Genuine question: why do you think speed limits and speed limiters are good ideas? I don’t see that you’ve given any arguments that support them.
Certainly, in built-up areas and places where it's busy, yes, it's best to keep things slow so that everyone will have time to react.
But - and this is the usual "but" round here - in good conditions on NSL roads and motorways, speed limits are not nearly so useful. Speed limiters here strike me as a dreadful idea.
In New South Wales the state government has succeeded in making pretty much everyone drive at the speed limit pretty much everywhere, all the time. Out of town, this felt unsafe to me. I was surprised at how unsafe it felt.
The reason it felt unsafe was: if you kept strictly to the limit it was difficult to get to clear space. It was also difficult to keep space once you'd got it.
On roads where traffic could easily have been well spaced out, everyone tended to move in bunches. Tailgating was common, although it didn't seem as aggressive as it often does here. With everyone travelling at approximately the limit, the traffic tended to coalesce into clots, and spaces gradually seemed to contract.
After a while I gave up doing things the local way, and started driving pretty much as I drive in the UK: check for cameras and police, check for hazards, pass swiftly, achieve clear space, and ease off.
This might seem an elitist or selfish way of driving, but I don't think it necessarily is. If I have space, then someone else has space too. If conditions are suitable - good road, not too much traffic - then almost everyone should be able to drive at a speed that feels safe and comfortable to them, with good space all around.
As speed limiters would put paid to this, I'm not in favour of them at all.
Perhaps they would be a good idea in built-up areas, or very busy roads, but it seems unlikely that their operation would be restricted to areas where they might be useful.
Anyway, sorry to have rambled on for so long.
"The common good" can be difficult to get clear about. For one thing, there are so many people with so many different interests. Of course, there are some things that almost everyone agrees on: no one wants to be run over, knocked off their bike, or injured in a crash. So it seems sensible and desirable to take steps to make these things less likely. The trouble is, it's difficult to find measures that work. This becomes even more difficult if people insist on general solutions that are to be imposed everywhere, rather than on smaller steps that might work in particular sets of circumstances.
Certainly, rigidly enforced out-of-town speed limits won't make me feel any safer. And, although feelings can be deceptive, I'm certain they wouldn't make me objectively safer either.
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I suspect many people don't actually care about collective wellbeing, that's why they'll exploit any opportunity they can find to gain an advantage at someone else's expense, provided they think they can get away with it.
I don't think breaking the NSL is necessarily done at anyone else's expense. Actually, when I break the NSL, someone else may even benefit, though admittedly not by much. They'll have space, I won't be near them, and they can continue as if I didn't exist at all.
You're probably right though. Most people probably don't care much about collective well-being. It's rather abstract for a start. Some people might even want to add that despite this, capitalist democracies have done rather better in furthering the average well being of their citizens than any other arrangement that has been tried. Admittedly, average well-being is probably not the same as collective well-being.
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The other great aspect of everyone abiding by the rules is that it becomes easy to see whether something is working or not, so the rules can be improved to address genuine problems.
This sort of approach - let's call it the scientific method - is excellent when the aim is to discover a set of rules whose application will give results that can be measured as satisfactory or unsatisfactory. (E.g., you're writing code that should perform certain tasks - so you name your variables according to the prevailing convention - or you're testing a drug to see if it's useful - so you use a standard experimental design.)
But where this sort of thing is not the aim, trying to use the scientific method may be inappropriate, or even unethical.
That 3000 odd people are killed on our roads each year may seem so unacceptable as to justify any intervention that has at least some chance of reducing the toll. But we do have to ask, unacceptable compared to what? Compared to horses or barges, for example? We also have to ask if it is acceptable to treat road users as if they were experimental subjects. Could a nation-wide experiment with speed limiters be ethical?
The thing that most annoys me about scameras? It's a slightly odd thing to be annoyed about, but it's this: The object of the scameras is not to make anyone in particular drive more slowly. No, the object appears instead to be to arrange things so that the average motorist will on average drive more slowly.
This seems to me to be almost unethical. Partly because it's obviously an experiment, yet the consent of the subjects has not been properly sought. But partly because, in my view, the state is mandated to treat only with individuals. It has no mandate, for example, to take steps to ensure that youth, for the most part, shall be vigorous, disciplined and warlike, or that people, for the most part, will go to church on Sundays, or any of that kind of thing.
The state has a mandate to punish people who break the laws, but it has no mandate to try to engineer things so that laws will not be broken. This is probably a slightly peculiar view.
(Obviously, I don’t agree with SafeSpeed when he says that the fundamental purpose of the Law is to enforce social norms.)
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(By way - no one knows who ist really after our cuckoo clock und chocolates... 
)
- we ask nasty questions....und seek nasty answer too... 
prosecute at 3 mph und hide them in wheely bins ... und in tunnels.....but you do note these oddly placed wheely bin
