This is a good philosophy, not just for traffic flow but for safety. If a drunk or disoriented driver is going the wrong way they're usually going to be in what is to you the left lane, which to them is the right lane. So they'll just go past you instead of into you.
Its legitimately unsafe. Having traffic on one side consistently faster than you and the other side slower greatly reduces the chance of accidents because you can have have some relative assurance that speeding up while merging left is safe and slowing down while merging right is safe. It also keeps faster traffic out of and further away from onramps/offramps.
Drive safe, don't be an asshole, its not that complicated.
It’s a great argument actually. Speeding on the highway is generally expected. Going 20 over in front of a cop is unlikely to get you pulled over in most of the U.S. The cops are more than likely doing the same thing. Passing on the right on the other hand is very likely to get you pulled over if a cop sees it. It’s a very dangerous move to pull because it’s not something other drivers can predict that you’ll do. The last thing you want to do is turn a middle or right lane into a passing lane. Then the slower drivers that just want to cruise will be pressured to move, possibly into the left lane which is now no longer a passing lane which compounds the issue, and you just get chaos where different lanes are all going different speeds at random.
I'm just going to go ahead and assume that both of you are taking into account that not everywhere has the same roads - IMO (and I think it's just proven logically) the middle of the road should be where the fastest cars are.
On a 4 lane road (with a divider like 2/2) those middle two lanes should have the fast drivers. This way the people who want to go fast do so, and they don't have to deal with people merging onto the road. Neither do the people merging have to deal with the fast drivers.
Having the middle lane/lanes be the "passing"/speeding lanes is less safe though, because both outside lanes then have to worry about faster traffic merging into them to pass people in the middle lanes, rather than just a single lane. Also the people merging absolutely would still have to deal with fast drivers, when drivers in the faster middle lanes try to pass each other on the right. Doing so would put them in the same lane people are using to merge onto the highway.
Edit: also people in the slower left lane would have to merge into and out of the faster middle passing lanes in order to exit the highway, which just sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Edit edit: are you talking about 4 bidirectional lanes, with, for example, two going north and two going south? If so my bad for the misunderstanding, we actually agree