Is speed control a matter of safety or philosophy?
Philosophy or Safety?
I read an interesting blog – by one of those Libertarians who advocates the kind of “freedom” that rides roughshod over the freedoms of everyone else. In this case, it is the freedom to speed in a car or motorbike.
The cause of this puerile outburst which you can read here: http://tinyurl.com/q2b5le – is the new GPS speed governor which is being developed in Australia. “Freedom dies with GPS speed governor” wails Alexander Mark. His argument is that this is another step along the road to a “dictatorship of rules” against which we will all one day rebel.
Now, in a sense, I’m in agreement with Mr Mark about this dictatorship of rules – we are slowly being hemmed in by regulations and contractual requirements. The former have been instigated by governments who have put in place laws that govern our behaviour and require us to behave as good consumers and the latter are the contractual obligations allowed by these laws that require us to pay forever for things we have already bought.
These are the laws that allow companies to control the ownership of ideas, systems, services and more recently goods as well. We now longer own the things we buy, so the freedom to dispose of these goods has been removed. Now whether that is a good or bad thing is simply a matter of perspective. If you are actually the owner of property – that is you are a corporation, or you control a corporation, then it is absolutely fabulous. If, on the other hand you’re just Joe Public: then you have no choice, you are in the thrall of the corporations who will rip you off until the day you die.
Where I diverge from Mr Mark is the assertion that all freedoms are good. The freedom to crash into a bus queue of children with a half ton of metal and plastic is not a good one. The freedom to cause a five, ten, or forty car pileup on a motorway, autobahn, or highway, is not worthy of the oxygen it takes to express it. The freedom to speed in car or on a motorbike is not a real liberty; it is the wanton disregard of the right of others to exist peacefully and without danger.
The advocates of this freedom would have us believe that speed control is a matter of individual conscience and not rightfully the province of law and government. Wrong. The government has at its very core the wellbeing of its citizens, or at least it should. Governments should be solely concerned with making our lives better. Currently they don’t, but that’s another argument. Allowing fools to speed is not part of that remit, I will submit.
The question is: do we want government to actively participate in promoting the safety of our citizens, or do we want it to be passive? This is the crux of the philosophical debate and defines the difference between real libertarians who have at their core a system of ethics that will allow for behavioural controls where the behaviour in question is deemed to be aberrational: and nihilists who simply want an “anything goes“ society where the strong walk all over the weak, irrespective of the merits of their strengths. Nihilism is the real philosophy of dictatorship.
The truth is, at this point in our development, we have certain elements of our society that need to be controlled and the sophistication of that control is now being determined by technology. The GPS speed controller is another facet of technology being used to make society a safer place for the majority. It will not affect those who obey the speed limits, but it will stop those who endanger the rest of us by simply preventing them from driving too quickly.
The only other argument against mechanical or electronic speed control is the argument that sudden acceleration and temporarily exceeding the speed limit can and does allow people to get themselves out of trouble. This is true for those who get themselves into trouble in the first place by bad driving. For the rest of us, there’s the foot brake.
Even though I am a libertarian at heart, I feel that preventing the fools that have so far dominated this debate by arguing for spurious freedoms, from speeding and killing the innocent, can only be a good thing. Put me down as “Yes to GPS speed control devices” advocate.
