When is paternalism good

Paternalism is the use of coercion to achieve a good for a person who does not recognize the good. Question: Is the individual the best judge of that individual's best interests? Who is the judge of one's own welfare?

Paternalism would only be justified , according to John Stuart Mill, to preserve wider freedom. To choose is a GOOD that is separate from the good that is chosen. Gray ed. Co, , II. According to Dworkin, the wager view by which Mill justifies paternalism with respect to children can be extended to adults.

The Wager View: It is morally permissible to restrict the autonomy of children for their benefit since they are not fully rational and we bet wager that if they were, they would concur with our decisions. But extending the wager view to adults requires that we assume that, if the adult were fully rational, the adult would concur with our restrictions on his or her autonomy.

What this implies is that. Those who would restrict an individual's autonomy bear the burden of proof-i. It is not required that the individual justify that paternalism is wrong, since paternalism is presumptively wrong.

In cases were paternalism can be adequately justified, the alternative which least restricts autonomy should be adopted over any other alternative. Given these restrictions on paternalism, it is astonishing to realize the extent of unjustified paternalism on the part of the Federal and State Governments. For example, the so-called 'War on Drugs' and the prohibition of drugs for recreational use is morally illicit, since the government has clearly failed to adopt the alternatives which least restrict autonomy, even assuming it borne the burden of proof to justify the prohibition, which, to be sure, it has not.

Mill was opposed to Strong Paternalism. For Kant you can not treat a person as a means to an end even to their own ends. No one knows what the future consequences will be. Informed Consent is not to be violated. Could a person consent to have others force him to do something? Could an ill person consent to have their decision making authority given over to someone else for decisions that they might then protest against? Under what conditions and for what period of time?

What principles would make this morally justifiable? Pecorino All Rights reserved. Web Surfer's Caveat: These are class notes, intended to comment on readings and amplify class discussion. They should be read as such. It is difficult, if not impossible, to identify an act that harms an individual that does not also harm others, even if this is only indirectly and remotely.

While this person may very well have consented to the risks of riding without a helmet, and thought that the act was private and self-regarding, many people who did not consent are likely to be harmed by the act. But if the public charge argument can be invoked in the case of motorcycle helmet laws because of the potential harm posed to unconsenting others then, arguably, a whole range of state interventions may be considered to be justifiable, and not paternalistic.

As philosopher, Peter Suber argues:. We can prohibit eating fatty foods on the same grounds. In a welfare state which shifts costs to compensate those who harm themselves, virtually all self-harm will be other-harm too; hence, virtually every corner of life could be regulated by law without violating the harm principle, and virtually all paternalism would be justified.

The main point made by Suber is that a given public policy may or may not be paternalistic, depending on the rationale behind it and the way in which harm and consent are defined. For example, if it is argued by the state that smoking in public areas is harmful to others, then prohibiting this act is justified under the harm principle and not paternalistic.

The state can also avoid accusations of paternalism by narrowing the definition of consent. For example, if it is determined that disadvantaged people who gamble their limited income support payments on poker machines are effectively being manipulated into doing so, then it may be argued that their consent is invalid.

Two key contributors to the debate are Goodin and New, both mentioned earlier, and both of whom isolate circumstances in which the paternalist intervention of the state may be justifiable. Political philosopher, Robert Goodin, has argued that the best way to achieve such a compromise is to search for some justification for paternalist intervention in the person who is being subjected to this intervention.

Firstly, he identifies two key threshold characteristics for the justification of paternalist public policies. At the same time, these decisions are to a large degree irreversible in that, having started taking addictive drugs, a person is likely to experience great difficulty in overcoming any subsequent addiction.

An individual may not have the technical ability to reason or to adequately work through information in some situations. It is also the case that an individual may have abstract knowledge or information in a particular area, but be lacking in first-hand experience. For example, they may not have experienced the consequences of a decision, like crashing a motorcycle whilst not wearing a helmet. In instances such as these it may be argued that the state, with its access to technological resources and institutional memory, is likely to be in a better position to make a rational decision on behalf of individuals and in the interests of the collective.

However, it can neither be assumed that this is the case, nor that state intervention is necessarily warranted. As discussed earlier in this paper, where people have too little information, or inadequate information, then the state cannot be said to be paternalist when it intervenes to provide such information.

Such interventions may be justified on the grounds that they are correcting a failure of market exchange, in which there is insufficient information for individuals to make a proper judgement in their own interests. Given that poker machines are the only form of commercial gambling game in which the odds of winning or losing cannot be readily calculated by the gambler, and that this mathematical information is not currently provided to consumers, such a requirement could not be said to be paternalistic.

For example, people especially young people may choose to smoke and claim that that they are happy to accept the associated risks. However, given that we may almost certainly assume that these people are likely to subsequently regret their choice to take up smoking, especially when its impacts are felt, there are grounds for justifiable paternalism to protect them from their current selves.

A person undergoes changes—physical, psychological and material—as they age. They are not the same person at the age of ten that they are 30 years later. The greater the gap in age between the present and subsequent self, the less the continuity of the self—that is, the greater the difference between the present and future self.

The implications of this in terms of arguments for or against paternalist interventions are that the greater the distance between the present and future selves, the less weight should be given to decisions made by the present self. This is because the future self has no say in the decisions made by the present self but is nevertheless affected by them. Like Goodin, Le Grand does not consider that state intervention is necessarily required to correct this problem.

However, where there are empirical grounds to justify intervention to balance the interests between present and future selves that are not optimal, Le Grand appears to agree with such interventions in principle. For example, it could be argued that paternalist interventions are necessary to ensure that the poor spend what money they have on healthy food, rather than on items that are not in their long-term interest, such as fast food, alcohol and tobacco this is more or less the logic behind the policy of income management of welfare payments.

The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.

A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't … When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man's opium.

A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread. Nevertheless, where a person is, on all available evidence and accounts, almost guaranteed to subsequently regret their earlier choice, then Goodin views this as being a relatively clear-cut case for paternalist intervention by the state in favour of their future self. Where public policies help people to realise their preferred preferences through, for example, making it more expensive or inconvenient for people to smoke , then such policies cannot be said to be paternalistic in a morally unjustifiable sense.

Although he raises this view, Goodin is not entirely convinced by it. This is because, despite having been manipulated by advertisers or whomever , people may still deliberately claim these preferences as their own in arriving at their preferences. Nevertheless, Goodin does argue that there is a strong case for severely restricting the advertising and promotion of products that are addictive and damaging.

Further, while most smokers would like to quit, they find it difficult to do so. Paternalism may or may not be justifiable on one or more of the above criteria and it remains a matter for debate whether or not a given intervention is justified merely by satisfying one or more of the above criteria. However, Goodin insists that the argument against a given intervention simply on the grounds that it is paternalistic is insufficient.

Paternalism may always be defensible, depending on whether or not it is justifiable against criteria such as those discussed above. The above position is useful not only because it presents arguments which justify paternalism, but also because it accommodates the fact that the formation of preferences or choices can be a far more complex act than is generally supposed.

A preference is not simply something that can be taken for granted as the final word. The above analysis suggests that the assumption that a choice made by an individual at a given time and place should always indeed, necessarily prevail does not grasp the complexity of the processes by which preferences are made.

This more complex understanding of choice has been explored by number of sociologists, including most famously , Pierre Bourdieu, who analysed the ways in which individuals in particular social classes distinguish themselves from others through the consumption choices they make. Similarly, philosopher and sociologist, Renata Selacl has challenged the realist notion of individual preferences by questioning the assumption that the formation of individual preferences is best understood in terms of individuals making rational, objective calculations that maximise the benefits and minimise the costs of any situation known as the rational choice model of human behaviour.

This position is supported and explained by a range of sources. Hence, it may be argued that there is a substantial burden of proof on the state to defend paternalist policies. The previous section outlines the basic philosophical case under which a paternalist intervention might be considered justifiable.

However, what it does not do is provide much guidance in deciding on the legitimacy of particular forms of paternalist intervention. While, for example, we might agree that a clear-cut case of myopia such as the decision to smoke may make some kind of paternalist intervention theoretically justifiable, this then raises some important practical or consequentialist questions.

Relatively little attention has been paid to the nature or form of paternalist interventions. Clearly, there are more or less intrusive—and more or less justifiable—forms of paternalist intervention. Indeed, the emergence over the past couple of decades of new and more substantial forms of intervention such as compulsory income management has thrown into relief the issue of whether or not certain forms of paternalist intervention may be justified.

The possibility that paternalism might be found to be justifiable in a given situation , tells us little about whether a particular form of paternalism is justifiable. Clearly, this is a critical issue in evaluating the appropriateness and justifiability of a given instance of paternalism. Given that there has been little theoretical attention given to the appropriateness of different forms of paternalism, this section will suggest four criteria that might be used to establish a framework for evaluating paternalistic interventions: discrimination; proportionality; accountability; and efficacy.

This presumption, we suggest, can be regarded as placing limits on the form of particular paternalist interventions. If we accept the principle that states should only engage in paternalism in limited circumstances for example, where irreversible or life-changing decisions are involved , it could be argued that particular interventions should be designed in ways that avoid an impact on people other than those deemed to be at risk of harm from a particular behaviour.

In short, paternalist interventions should discriminate between those for whom paternalism is deemed necessary and those for whom it is not. As outlined earlier in the paper, this position, whereby the class being protected is identical with the class being interfered with, is known as pure paternalism.

There may be situations in which a pure intervention is not likely to be as effective as an impure intervention. In pursuing a pure, rather than impure, approach, the state might avoid interfering with the liberty of those not deemed to require protection, but this could come at the cost of assisting some people for whom that protection would be beneficial.

For example, a class of people might be particularly susceptible to harm as a result of consumption or overconsumption of a particular product—such as young women and sweet alcoholic drinks alcopops. A further argument against a strictly targeted approach is that, by its very nature, it formally discriminates against certain groups of people.

That is, it creates a situation in which some people have choices but others do not. For some paternalists, this is the whole point—some categories of people need protection but others do not. For others, however, strict targeting is an even more egregious violation than a more general approach because it sets aside the rights of a particular group of people to choose for themselves.

For those taking this stricter approach, the fact that the targeting happens under the guise of protection does not necessarily make this violation legitimate. In some cases, it is argued that such targeting may increase the possibility of harms to certain people precisely because it involves the setting aside of their rights, thereby creating the risk of increased social stigma and humiliation.

This argument is frequently made in relation to compulsory income management and other paternalist measures associated with the Northern Territory Emergency Response NTER. This indicates that while, on the surface, pure paternalism may be more consistent with the liberal presumption against paternalist policies, there may be instances where this more pure approach is inconsistent with other values and objectives, including the justified one of securing assistance for certain groups of people.

Another criticism of the form of income management used in the NT is that it is not discriminating enough in its application. In this connection, it is worth noting a crucial distinction between the income management arrangements operating under the NTER and those instituted in Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. While income management is imposed relatively indiscriminately on certain categories of welfare recipient within the NT that is, on a categorical and geographical basis , in Cape York income management is only applied to those income support recipients who fail to meet certain obligations to their children and the community.

If the person is able to demonstrate that they have been complying with their obligations, then their right to manage their own payments may be reinstated. In other words, the form of income management employed in Cape York is more clearly targeted at those failing to meet their obligations. In this respect, it could be said that the Cape York approach, while still setting aside the rights of certain people to choose for themselves, provides an example of how paternalism may be designed to restrict its impact to those actually in need of assistance.

What is the appropriate level of interference in a paternalist intervention? How deeply may the state intervene in the choices made by individuals? Again, the principle that paternalism should only be applied in limited circumstances suggests that in liberal societies there should also be limits to the extent of intervention that is justifiable.

One such limitation might be that any intervention is the minimum necessary to achieve the effect of protecting those subject to the policy. A further limitation might be that any paternalist intervention should be proportionate to the problem being addressed by the intervention.

Here is it useful to return to the distinction made between strong and weak paternalism the former interfering with ends, the latter interfering with means outlined earlier in the paper. According to the principles outlined above, strong and deep paternalism would rarely be justifiable—that is, only as a response to threats of the most irreversible, life-changing kind.

Of course, precise judgements about such matters as whether a particular intervention is the minimum necessary are far from simple. Among other issues, such judgements require engagement with evidence about the nature of particular social problems and the outcomes of particular social policy interventions. Issues of evidence are themselves particularly complex and will be discussed in detail in a later section of the paper. In liberal societies, it is expected that governments should be transparent in their actions and accountable to citizens.

This raises the question of whether or not the design of an intervention should make it obvious that some form of attempted coercion is taking place. Relatedly, is it legitimate for the state to make decisions on behalf of its citizens or influence them to make particular decisions without telling them? Are there some instances in which the benefits are so obvious that the consent of citizens may be assumed and who precisely should decide when this applies?

Such questions have been subject to significant debate in recent years. Some public health experts, for example, have begun to argue for preventive health interventions that take choices away from individuals. It is generally accepted that some of the biggest gains in preventive health are to be made in areas where individuals do not exercise individual choice such as water fluoridation, sanitation and food regulation , or where there are measures in place to ensure the widest possible compliance such as vaccination.

UK public health expert, Nicholas Wald, in arguing for a stronger approach to intervention in nutrition and other areas of public health, has stated:. Contrary to current perception, the key to effective public health is not individual choice but collective action linked to public trust in its value.

Most of the main determinants of health vary little among people in a community. The scope for individuals to choose healthy and safe foods, drinks, transport, or buildings is limited; the similarities in exposure are greater than the potential differences. The chief merit of the increasingly popular convenience foods is their convenience. Individuals have little influence over their composition. Even foods that are described as being healthy can be high in sugar and salt, counterbalancing any benefit from added micronutrients, such as folic acid.

But discouraging the use of convenience foods is not practical; we need collective action to reduce the amounts of salt, sugar, and saturated fat in foods, and a sensible policy on portion sizes in restaurants. Public health arguments such as these highlight the difficult choices governments face in particular, between paternalism and individual freedom when seeking to make significant gains in the area of preventive health.

For example, governments may introduce policies that try to de-normalise smoking and make it as difficult as possible for people to smoke.

Some would argue that such interventions are not justifiable. Perhaps there are slippery-slopes to be avoided. Perhaps proponents of nudging over-estimate the amount and seriousness of faulty reasoning by agents; mistakes that nudgers wish to harness to promote the agents welfare.

Perhaps they are mistaken about what agents really value when they claim people prefer health to more sugary beverages. But these objections are not objections to nudging but to the misuse of this type of behavioral intervention. Are there objections to the very nature of nudging itself?

There is one feature of many nudges that must be considered which, although not intrinsic to the concept of a nudge, is often present in the background as a crucial feature. One author actually links these background conditions to the definition of Libertarian Paternalism. Libertarian Paternalism is the set of interventions aimed at overcoming the unavoidable cognitive biases and decisional inadequacies of an individual by exploiting them in such a way as to influence her decisions in an easily reversible manner towards the choices she herself would make under idealised conditions.

Rebanato 6. An example of this use of cognitive biases is changing opt-in to opt-out. It is because of cognitive bias to doing nothing to change the status quo that there are relatively fewer opt-outs than might be expected.

Given this background, there are at least three objections that have objected to features intrinsic to some—by no means all—nudges. The first is that nudging often occurs without the nudged being aware they are being nudged.

The second is that nudging often works by harnessing defects in the thinking of those being nudged. The third is that some nudges besides those subject to the first two objections are forms of objectionable manipulation. One issue with many nudges is what the person being nudged knows about the nudge.

In the Cafeteria example the students are aware that food has been placed at different levels of eyesight. In that sense the nudge is transparent to them. It is not like subliminal messaging in which they are not aware of messages directed to them. Let us call nudges which are transparent in this sense narrow nudges. This did increase the rate of payment. Most workers questioned about the painting either had not noticed it at all or made no connection with the issue of payment.

In the cafeteria example while aware that the food is on different levels the students are not aware that the placing of the food has been done in order to promote a certain end—eating more healthy foods. The placement of the food is not random, nor motivated by aesthetic considerations.

It is deliberate and motivated by a particular set of considerations. Some nudges are more transparent in the sense that it is obvious they have been deliberately introduced and their motivation is also clear. Call these broad nudges. There is some evidence that making nudges broad does not interfere with their efficacy.

A recent study in the context of end-of-life care showed the effect of a default is not weakened when people are told that a default was chosen because it is usually effective Lowenstein et al. Note that there could be an even more transparent feature of nudges—call them very broad nudges.

This would be when the mechanism by which the nudge influences is made public as well. Suppose we presented an opt-out set up and said 1 we are doing this to increase participation in the retirement program, and 2 if this is effective it is because people have a tendency to stick with the status-quo. Nudges which are neither narrow nor broad—such as subliminal messages to movie-goers to buy fruit instead of popcorn—might be an effective way of encouraging consumption of healthier food.

But they seem to have a morally dubious character. Even if the facts are that such messages have rather weak efficacy we object to their by-passing any possibility to avoid or resist them. Choice architecture should be transparent and subject to public scrutiny, certainly if public officials are responsible for it. At a minimum, this proposition means that when such officials institute some kind of reform, they should not hide it from the public…If officials alter a default rule so as to promote clean energy or conservation, they should disclose what they are doing.

This formulation leaves open a number of issues. The government could announce in advance that they are going to use subliminal messages on television programs to promote health. Sunstein believes that this would satisfy his transparency condition but that it might be objectionable on grounds of manipulation. It remains open for discussion how to formulate a norm which is closer to the intuitive idea of transparency, to distinguish various sense of transparency—such as narrow and broad—and to debate whether such transparency is a necessary component of legitimate nudges.

Must, for example, the public utility which hopes to encourage energy conservation preface its informational message about the average consumption of your neighbors with the fact that they are sending this information because they think it will encourage conservation? Does it have to disclose they believe it may do so because people have a tendency to conform to what their neighbors are doing? Why is transparency required?

One possible objection to non-transparency is that it interferes with the autonomy of those influenced. Another issue concerning autonomy is whether it is affected by both intentional and unintentional nudges.

Are the choices more autonomous in this case than in a case in which the food is placed in exactly the same way but deliberately in order to affect the choices? The second objection to nudges has to do with a specific mechanism through which the end of nudging—promotion of agent ends—is sometimes accomplished. Consider the cafeteria example. The reason we place the healthy foods at eye level is because there is a tendency to choose what is at eye level over options that are not.

The thought is that nudgers can harness this tendency by putting healthy foods at that level. Since the positioning of foods is not a rational ground for choosing nudgers use this non-rational tendency so that healthy foods are chosen.

Note in this case we get both a lack of transparency and the harnessing of non-rational tendencies. Some argue that taking advantage of our non-rational tendencies, even for good ends, is objectionable. Consider the opt-out nudge. It relies upon, and works in virtue of, the fact that we tend to go with the given even if there are better options easily available.

It is because we irrationally choose the worse option that we present the better option for the agent to choose irrationally. Framing effects: It is one of the most confirmed findings of empirical decision theory that subjects decisions are affected by different ways of presenting information.

This is exactly the same information but those told A are more likely to choose the operation than those given B. It is irrational to make the decision differently depending on how it is worded. This harnessing of the irrational for our own good is not paradoxical but it strikes some as problematic in the same way getting children to read by offering them financial incentives is problematic.

We are getting them to read for the wrong reasons. At least in these cases there is the idea that once reading they will come to appreciate the pleasures and importance of reading for its own sake. But do people who stick with opt-in out of a tendency to stick with the given learn to change their faulty heuristic? If anything, it is reinforced because their faulty heuristic has a good consequence. If we think of cases of rational persuasion, then in the ideal case, we would find that the agent chooses because she believes she has been given reasons, these reasons support her choice, and she acts because of those reasons.

In the case of harnessing non-rational tendencies for nudges these conditions are not satisfied. It is a good thing that, usually, we act not simply in accordance with the reasons there are to act, but also out of, in recognition, of those reasons. It is clear that while many nudges as defined harness bad reasoning, most do not. Some do not harness reasoning at all, e. Since nudges are defined to exclude coercion, and they usually are not cases of outright deception as opposed to a lack of transparency the concept that is often used to criticize nudges is that of manipulation.

The charge of manipulation is raised often against the acts of others even when, like nudging, they are benevolently motivated. We think of manipulation, like other forms of paternalism as failing to respect us as rational and capable choosers.

After all, if we were capable choosers why not just present us with the reasons which favor our acting in particular way? Nudging uses the clever tricks of modern psychology and economics to manipulate people. Wilkinson, see Other Internet Resources.

The problem is that manipulation seems a very amorphous and ill-understood concept. There is widespread disagreement about what kinds of influence are manipulative and the conditions under which they are wrong. There seems to be only general agreement on the idea that in some way or other manipulation interferes, or perverts, or takes advantage of factors that people would not want to influence, the decision making of agents. Whether manipulation must be intentional, whether it must be hidden, whether the motive of the manipulator matters, whether there has to be a gap between the way in which the influence causes behavior and the reasons which justify it , whether there has to be a manipulator if one is manipulated, all are contested in the literature see papers in Coons and Weber Is harnessing a non-rational propensity of a person bypassing or subverting rational capacities?

Perhaps people perceive a process as manipulative only if they already disapprove of it for other reasons. In almost every case, respondents on the left of the political spectrum supported nudges when they were illustrated with a liberal agenda but opposed them when they were illustrated with a conservative one; meanwhile, respondents on the political right exhibited the opposite pattern. Given the very different conceptions of manipulation there is disagreement about why, when it is, manipulation is wrong.

Because it violates dignity? Because it violates autonomy? Because it violates a conception of liberty? It is clear that many nudges are not plausibly examples of manipulation.

Warning labels, default rules such as opt-out, providing caloric information on menus cannot count as manipulation without using such an expansive conception of manipulation as to deprive it of any use. Nudgers are clear that they want the influence they use to be easily avoidable. That is why they do not consider making choices very costly or difficult to be a nudge.

But manipulations vary in their strength or effectiveness. Perhaps certain subliminal messages are quite weak in their force; only people who already are thinking about buying popcorn are affected. Would only the influences that are difficult to evade or avoid be considered manipulative? In the case of paternalistic acts there seemed to be only one or two concepts which figure in the normative objections—e. In the case of objectionable nudging there seem to be a greater diversity of normative values at stake, and they seem to have no overarching conceptual unity.

Until more refined notions of manipulation and of subverting rational decision-making are developed it may be more fruitful to look at specific nudges which strike one as problematic because of some identifiable features they have, and to distinguish them from other nudges which lack such features.

There may be no common features which explain why those nudges that are wrongful all fall under a plausible concept of manipulation. Lies motivated by the claim that the person being lied to will have her interests advanced are the most common examples of paternalism that are claimed to be, at least sometimes, justified.

Paternalistic lies, and other forms of deception such as truthful but misleading assertions, raise interesting conceptual as well as normative issues. Further this difficulty is hidden from the person being lied to. This raises the issue of what exactly are the features of the person being lied to which are affected. Is it her liberty, her freedom, her autonomy? Is it the voluntariness of her action?

Is it none of these things but something like her ability to accomplish her aims? Thinking about these questions is important in evaluating whether, and when, paternalistic lies are justifiable. This discussion is about lying not deception. One can deceive without lying, e. Or by not asserting at all as when a husband replaces his sleeping pills with cough medicine to prevent his wife from harming herself.

By a lie I mean an assertion P by A who does not believe that P and intends a listener to either come to believe that P or at least to believe that A believes that P. A lie may not in fact deceive the listener for many reasons— P might actually be true or the listener may be aware that she is being lied to—but it is still pro tanto wrong as an abuse of assertion whose function is to provide evidence of what the speaker takes to be the truth.

Paternalistic lies are prima facie wrong, as Kantians would claim, because they are violations of our right as rational creatures to determine our ends, and the means to obtain them, for ourselves. Since lying is pro tanto wrong any specific lie can turn out to be justified if there are reasons that outweigh the ones making it wrong.

And defenders of paternalistic lies argue there are sometimes harms avoided or goods produced that outweigh the harms of lying. Anti-paternalists argue that such calculations fail to take into account that lies interfere with important values such as the autonomy, liberty, and rationality of the person and these values may outweigh the harms avoided or goods produced.