And freedom, by itself, is no virtue -- it is necessary for full human development, but there are aspects of being that are both necessary and virtuous. Like responsibility.
If a culture encounters a new thing, a change in the ground so to speak, such as gin in England, or the bottled booze industry in the US, or in our time, porn on the internet -- it is sometimes a necessity to implement social circuit breakers that do lessen liberty, if considered by themselves alone, so as to rescue the unadapted culture, the culture without-as-yet developed barriers and protections from the tyrannies of addiction and destructive behaviors that the "new thing" brings on.
These circuit breakers are a temporary thing -- if not, then they are Mohammedean afflictions to freedom.
The human body can fight of a germ -- yet if a person gets a fever and is overwhelmed by weakness and ill-feeling from the propagation of the germ, that person both withdraws from the full freedom of daily activity in order to rest and recover, and also takes a bitter medicine -- an anti-biotic -- to stop the infection, as well as other medicines to ameliorate the negative effects.
Intriguing thought. How do you determine what is harmful enough to justify restrictions on liberty without the benefit of hindsight? I’ve got my opinions on the harmfulness of porn, but the science on the subject seems to go both ways. Also, why do you think culture always adapts to make a new innovation less harmful? I would think culture could often become more accepting or tolerant of harm rather than protecting against it. Why do you think responsibility is more likely to form in the presence of protective Gov’t impulses than the absence?