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DanArmak comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 117 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm pretty sure lifespan is just a justification, a rationalization, and not the actual reason people think that. If expected lifespan was the reason, people would treat healthy 20 year olds as more valuable than mature 50 year olds, and the oppposite is mostly true.
'Innocence' is more plausible. If a person alieves in a philosophy or theology that says people acquire guilt like bad karma, and it's OK (or more OK) to hurt them the more generalized guilt they have, then children would be hurt less. But again, on this theory you would expect older people to be the least innocent. And yet it's not the case that hurting older people (but not so old that they are weak and defenseless because of it) is more morally permissible than hurting young adults.
On balance, generalized guilt sounds to me like a good partial explanation alongside other heuristics.
This isn't true in my experience. The death of a 20-year-old is grieved as untimely, while the death of a 70-year-old is often accepted as the natural order; 50 falls in between (still untimely but not the same level of tragedy as at 20). If it's murder, then you get more sympathy with age for being defenceless; you can see that that is the reason, because it doesn't apply to natural death.
People talk about the value of the elderly for the same reason that they talk about the value of female STEM majors and racially diverse neighbourhoods: to overcome society's ingrained prejudice in the reverse. (It is irrelevant to this phenomenon whether people believe what they say, or even if the prejudice is justified; such comments are still a reaction.)