What's Wrong with Paternalism and the "Nanny State"

In an op-ed in The New York Times titled "Three Cheers for the Nanny State," Sarah Conly, a philosophy professor at Bowdown College and author of Against Autonomy, dismisses principled concerns about paternalism and presents her own arguments in favor of it. I find her argument both lacking and revealing, and I explore some facets of it below.

1) First, Professor Conly raises the issue of bad decisions, citing the work of Daniel Kanhneman and Amos Tversky (and others) on cognitive biases and heuristics that interfere with textbook rationality, summarized well in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's book Nudge. Joined with John Staurt Mill's justification of paternalism in the case of nonvoluntary choice (his example being man about to walk onto a partially collapsed bridge), Conly concludes that "we need help."

As I explain in my book The Manipulation of Choice, there is a critical problem with saying "we need help" in cases of bad decisions: while we all make bad decisions from time to time, no one knows which decisions are bad except the person making them. This is because no one has more information about a person's goals and ends than the person himself or herself. The only basis on which an outside observer can say that a person (or a group of persons) needs help is the observer's own judgment. If a policymaker says that Jim shouldn't have eaten that donut, Jane should have signed up for her company's 401(k), or Joe shouldn't have that big soda, it is not because Jim, Jane, and Joe feels they're bad decisions in the context of their interests. It's because the policymaker thought they were bad decisions, based on his or her own idea of what decisions Jim, Jane, and Joe should have made and what the policymakers thinks their interests are (or should be). Paternalism necessary involves presumptive external judgments of people's interests, and it is these artificial interests, not people's own, that are promoted by paternalism in the end.

2) Next, while Professor Conly admits that paternalistic laws may make some people worse off if it prohibits decisions that are truly in their own interests, she argues nonetheless that laws have to be general and sometimes they will harm some people who fall under them, in pursuit of the public good.

There are several problems with this statement. First, there is no "public good" with regard to paternalistic laws, which by definition promote individuals' own good. This was precisely John Stuart Mill's point when he argued against paternalism: putting aside cases of clearly nonvoluntary action, coercive laws are justified only to prevent a person from harming another, not himself or herself. The public good is promoted by laws that prohibit harm (or risk of harm) to others, such as the example of speed limits that Professor Conly cites, not behavior targeted by paternalistic laws.

Futhermore, in saying that the good of the majority—whom she presumes will benefit from paternalistic laws—trumps the rights of the minority to be free of them, she flips one of John Stuart Mill's other famous concepts, the tyranny of the majority, on its ear by saying that the needs of the majority can take precedence over the rights of the minority. No one has the right to drive 90 mph on a public road that is trampled by the existence of speed limits, but a strong case can be made that a person has the right to drink what he or she wants, without any interference or "nudges" from the government, regardless of how much other people choose to drink or their own desires to have their consumption regulated. A law that limits the legitimate and rightful action of some in order to "help" others better govern their own behavior places a heavy burden on the latter to justify it—and simply saying "it will help us" is not sufficient.

3) Professor Conly then states that fears of a "slippery slope" regarding paternalistic interventions are unwarranted. But her argument for this is self-defeating when seen in light of the willingness to let policymakers judge the decisions of ordinary people.

She argues that specific paternalistic laws will be assessed on a case-by-case basis according to their costs and benefits. But who will be determining and comparing these costs and benefits? The same people who judged our choices to be inferior in the first place. And if policymakers do not think people should be drinking big sodas, then there is a very good chance they will see the benefits of discouraging soda consumption to be high and the costs low--evidenced by Conly's question regarding the soda ban, "why is this such a big deal?" (Ironically, the connection between paternalism and cost-benefit analysis is the subject of The Illusion of Well-Being, my follow-up to The Manipulation of Choice, now in progress.)

Simply the act of subjecting paternalistic intervention to cost-benefit analysis ignores qualitative aspects of the issue, such as the impositions on autonomy and dignity that they represent, making it more likely that policymakers will see a net benefit of paternalistic regulation. (As Conly writes, "large cups of soda as symbols of human dignity? Really?")

4) Professor Conly's final paragraph begins by saying that "the government is supposed to... help us get where we want to go." I would emphasize the phrase "where we want to go," and argue that the best way for the government to help get us there is by maximizing the extent to the people can make their own choices regarding their lives, consistent with the ability of everyone else to do the same. When Joe drinks a 32-ounce soda, he doesn't directly harm anyone else, and the judgment of the wisdom of his decision properly rests with him, his family, and his doctor.

Ethics and Morality Essential Reads

Lab Beagles: What Science and All of Us Owe To Research Dogs

No One Is All Wicked, or All Good

The government has many more important things to do than play "nanny"—things that may truly help us get where we want to go rather than where policymakers think we should be.

-----

The first chapter of The Manipulation of Choice is available for free here. For more on paternalism and nudges, see my posts at the Economics and Ethics blog and my recent op-ed at The Washington Times.

You're invited to follow me on Twitter and my website/blog, as well as the blogs Economics and Ethics and The Comics Professor.