LONDON — A plan by the United Kingdom to make family-friendly filters the default setting for  Internet connections has drawn praise as a thoughtful way to balance the free flow of information with the protection of people from pornography’s harm.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron announced in a July 22 speech that the government had reached an agreement with the nation’s biggest Internet service providers to block access to online pornography unless the consumer expressly chooses to remove the filter. The agreement covers 95% of British homes.

“It’s a very good thing because it establishes that the cultural norm, the feed that’s just going to come into (your home), is not going to include” pornography, said Susan Selner-Wright, a philosophy professor at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver.

Since human beings live in a fallen world, Selner-Wright explained that “itʼs fine to agree that this is not going to be part of your normal feed, but if you want this, here’s the process you go through, and then it will come to you. I think that’s exactly the right solution.”

After that, she said, Christians are called “to do the real work, which is to get at: Why are people attracted to pornography? And start to work on the buyersʼ end to try to effect conversion, so that people don’t want this anymore.”

Selner-Wright said that, in light of the “value of the free flow of information,” and that governments would have to restrict access to many goods “in order to outlaw every bad thing,” the opt-in system is a reasonable solution to the plague of online pornography.

Philosophers since St. Augustine in the fifth century, she said, have recognized that “you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.”

Selner-Wright added that St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s affirmed civil law should not outlaw all evils, as “human law can’t get rid of all evil things without getting rid of a lot of things that are necessary for human thriving.”

Because of this, she said “open societies err on the side” of allowing access to that which is harmful, “but we don’t have to let it be there in a way that it’s just constantly confronting us.”

“We have a right to say No,” Selner-Wright said, explaining this right is reflected in the new U.K. policy.

Cameron announced that the government was adopting the porn-blocking policy to “protect our children and their innocence.”

“Many children are viewing online pornography and other damaging material at a very early age,” he said. “The nature of that pornography is so extreme; it is distorting their view of sex and relationships.”

The government’s aim, Cameron said, is to “stand on the side” of parents trying to protect their children and “to make that job a bit easier, not a bit harder.”

Selner-Wright said that it was easy to see why the British government is adopting the policy for the sake of children, rather than all persons, because children “just happen to be the only human beings that it's really fashionable to want to protect at this point.”

“Everybody else is out there in a free-for-all,” she said. “Part of where we’ve gone in the West is that [the mentality for] the rest of us, once you’re 18, [is that] all these images can come at you all the time.”

Yet Cameron’s concern to protect children from “distorted ideas about sex,” Selner-Wright said, shows that “the reason we want to protect children from it is because its harmful to human beings.”

Between the Internet, advertisements and a constantly connected culture, “we just have a very visually assaultive situation,” Selner-Wright said, “and this is just the beginning of saying, ʻStop.’ Stopping the visual assault on children is the first thing.”

In Iceland, the legislative and executive branches are also considering their own bans on Internet pornography out of concerns about the effects on children exposed to violent sexual content.

The country has already banned strip clubs and forbids the printing and distribution of pornography, but it has not yet dealt with pornography on the Internet.

Selner-Wright viewed the U.K. government’s implicit acknowledgment of pornography’s harm in the new policy as a hopeful sign for society.

She said, “If people can wrap their brains around why that makes sense [for children], I think you're getting closer to seeing why it makes sense for other people, too.”