Paternalism

Henry Farrell's post on paternalism and prescription drugs reminds me that I should try and be as clear as he is when discussing this and say that I don't see anything wrong in principle with paternalism. There are often excellent reasons not to impose paternalistic policies, but they're basically pragmatic ones. Oftentimes, you get better results on average by letting people choose for themselves even if some individuals wind up choosing poorly. Other times, it's important for the long run to let people make certain sorts of mistakes so that they learn their lessons. But that something is paternalistic is not, in and of itself, a good reason to oppose it.

One thing I would observe is that paternalism quite literally gets a bad name. The implication is that any observation that a given person may, if left to his own devices, fail to act in his own best long-term interests is somehow infantilizing. This, however, is silly. That perfectly normal adult human beings often fail to act in their own best long-term interests is clear and well known. Associating efforts to prevent such behavior with treating people like children is unfair. The point is simply that people tend to stay alive for quite a long time and the interests of you-now (i.e., the decision-maker) can quite easily diverge from the interests of you-in-two-decades even though you-in-two-decades is a person whose interests ought to count just as you-now's interests count. Beyond that simple divergence of interests, there are some systematic biases in decision-making that stem from the fact that human beings did not evolve so as to have a natural grasp of statistics and so forth. We all have an inbuilt tendency to completely neglect small chances, even if the consequences of those small chances are enormous.

One could go on like this, but the other important thing to do is to separate questions about paternalism from other issues about the legitimate bounds of state power. Many people believe it is illegitimate to use the coercive authority of the state in order to help people buy, for example, taxing some people in order to give food to starving people. If you believe that you should, naturally enough, also oppose efforts at state paternalism. But most people who object to collective charity ventures of that sort have no problem with charity as an individual initiative, and many even believe there is an obligation to act charitably on an individual basis. If you believe that, you ought to also believe in a duty to practice paternalism on an individual level, trying to dissuade people from making bad choices about their lives. If, like a normal person, you think it's legitimate -- and, indeed, obligatory -- to use the coercive power of the state in order to help people, then you should also find it obligatory to deploy the coercive power of the state for paternalistic purposes when pragmatically appropriate.

My thinking on this has been greatly influenced by Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons which has probably shaped my overall thinking more than any other book. I hesitate somewhat to recommend it to people, since it's a pretty inside-baseball technical philosophy kind of book that doesn't really directly discuss the sort of policy questions in which there's a broad degree of interest in. But I certainly think the ideas it expouses deserve a larger audience, and perhaps the best way for that to happen is just for people to read the book. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who read the book but who didn't specifically study philosophy to hear whether or not you found it valuable in any way.