Thursday, October 25, 2012

[vmazvvsv] Repression causing freedom

Government laws restricting behavior sometimes paradoxically cause more freedom than the lack of law.  In the absence of government restrictions, social mechanisms arise to restrict behavior which might be even more restrictive than government regulations.  With government regulation, the social mechanisms don't have much bite, as people lazily use the law to define the boundary of morality.

A positive and a negative example:

Age of consent.  At age 18, anything goes between consenting adults, and most of society begrudgingly agrees.  In contrast, if there were no age of consent - the age of consent is zero - then we would likely have much more powerful and restrictive social mechanisms controlling who can have sex with whom at what age.

Freedom of speech.  The government generally makes no laws restricting speech, so as a response, we've evolved a tremendously complicated social culture of political correctness, taboos, "considerateness", and "civility" in order to restrict speech, as well as social mechanisms to punish violators. Despite widespread agreement of the importance of the principle of freedom of speech, a great many people think applying those social mechanisms is OK.

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