> Nobody should be telling me what I can and can't look at on the internet (please don't take that out of context of laws). But the law is mutable and so we mu

> Nobody should be telling me what I can and can't look at on the internet (please don't take that out of context of laws). But the law is mutable and so we must appeal to deeper principles than those that the law hinges on. Otherwise, we could pass a law that restricts your access to exactly those websites that you wish to visit. This is the fundamental problem with liberalism. It desires to marry liberty and (an anemic version of) reason, but reason properly exercised also entails knowledge of good and evil. Thus we pass legislation to punish some evils for the sake of the common good and social order, and tolerate other evils the punishment of which would cause more harm than good. But when liberty chafes under the demands of reason, it will often resort to a tendentious skepticism in order to artificially erode certainty for the sake of securing greater permissiveness. Now it may be possible to argue that, given the way things are, and as broken as liberalism it, it is nonetheless the most prudent way to organize a (Western) society and that the best available way to deal with many social maladies is through softer means than legislation. Whatever the case, the laws themselves are to a large degree informed by culture, ethos, and circumstance and so what ought and ought not be legally restricted online is very much a core issue. It is insufficient to say on the one hand that nobody should be telling you what you can and cannot look at on the internet and on the other preface the former with the caveat that you are assuming conformity with the law because the law can be changed based on a change in understanding of what will best serve the common good here and now.