I hate to play devil's advocate, but what about things like intellectual property or (ugh, even saying this makes me feel like a scumbag politician) child pornography? I can see the argument for the virtual variety of CP, but what about the real kind? I'm genuinely curious how the unlimited viewpoint can be defended against these types of arguments.
You mean the kind of child abuse that's been occurring for centuries before we even thought up the electron? Or are just worried about how these images of abuse end up getting distributed?
If it's the latter, then fine, censor the internet. If it's the former, you're going to need a more comprehensive plan.
Intellectual property is ideal theft. It exists mainly to employ lawyers and enrich middlemen. That some creators are accidentally rewarded is a byproduct that is used to justify the rest of it.
There are very good counter arguments you can easily find online.
I'll give you my favorites.
For intellectual property, it is not real property. Property is the category of things that are material and can exchange hands. Data, like speech, does not get literally exchanged, but copied. So there's no such thing as intellectual property.
Imagine you can memorize whole books. Would that be illegal? What if your friends could phone you and ask you to recite some paragraphs from memory, would that be illegal? What if you were part of a group of people that memorized the books they own and they ask each other to recite over the phone one page a day from a book they don't have? A hard-drive is a shortcut for that brain capacity we don't yet have. But if we did have that capacity to memorize, it would not be illegal. So instead of enjoying hard-drives to freely books and songs, we are criminalizing an arbitrary human enhancement.
For child pornography, I find it hard to justify the suppression of criminal evidence. We all should fear a government that has the power to arrest someone and suppress the evidence for their crime. If someone kills someone else even if just to film it, that would be a crime (or many crimes) but the video should not be illegal to possess. Evidence of gruesome deaths (intentional or not) are likewise legal to possess. What should be illegal is the act in itself, not the documentation with which we prove the crime.
The logic of child porn legislation seems to mimic that of drug laws. Catching the suppliers are hard (multiple jurisdictions etc) so instead catch the consumers and so hope to dry up the market.
Thing is that we are dealing with a mangled sex drive here, and you can't get any more basic than that (the sex drive can even override the drive for self preservation).
The only way to really solve the problem would be to find a way to test for it clinically, and some way to rectify the problem at a neural level. But i wonder what other devils we will uncork if we ever get the means to do so...
Simple. Once we have a good test, the one's who test positive will be institutionalized for life, likely kept on drugs. It would be to the extent that it might be more humane to take them out and shoot them. Especially if this test would work while they were still children.
