problems and the children are the ones to suffer for them. And there is a certain logic to this argument that undermines the adults’ claim of greater knowledge. When the grown-ups, who may have greater knowledge and the benefit of experience, fail to find a solution, their claim to know better falls a bit flat.

On the other hand, the fact that adults haven’t solved a problem doesn’t imbue any special ability to the children to fix it. The assumption is that if the situation is dire with the grown-ups in control, then the kids should be given a chance. This assumption is premised on the fallacy that the alternative has to be better, when it can always get worse.

It’s also premised on the assumption that every problem has a solution. One can’t blame youth for believing this, as any other belief would be too pessimistic, if not nihilist, to accept. But as Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer reminds us, it takes wisdom to appreciate that there are things we cannot change.

This isn’t to say that the kids may not bring worthwhile ideas to the table.

It would be a mistake to dismiss policy proposals out of hand, merely because of the age of their adherents. But it is also a mistake to ascribe any special political wisdom to the young. The fact that large numbers of young people support a political cause adds little, if anything, to its merits.

New eyes, new values, can contribute to better policy choices. But it’s not a product of the sadness of their experiences, their cuteness or the visceral reaction we have when we see them, we hear them, expressing themselves. We may care deeply for their hurt, but that doesn’t make them knowledgeable or right. We may see people turn out in huge numbers, which will inform us of how important an issue is, or how strongly they feel about it, but quantity offers little to the quality of their insights.

There is, however, a nefarious aspect to the use of appeals to emotion as reflected by the school walkout. Are they being fed by adults who are using their “moral authority” for their own purposes? Are they being enabled, if not outright manipulated, to believe in a solution that parrots one side in a very complex and heated dispute? Are the children merely being used as props in the adults’ passion play?

On the other hand, young people can come to a problem unburdened by “the way we’ve always done it,” the blind acceptance of norms of behavior that we take for granted. Josh Blackman raised the question of why the opinions of the Supreme Court carry the force of constitutional law, when they’re not the Constitution but merely five justices’ interpretation of it. Whether he’s right is less the point than whether anyone has ever considered that we’ve taken it for granted without giving it the scrutiny it deserves.

As Ilya concluded, and as should be obvious, it’s not the emotional appeal of youth that should push us to embrace a policy, but facts and logic. Then again, what may well come of this renewed focus on issues of significance is that we revisit our acceptance of policy through newer, younger eyes.

It’s not that their sad tears should guide our public policy, but that this show of concern should give us pause to revisit our policy to make sure it’s the best we can do. Neither children nor victims may have  any special insight into how best to address societal problems, but when they rise up in protest, they tell us that the current answers are inadequate and we should put some serious thought into trying to do better.

We may not have better answers, but it’s worthwhile to give it serious thought rather than accept a poor answer as the best we can do. And you never know, we just might do better the next time. Just because one alternative to bad can be worse, it doesn’t mean another alternative can’t be better.