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I think you’ve kind of elaborated on the wrong things (although I’m interested to hear more about the skateboarding and if we know any of the same spots).
But what are they? I do too though. I believe that there is a human instinct for retribution that has been delegitimized in academic penal theory regarding deterrence, and that a victim is actually owed this retributive justice because it instinctively feels good and its omission is a harm. Additionally I think that there are some things humans naturally find disgusting, and that disgust is also a harm (in a lesser but similar way that assault is a harm), and I found the class I took on Rawls laughable because the professor a priori denied that a person has a right to not feel disgust while possessing a right to not be slapped.
But what topics?
I definitely agree here. Once a civil authority can no longer predictably keep you safe from crime or make satisfaction after the event, you should have the right to inflict corrective corporal punishment on the criminal provided you have sufficient evidence of the crime occurring (video recording). This is doubly true if the crime will not be investigated or if the response time is greater than half an hour. Our idea of withholding personal justice is predicated on the faith that our victimhood will be satisfied by a higher civil power. It’s also truly insane from a psychological position of (ironically) deterrence theory. Imagine if you withheld administering a slap on your dog after biting a child, and instead waited months before assigning a verdict. Such a process is only effective for rational intellectual creatures and criminals who reason about there actions longterm, not for your average violent or antisocial criminal. We could be deterring so much more crime by simply beating criminals immediately if sufficient evidence is obvious, or at the very least throwing them in a cell without food for 30 hours (the walls decorated with the psychological cues of their crime). This is actually vastly better for the criminal who hopefully develops a minor trauma response when considering criminality in the future.
Seems like a fully general argument against, for instance, freedom of speech? I can certainly find plenty of people who would honestly say that they find whatever you want to talk about to be disgusting, you could do the same for me.
But, more generally: I think there's a higher-level game-theoretic value to discouraging utility monsters.
'People shouldn't get slapped' is a pretty fair restriction. Slapping can cause real physical damage; direct physical pain from bodily assault is very universal negative utility that's very hard for people to ignore or overcome, and we wouldn't want them to generally lose that negative association anyway; and most importantly, a slap is specifically directed and targeted at a singular individual, giving that individual broader rights to object to it.
But if someone says 'I am disgusted by things I see in my environment, I have a right to demand they stop' then that's a pretty different thing. First of all because those are passive things not targeted at the individual, which they can avoid if they don't like them, and that have value to other people which they are trying to destroy. And second because while disgust is a universal human experience, the targets of disgust are not universal, and it's very likely the person in question could retrain away from that disgust if they wanted to (much more easily than someone could train to not feel pain when slapped).
Allowing someone's disgust at seeing something to be a moral imperative towards everyone else creates a perverse incentive for everyone to become as disgusted as possible at everything they oppose on any grounds. Not only is that a hugely dangerous weapon to hand people, it favors the creation of a society in which everyone is unhappy all the time because they have to be performatively disgusted by everything they oppose. Which also shifts all discussions and attempts to actually solve problems away from reason and towards emotional assaults.
So, basically: don't feed the utility monsters.
(and since I have some ability to predict the future: yes, this is an argument that can be deployed to validate rejecting trans people, I think that's a valid form of argument but not a strong one because of the different circumstances esp. around how targeted the request are)
The idea of freedom of speech developed in a period with strong indecency laws and “unsightly beggar ordinances”. For hundreds of years people were able to see the nuance between permissible expression and things that are disgusting. I am not saying “anything someone finds disgusting should be illegal”, and in fact no such law has ever existed, rather that what a reasonable person finds disgusting should not be done in public. This is how eg indecency laws operated. The rare case of contention over decency versus indecency does not invalidate the utility of the distinction in the 90% of applicable cases where a majority of reasonable persons concur. If we choose to ignore disgusting things you run the risk of causing serious harm (disgust) to reasonable people which in some cases can be worse than a slap.
I think this is just wrong? Sodomy laws have certainly existed to outlaw things happening in private, for example. I'm pretty sure there have been banned books that it's not legal to own private copies of. To the extent that restrictions on pornography exist they've applied to private spaces. Etc.
At any rate: Yes, the public/private distinction is relevant, asking for things to be kept out of public spaces is being less of a utility monster than asking for them to be eradicated entirely. Although the modern world has complicated that distinction profoundly; are social media sites public or private? If you do something in a private space that gets recorded and then broadcast in public (maybe by an enemy), was the thing itself ok? Is Netflix or Cartoon Network 'public'? There's a lot of room to stretch the definition of 'in public' into every corner of our private lives, which seems to be the tact used whenever you allow 'disgust' as a policy-relevant factor for people to manipulate.
But you're also ignoring one of my central points here:
You're still reifying 'disgusting things' as if that were an ontologically basic category, rather than a subjective individual judgement which is contingent on culture and upbringing and which people can train themselves into or out of or just lie about.
If you think being gay is a sin and should be illegal, I can point at separation of church and state and tell you to screw off. If you say that gay people are disgusting and you shouldn't be forced to see them holding hands in public, suddenly you've appropriated the power to take away their rights to act normally and be regular people across huge swaths of daily life, plus all the other knock-on effects of making things invisible and hidden.
And again, the point is that 'disgust at seeing gay people holding hands' is not a universal or primitive qualia the way 'pain at being slapped' is. You can train yourself into or out of it, culturally if not individually, which means that allowing it to be a factor in forming policy turns it into a weapon that you're incentivized to encourage.
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