While robocalls are annoying, what's the moral justification for making this illegal? If a person is allowed to call you, why can't a computer? Also the line is getting blurred recently, so it seems like a problematic distinction at this point in time.
In context, people mean "illegitimate robocalls." Nobody is proposing to outlaw legitimate robocalls (like when a pharmacy makes an automated call to notify you that a prescription is ready.)
It's mostly illegal to make human or automated marketing calls to numbers in the US that have signed up for the national Do Not Call registry. The problem is that huge numbers of illegal calls still reach numbers on the Do Not Call registry. Most of these illegal calls have no connection to any real business; they are instead trying to defraud people. I have often been called by "Microsoft Support" to alert me to Windows problems that need fixing. I don't have any Windows computers.
Because abuse by a very few destroys trust in and value of the system to all:
[S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a way to [stop call-spoofing], worried that spam phone calls could eventually endanger the whole system. “We’re getting to the point where nobody trusts the phone network,” says Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) “When they stop trusting the phone network, they stop using it.”
That’s not a bad answer (“things that undermine trust in systems are bad”) but when generalized, can lead to undesirable results. For example using your axiom, undermining trust in a corrupt and harmful system would also be bad. Like for instance, speaking out against a repressive government regime.
Trust is one element. Common weal, the sense of acting in the common good, is the more critical element.
Trust here is a mechanism, rather than and end goal itself. Through the undermining of trust in a system for the public benefit, the common good is harmed.
Your counterexample becomes far less difficult when phrased equivalently:
Through the undermining of trust within a system opposed to the public benefit, the common good is increased.
TL;DR: you've confused ends and means.
Though generally, common good is extremely reliant on a strong social trust fabric.
(As to the question of whether or not "common good" / "common weal" is an appropriate goal value of a system, that's another discussion. I've elected to adopt for now the general idea that it is, but there are varying points of view on this point, and cases in which there is no globally beneficial outcome. Most especially where some are disadvantaged such that others, any, might survive. See also: "lifeboat ethics".)
Misrepresentation is a commonly agreed upon morally bad thing (i.e lying). But spoofing is an issue seperate and apart from robo-calls, even if the correlation between the two is very high. So we still need to figure out what, exactly, is morally bad about being robo-called. And the answer can’t be related to spoofing, do not call lists, or whatever, as these are not related to the essence of what defines a unsolicited robo-call.
Small-scale spoofing, a/k/a pseudonymous / anonymous whistleblowing or commentary, can be useful, and has a very well-established tradition.
The goal of, effectively, all robocalls is fraud or value-extraction from the system. It works only because of the scale possible.
Small-scale operators (unless hugely and widely distributed) don't exhibit these characteristics. A fundamental problem of robocalls is the scale of operation itself.
Scale matters.
Countermeasures which disrupt at-scale operation whilst protecting small-scale activities are net beneficial.
Tragedy of the commons. Unwanted bulk requests that intentionally evade automated filters are an attack on the availability of a communication network.
That’s nor a good moral justification. Most people using Tor are probably doing something illegal, but it wouldn’t follow that Tor should be illegal, would it?
