I think there is a good reason to make the "So YOU are the one who gets to make the decision?" argument. It isn't about social desirability bias, but rather the procedural point of "how do we choose who gets to make those decisions for everyone else?" Whether or not you think the reason people want to be paternalists is because they want to protect the idiots or just tell everyone what to do, the end result is a requirement to identify what behaviors are idiotic and punish people for engaging in them, along with punishing those who make those behaviors available. In the case of drugs that is a little easier to do (though not a lot), but in the case of misinformation it is a direct path to "whoever controls the government controls all speech". Not to mention that once you assent to paternalism in one realm of life there is no compelling reason why it shouldn't be applied to every decision a person should make; one simply has to make the argument that a given decision is idiotic and you need to be protected from it.
"are seducing innocent people into buying their deadly and addictive wares"
I think this is the part that bothers people. We know that human beings are flawed. We know that X% of people will make flawed decisions under context Y. So it's the knowing creation of context Y for ones personal profit that is a sin.
Do drug dealers fill an existing demand or do they take actions to actively create demand where none would exist without them? If you believe the latter is a big part of the drug market then dealers are indeed complicit in creating new addicts.
This could be applied to a lot of things. A large amount of the economy is to employ people whose job is to exploit human psychology at scale to the customers detriment and your profit. I think most people understand the difference between offering a product of service that makes peoples lives better and offering a product or service design to exploit weakness.
Many leftists think that capitalism/companies manipulate humans to want things, and that in the absence of marketing or external stresses, that people wouldn’t want the things they buy
This is a major reason for why they reject “revealed preferences” and “voting with your wallet/feet”
It's certainly true that companies manipulate people to make choices that aren't in their interests. There are many cases in which this should be regulated against. ironically, most leftists I know what to prevent this in the areas I think its most clear cut (like drug use).
Of course, government often makes choices that aren't in my interests for me, bypassing the entire process of asking for my input. The the extent I have input its via the process where I'm also bombarded with manipulation (I find the political ads I'm subjected to even more demeaning then consumer advertising) and my incentive structure to communicate my preferences are even danker then consumer purchasing.
Is all paternalism bad? What about literal paternalism? If your 5 year old son wanted to drink Draino, would you let him because that was his preference?
Maybe you say you would stop him up until the day when he turns 18? 21? 35? Assuming you continue to have the power to prevent him from drinking Drano, when you would start letting him make his own Draino mistakes?
Maybe you say things are different in this case because you are his literal father and so have a financial and genetic interest in him living. Does it change if he is your nephew? Your stepson? Your best friend's son? A random 5 year old in your town? On your planet?
Maybe you say Draino is different because it is 100% instantly fatal (assume it is) and so it is a mistake you only get to make once and can not learn from. How about if he wanted to drink 50% strength Draino (assume 50% chance of instant death)? 10% How about if he wanted to try a drug that was 10% chance of instant death? How about a drug that was 25% chance of death over the next 5 years after they first try it?
You're right, there seem to be some cases where paternalism is clearly good. If you were highly confident that someone was not suicidal, but nevertheless observed them doing something that was very likely to lead to immediate death, you're probably justified in stopping them by force.
There are other cases where it is clearly bad. Few support direct government intervention to ensure that you make a good choice of spouse.
Most things fall in the middle. It is usually difficult to determine whether it's best to intervene in someone's bad choices or leave them to the consequences of their decision.
A parent tends to have a lot of information about their child and is probably among the best-equipped to make a call about whether to intervene in their lives. For this reason, parents intervening is generally socially accepted. Even if your child is an adult, you probably won't be judged if you go to great lengths to prevent them from choosing to frequently use dangerous street drugs.
On the other hand, making such determinations about a stranger, or even worse, at a societal level, is a very information-poor exercise. This is why it's generally not socially acceptable to go to great lengths to prevent a stranger from frequently using dangerous street drugs, and a major reason why I (and I suspect Bryan) would usually oppose paternalism at the societal level.
In short, it's a knowledge problem. It's OK for God to be paternalistic, but dangerous for you and I We often can't be certain of something, and even when we feel certain, we're often wrong.
"A parent tends to have a lot of information about their child and is probably among the best-equipped to make a call about whether to intervene in their lives. "
So then, in principle, if government had even more information about its citizens than parents have about their children, then government could do an even better job of intervening than a parent could? We should be demanding that government have unfettered access to everyone's email and texts and location history and web logs and
urine reports and everything else. Not only would it have more information than any parent could dream of, it would also have massive economies of scale compared to parents who can each only watch over a dozen kids at most.
If we assume that governments always and only want the best for everyone, then perhaps you'd have an argument that we should give them maximum information. But obviously that's a very silly assumption. Parents are much more likely than bureaucrats to have your true best interests at heart.
But even with the assumption of omnibenevolence, you're equivocating information with knowledge. Simply having a ton of data about someone is not the same as knowing them. Data is not self-interpreting. If one's theory about a question is wrong, more data can be worse than no data, by giving them false confidence. Also, it is usually infeasible to have data about everything, everywhere, in real time. Governments that have tried to collect maximum information in order to centrally plan things have not fared well (e.g. Gosplan, North Korea). For another line of argument about this, see Hayek's article "The Use of Knowledge in Society." It's short and readable.
Paternalism might be justified for specific persons. But it seems extreme to apply paternalistic measures to people in general, just to make sure they apply to those who need them.
There is something paradoxical about rescuing someone who doesn’t want to be rescued. People who are unaware of a danger can be informed of it. The mere existence of danger is not sufficient to justify nullifying a reasonable adult's agency.
Children usually have parents who care for them. Who should take this role when competent adults are paternalized?
I feel like the real complaint here isn't that information is being hidden but about the fact that there isn't implicit blame/judgement of people for making bad choices. No one is saying that the people who take drugs or work in crazy high risk jobs are making the ideal choice for themselves -- they merely portray it as understandable that people make a bad choice in the situation and blame those who take advantage of that failing.
They treat these bad choices the same way we treat children's mistakes or limitations -- we don't call our children idiots for being susceptible to make poor choices and we tend to see people who take advantage of children's limited abilities as the blameworthy ones. And you don't really argue for a reason why we need to regard these choices as blameworthy rather than irrational but understandable. After all not all irrational choices are stupid (my failure to simply write down a proof of P!=NP is technically irrational, assuming it's provable, since it would greatly benefit me but not stupid).
I have plenty of objections to aspects of paternalism but I just don't think you're making a good case that it's dishonest.
It seems like you're saying that people DO acknowledge that support for these policies implies that people are incapable of managing their own lives, and that Bryan's problem is that they fail to assign blame to those individuals.
I think that's a fair understanding, although your analogy to children misses the mark. I don't think leftists are, by and large, willing to publicly rationalize their policy positions with "the average person is similar to a child in their succeptibility to make poor choices." Why aren't they willing to say that? You're right that we don't call our children idiots, but calling an adult a child is tantamount to calling them an idiot. If an adult behaved like my children do, they would indeed be an idiot.
I think your example of P! = NP nicely illustrates the difference between blameworthy and irrational but understandable. It is understandable that you can't write a proof of that, because nobody else has, either. It being beyond human capacity right now is therefore a reasonable theory, just as responsibility money management is beyond the current capacity of a small child. On the other hand, the foolishness of investment in a Ponzi scheme, unquestioning acceptance of the marketing claims of a comsumer goods company, or use of street heroin is obvious enough that a large number of adults intentionally avoid avoid those activities. The theory that avoiding those activities is beyond human capacity is therefore a very poor one.
And obviously it's not beyond human capacity. Some people don't shock the guy in the Milgram experiment but most people do.
And I agree that it's probably true that on average these people making these choices are somewhat worse at making decisions. There is a correlation between ability to delay gratification and success. However, I think what the reasonable progressive would say is that the variation in situation and temptations is substantially more impactful than variation in ability to choose rationally and no argument challenging that has been prosecuted here.
No, you've shifted the claim there a huge amount. People acknowledge that: it would be a better choice for people not to take those jobs, do those drugs etc.. You want to reach a stronger claim that these people are somehow unusually or especially inclined to make bad choices in a way that is far beyond that of most adults.
All of us are fallible and will often make bad choices in sufficiently tempting/difficult situations [1]. You want to assert that the people doing drugs, taking risky jobs etc are particularly poor decision makers rather than average (or a bit below) deciscion makers subject to particularly strong pressure/temptation.
At the very least that requires substantially more argument. I think there is good reason to judge it to be false since when otherwise upstanding people lose their jobs, get ostracized from their friends and support structures and end up in similar situations to those making the bad choices they often make bad choices as well (maybe more since the fall itself makes it worse). Of course, that's nothing like a random sample but until we get IRB approval to take some random middle class people and take away all their money, give them a criminal record and a big face tattoo so everyone makes negative assumptions about them and induce lower class speach patterns, block contact with friends and family and induce them to form friendships with bad influences and see how they do it seems hard to be confident they would make better choices in that context.
1: Many happily married men could be seduced if placed in a sufficently tempting situation over a long enough time -- especially if encouraged to drink in it. The Milgram experiment shows even moral people can be pressured into acting immorally. It's not that the people who fail to act properly in these situations are particularly wicked -- they were just normally wicked and exposed to unusually intense temptations (it's why security clearance is more about making sure you are vulnerable to intense pressure than about evaluating character).
It probably is not good rhetoric, but there is yet another argument against paternalism. That is that while we and even the government might be smarter than some people, we are not terribly smart. If I had to bet we have the right answer on a lot of questions, maybe I would come out ahead, but I’m bound to pick some losers. Paternalism tends to make culture more monolithic, or monotonous, more one-size-fits all. If everyone does the same thing, we won’t know whether it was a good idea or not. We need experiments. Oddballs are volunteering for the control group. Forcing them to do like everyone else violates experimental ethics and good methodology, which call for volunteer subjects and a control group.
a) Calling people "idiots" is impolite even if you agree on a substantive level that paternalism is justified. You might get power of attorney over your dementia-addled mother for paternalistic reasons, but you are never going to say "It’s because she's an idiot now".
b) "Idiots" also frames people as blameworthy, when most supporters of paternalism would likely frame them as "victims".
c) Finally, I think many supporters of these policies will claim non-paternalistic justifications. For instance, the justifications for workplace safety regulations tend to be much closer to "employers have more market power so employees have no choice but to accept unsafe environments" than "employees are just too dumb to realise they need more workplace safety".
> For instance, the justifications for workplace safety regulations tend to be much closer to "employers have more market power so employees have no choice but to accept unsafe environments" than "employees are just too dumb to realise they need more workplace safety"
Yes, this is a great point. The people pushing paternalism are frequently every bit as idiotic as the idiots they are trying to protect.
Isn't the problem with paternalism kinda the opposite? It's too quick to say that these poor people are less rational than us elites so if we step in we can make better decisions for them.
Plastering the message that these people are making dumb choices only makes the problem worse by convincing more people that they are so much more rational they can step in and make things better when in fact those government agents and elites are often not that much better at making decisions especially via a bureaucracy.
But those left wing circles aren't being any less honest, merely less judgemental. They aren't afraid to say things like drug use is a negative for the user or acknowledge that it's not a choice an ideally rational actor would make.
The difference is how harsh they are willing to be but that's a question of values/judgement not facts.
A key belief of paternalism is that "we" need to care for people when they're in trouble. If we assume we have the responsibility to take care of them when they're in trouble, then it seems like a good idea to do what we can to prevent their getting into trouble. Good parents take care of their children and protect them from bad things. Good government, on that analogy, takes care of its children (citizens) protects them from bad things.
People do not all judge risk/danger/idiocy correctly. In fact, they are just as prone to judge incorrectly as people are to make bad decisions thoughtlessly or simply incorrectly. We have abundant examples in the "helicopter parent creates wussy" class as a single example. Secondly, surely everyone knows by now that any decisions you allow government to take over will not only be ridiculously made according the absolute lowest common denominator but will also be randomly, tyrannically enforced. We currently do not have a wise enough citizenry to trust with their own lives and we certainly do not have a wise enough government to trust with anything. The base reason appears to be an unwise, unreliable population.
Collective responsibility for people is a major part of paternalism
And socialistic welfare or healthcare means that if someone makes bad choices, they arnt just burdening themself but also society. So in some sense, redistribution neccesitates paternalism
TBF he isn't arguing against that claim here. But the piece does seem peeved that we aren't being more judgemental about those who make the bad choices -- in a way you wouldn't do with your children and that seems puzzling to me.
The existence of fools *does* impose a cost on society, and who is going to pay that cost? The cost of protecting children can reasonably be put on parents/guardians, but many fools are adults, including elderly victims of dementia. Some of these people can be deprived of their autonomy and assigned legal guardians, but that is an extreme measure. It really is rather hard on those who are very-stupid-but-not-so-much-that-they-should-be-assigned-guardians to leave them entirely to look out for themselves: a modest paternalism does have some plausibility.
“Oh, so you’re the person who knows how everyone should live their lives" is a great argument, because it implicitly ties in public choice and the implicit power grab, while clearly making the point that paternalism as practised is fundamentally arbitrary.
Where I live the government has proposed a smoking ban on paternalist grounds. We are also in the middle of a long-term soft decriminalisation of marijuana on pragmatic grounds. These policies are not necessarily inconsistent, but you could with equal justice reverse the rhetoric. Most people have huge differences in the paternalism they want in different areas (e.g. extreme libertarianism in matters sexual, extreme paternalism in matters economic) with no principled or pragmatic distinction between them. It certainly looks like people wanting to express their own preferences through law, so it's not at all unfair to accuse paternalists of wanting to insert themselves personally as the "pater."
As always I feel like your equivocations on drugs fall flat. In this case, not only do they *make* you dumb by altering your mind, being addictive etc., but a large majority of drug users start as children! Seems perfectly reasonable to be more paternalistic in this case.
There's a third option - allow people to demonstrate that they're willing and able to accept the risks of living outside of the paternalist framework in given domains.
We already do this to a limited extent via things like driving, where you have to pass a series of tests and maintain a clean record in order to have the legal right to get behind the wheel. We also do this with investing to some extent via the "accredited investor" requirement to invest in small risky startups. Socially, it's a lot easier for people to allow others to accept risk if it looks like they made informed choices and put in some work.
Imagine if we extended this to numerous other realms of life such as healthcare, where some of us can "test out" of having to bother going through a doctor to get prescriptions for many drugs. Or entitlements, where we can demonstrate we are competent and capable enough to not require a government safety net, etc.
It's always interesting to see how many people in Idaho ride motorcycles without a helmet. One might think that this is generally their problem during a crash. The actual problem is that the libertarians are not actually willing to allow a brain injury patient languish on the streets, so the state picks up that tab for long term skilled nursing. Call it paternalism, but I prefer not to pay for those who create unnecessary risk.
I think for misinformation, it's unreasonable to expect ANYONE to be able to resist it. Even highly educated end up believing nonsense, and there's no way to point it out since for all you know, you may believe things that aren't true. Sure there are heuristics but there's no way of being certain who the victims are, unlike in the case for drugs etc.
We therefore have to tackle the sources of misinformation - specifically corrupt media organisations that make money from people having poorly formed views, and much more importantly social media companies that have the most powerful and intelligent supercomputers and algorithms that have ever existed, and make their money from people believing and engaging with ever more outrageous content.
The guy who coined the phrase "ideological Turing test" might benefit from applying it. Your post treats drug addiction purely in terms of atomized individuals who only interact through the political system. Whereas the prohibitionist would conceive more in terms of community, recognizing that that drug addict is someone's son, daughter, nephew, sister-in-law, etc. They'd also likely say that, even for the atomized individual, it's vastly better to live around stupid people who don't do Fentanyl than stupid people who do.
I think there is a good reason to make the "So YOU are the one who gets to make the decision?" argument. It isn't about social desirability bias, but rather the procedural point of "how do we choose who gets to make those decisions for everyone else?" Whether or not you think the reason people want to be paternalists is because they want to protect the idiots or just tell everyone what to do, the end result is a requirement to identify what behaviors are idiotic and punish people for engaging in them, along with punishing those who make those behaviors available. In the case of drugs that is a little easier to do (though not a lot), but in the case of misinformation it is a direct path to "whoever controls the government controls all speech". Not to mention that once you assent to paternalism in one realm of life there is no compelling reason why it shouldn't be applied to every decision a person should make; one simply has to make the argument that a given decision is idiotic and you need to be protected from it.
"are seducing innocent people into buying their deadly and addictive wares"
I think this is the part that bothers people. We know that human beings are flawed. We know that X% of people will make flawed decisions under context Y. So it's the knowing creation of context Y for ones personal profit that is a sin.
Do drug dealers fill an existing demand or do they take actions to actively create demand where none would exist without them? If you believe the latter is a big part of the drug market then dealers are indeed complicit in creating new addicts.
This could be applied to a lot of things. A large amount of the economy is to employ people whose job is to exploit human psychology at scale to the customers detriment and your profit. I think most people understand the difference between offering a product of service that makes peoples lives better and offering a product or service design to exploit weakness.
Many leftists think that capitalism/companies manipulate humans to want things, and that in the absence of marketing or external stresses, that people wouldn’t want the things they buy
This is a major reason for why they reject “revealed preferences” and “voting with your wallet/feet”
It's certainly true that companies manipulate people to make choices that aren't in their interests. There are many cases in which this should be regulated against. ironically, most leftists I know what to prevent this in the areas I think its most clear cut (like drug use).
Of course, government often makes choices that aren't in my interests for me, bypassing the entire process of asking for my input. The the extent I have input its via the process where I'm also bombarded with manipulation (I find the political ads I'm subjected to even more demeaning then consumer advertising) and my incentive structure to communicate my preferences are even danker then consumer purchasing.
Is all paternalism bad? What about literal paternalism? If your 5 year old son wanted to drink Draino, would you let him because that was his preference?
Maybe you say you would stop him up until the day when he turns 18? 21? 35? Assuming you continue to have the power to prevent him from drinking Drano, when you would start letting him make his own Draino mistakes?
Maybe you say things are different in this case because you are his literal father and so have a financial and genetic interest in him living. Does it change if he is your nephew? Your stepson? Your best friend's son? A random 5 year old in your town? On your planet?
Maybe you say Draino is different because it is 100% instantly fatal (assume it is) and so it is a mistake you only get to make once and can not learn from. How about if he wanted to drink 50% strength Draino (assume 50% chance of instant death)? 10% How about if he wanted to try a drug that was 10% chance of instant death? How about a drug that was 25% chance of death over the next 5 years after they first try it?
You would stop him from drinking Draino just like you'd stop him from doing drugs. You wouldn't ban Draino.
You're right, there seem to be some cases where paternalism is clearly good. If you were highly confident that someone was not suicidal, but nevertheless observed them doing something that was very likely to lead to immediate death, you're probably justified in stopping them by force.
There are other cases where it is clearly bad. Few support direct government intervention to ensure that you make a good choice of spouse.
Most things fall in the middle. It is usually difficult to determine whether it's best to intervene in someone's bad choices or leave them to the consequences of their decision.
A parent tends to have a lot of information about their child and is probably among the best-equipped to make a call about whether to intervene in their lives. For this reason, parents intervening is generally socially accepted. Even if your child is an adult, you probably won't be judged if you go to great lengths to prevent them from choosing to frequently use dangerous street drugs.
On the other hand, making such determinations about a stranger, or even worse, at a societal level, is a very information-poor exercise. This is why it's generally not socially acceptable to go to great lengths to prevent a stranger from frequently using dangerous street drugs, and a major reason why I (and I suspect Bryan) would usually oppose paternalism at the societal level.
In short, it's a knowledge problem. It's OK for God to be paternalistic, but dangerous for you and I We often can't be certain of something, and even when we feel certain, we're often wrong.
"A parent tends to have a lot of information about their child and is probably among the best-equipped to make a call about whether to intervene in their lives. "
So then, in principle, if government had even more information about its citizens than parents have about their children, then government could do an even better job of intervening than a parent could? We should be demanding that government have unfettered access to everyone's email and texts and location history and web logs and
urine reports and everything else. Not only would it have more information than any parent could dream of, it would also have massive economies of scale compared to parents who can each only watch over a dozen kids at most.
If we assume that governments always and only want the best for everyone, then perhaps you'd have an argument that we should give them maximum information. But obviously that's a very silly assumption. Parents are much more likely than bureaucrats to have your true best interests at heart.
But even with the assumption of omnibenevolence, you're equivocating information with knowledge. Simply having a ton of data about someone is not the same as knowing them. Data is not self-interpreting. If one's theory about a question is wrong, more data can be worse than no data, by giving them false confidence. Also, it is usually infeasible to have data about everything, everywhere, in real time. Governments that have tried to collect maximum information in order to centrally plan things have not fared well (e.g. Gosplan, North Korea). For another line of argument about this, see Hayek's article "The Use of Knowledge in Society." It's short and readable.
Paternalism might be justified for specific persons. But it seems extreme to apply paternalistic measures to people in general, just to make sure they apply to those who need them.
There is something paradoxical about rescuing someone who doesn’t want to be rescued. People who are unaware of a danger can be informed of it. The mere existence of danger is not sufficient to justify nullifying a reasonable adult's agency.
Children usually have parents who care for them. Who should take this role when competent adults are paternalized?
I feel like the real complaint here isn't that information is being hidden but about the fact that there isn't implicit blame/judgement of people for making bad choices. No one is saying that the people who take drugs or work in crazy high risk jobs are making the ideal choice for themselves -- they merely portray it as understandable that people make a bad choice in the situation and blame those who take advantage of that failing.
They treat these bad choices the same way we treat children's mistakes or limitations -- we don't call our children idiots for being susceptible to make poor choices and we tend to see people who take advantage of children's limited abilities as the blameworthy ones. And you don't really argue for a reason why we need to regard these choices as blameworthy rather than irrational but understandable. After all not all irrational choices are stupid (my failure to simply write down a proof of P!=NP is technically irrational, assuming it's provable, since it would greatly benefit me but not stupid).
I have plenty of objections to aspects of paternalism but I just don't think you're making a good case that it's dishonest.
It seems like you're saying that people DO acknowledge that support for these policies implies that people are incapable of managing their own lives, and that Bryan's problem is that they fail to assign blame to those individuals.
I think that's a fair understanding, although your analogy to children misses the mark. I don't think leftists are, by and large, willing to publicly rationalize their policy positions with "the average person is similar to a child in their succeptibility to make poor choices." Why aren't they willing to say that? You're right that we don't call our children idiots, but calling an adult a child is tantamount to calling them an idiot. If an adult behaved like my children do, they would indeed be an idiot.
I think your example of P! = NP nicely illustrates the difference between blameworthy and irrational but understandable. It is understandable that you can't write a proof of that, because nobody else has, either. It being beyond human capacity right now is therefore a reasonable theory, just as responsibility money management is beyond the current capacity of a small child. On the other hand, the foolishness of investment in a Ponzi scheme, unquestioning acceptance of the marketing claims of a comsumer goods company, or use of street heroin is obvious enough that a large number of adults intentionally avoid avoid those activities. The theory that avoiding those activities is beyond human capacity is therefore a very poor one.
And obviously it's not beyond human capacity. Some people don't shock the guy in the Milgram experiment but most people do.
And I agree that it's probably true that on average these people making these choices are somewhat worse at making decisions. There is a correlation between ability to delay gratification and success. However, I think what the reasonable progressive would say is that the variation in situation and temptations is substantially more impactful than variation in ability to choose rationally and no argument challenging that has been prosecuted here.
No, you've shifted the claim there a huge amount. People acknowledge that: it would be a better choice for people not to take those jobs, do those drugs etc.. You want to reach a stronger claim that these people are somehow unusually or especially inclined to make bad choices in a way that is far beyond that of most adults.
All of us are fallible and will often make bad choices in sufficiently tempting/difficult situations [1]. You want to assert that the people doing drugs, taking risky jobs etc are particularly poor decision makers rather than average (or a bit below) deciscion makers subject to particularly strong pressure/temptation.
At the very least that requires substantially more argument. I think there is good reason to judge it to be false since when otherwise upstanding people lose their jobs, get ostracized from their friends and support structures and end up in similar situations to those making the bad choices they often make bad choices as well (maybe more since the fall itself makes it worse). Of course, that's nothing like a random sample but until we get IRB approval to take some random middle class people and take away all their money, give them a criminal record and a big face tattoo so everyone makes negative assumptions about them and induce lower class speach patterns, block contact with friends and family and induce them to form friendships with bad influences and see how they do it seems hard to be confident they would make better choices in that context.
1: Many happily married men could be seduced if placed in a sufficently tempting situation over a long enough time -- especially if encouraged to drink in it. The Milgram experiment shows even moral people can be pressured into acting immorally. It's not that the people who fail to act properly in these situations are particularly wicked -- they were just normally wicked and exposed to unusually intense temptations (it's why security clearance is more about making sure you are vulnerable to intense pressure than about evaluating character).
It probably is not good rhetoric, but there is yet another argument against paternalism. That is that while we and even the government might be smarter than some people, we are not terribly smart. If I had to bet we have the right answer on a lot of questions, maybe I would come out ahead, but I’m bound to pick some losers. Paternalism tends to make culture more monolithic, or monotonous, more one-size-fits all. If everyone does the same thing, we won’t know whether it was a good idea or not. We need experiments. Oddballs are volunteering for the control group. Forcing them to do like everyone else violates experimental ethics and good methodology, which call for volunteer subjects and a control group.
I agree with this
a) Calling people "idiots" is impolite even if you agree on a substantive level that paternalism is justified. You might get power of attorney over your dementia-addled mother for paternalistic reasons, but you are never going to say "It’s because she's an idiot now".
b) "Idiots" also frames people as blameworthy, when most supporters of paternalism would likely frame them as "victims".
c) Finally, I think many supporters of these policies will claim non-paternalistic justifications. For instance, the justifications for workplace safety regulations tend to be much closer to "employers have more market power so employees have no choice but to accept unsafe environments" than "employees are just too dumb to realise they need more workplace safety".
> For instance, the justifications for workplace safety regulations tend to be much closer to "employers have more market power so employees have no choice but to accept unsafe environments" than "employees are just too dumb to realise they need more workplace safety"
Yes, this is a great point. The people pushing paternalism are frequently every bit as idiotic as the idiots they are trying to protect.
Isn't the problem with paternalism kinda the opposite? It's too quick to say that these poor people are less rational than us elites so if we step in we can make better decisions for them.
Plastering the message that these people are making dumb choices only makes the problem worse by convincing more people that they are so much more rational they can step in and make things better when in fact those government agents and elites are often not that much better at making decisions especially via a bureaucracy.
"Why can’t supporters of paternalism be honest?"
If you get out of academic or left wing circles they are a lot more honest. Your average middle class conservative is pretty harsh on drug addicts.
But those left wing circles aren't being any less honest, merely less judgemental. They aren't afraid to say things like drug use is a negative for the user or acknowledge that it's not a choice an ideally rational actor would make.
The difference is how harsh they are willing to be but that's a question of values/judgement not facts.
A key belief of paternalism is that "we" need to care for people when they're in trouble. If we assume we have the responsibility to take care of them when they're in trouble, then it seems like a good idea to do what we can to prevent their getting into trouble. Good parents take care of their children and protect them from bad things. Good government, on that analogy, takes care of its children (citizens) protects them from bad things.
People do not all judge risk/danger/idiocy correctly. In fact, they are just as prone to judge incorrectly as people are to make bad decisions thoughtlessly or simply incorrectly. We have abundant examples in the "helicopter parent creates wussy" class as a single example. Secondly, surely everyone knows by now that any decisions you allow government to take over will not only be ridiculously made according the absolute lowest common denominator but will also be randomly, tyrannically enforced. We currently do not have a wise enough citizenry to trust with their own lives and we certainly do not have a wise enough government to trust with anything. The base reason appears to be an unwise, unreliable population.
Yes thats all true
But people want to feel that they are helping people, and being wise. So theres a lot of wishful thinking here, and etc etc
Collective responsibility for people is a major part of paternalism
And socialistic welfare or healthcare means that if someone makes bad choices, they arnt just burdening themself but also society. So in some sense, redistribution neccesitates paternalism
TBF he isn't arguing against that claim here. But the piece does seem peeved that we aren't being more judgemental about those who make the bad choices -- in a way you wouldn't do with your children and that seems puzzling to me.
The existence of fools *does* impose a cost on society, and who is going to pay that cost? The cost of protecting children can reasonably be put on parents/guardians, but many fools are adults, including elderly victims of dementia. Some of these people can be deprived of their autonomy and assigned legal guardians, but that is an extreme measure. It really is rather hard on those who are very-stupid-but-not-so-much-that-they-should-be-assigned-guardians to leave them entirely to look out for themselves: a modest paternalism does have some plausibility.
“Oh, so you’re the person who knows how everyone should live their lives" is a great argument, because it implicitly ties in public choice and the implicit power grab, while clearly making the point that paternalism as practised is fundamentally arbitrary.
Where I live the government has proposed a smoking ban on paternalist grounds. We are also in the middle of a long-term soft decriminalisation of marijuana on pragmatic grounds. These policies are not necessarily inconsistent, but you could with equal justice reverse the rhetoric. Most people have huge differences in the paternalism they want in different areas (e.g. extreme libertarianism in matters sexual, extreme paternalism in matters economic) with no principled or pragmatic distinction between them. It certainly looks like people wanting to express their own preferences through law, so it's not at all unfair to accuse paternalists of wanting to insert themselves personally as the "pater."
As always I feel like your equivocations on drugs fall flat. In this case, not only do they *make* you dumb by altering your mind, being addictive etc., but a large majority of drug users start as children! Seems perfectly reasonable to be more paternalistic in this case.
There's a third option - allow people to demonstrate that they're willing and able to accept the risks of living outside of the paternalist framework in given domains.
We already do this to a limited extent via things like driving, where you have to pass a series of tests and maintain a clean record in order to have the legal right to get behind the wheel. We also do this with investing to some extent via the "accredited investor" requirement to invest in small risky startups. Socially, it's a lot easier for people to allow others to accept risk if it looks like they made informed choices and put in some work.
Imagine if we extended this to numerous other realms of life such as healthcare, where some of us can "test out" of having to bother going through a doctor to get prescriptions for many drugs. Or entitlements, where we can demonstrate we are competent and capable enough to not require a government safety net, etc.
It's always interesting to see how many people in Idaho ride motorcycles without a helmet. One might think that this is generally their problem during a crash. The actual problem is that the libertarians are not actually willing to allow a brain injury patient languish on the streets, so the state picks up that tab for long term skilled nursing. Call it paternalism, but I prefer not to pay for those who create unnecessary risk.
I think for misinformation, it's unreasonable to expect ANYONE to be able to resist it. Even highly educated end up believing nonsense, and there's no way to point it out since for all you know, you may believe things that aren't true. Sure there are heuristics but there's no way of being certain who the victims are, unlike in the case for drugs etc.
We therefore have to tackle the sources of misinformation - specifically corrupt media organisations that make money from people having poorly formed views, and much more importantly social media companies that have the most powerful and intelligent supercomputers and algorithms that have ever existed, and make their money from people believing and engaging with ever more outrageous content.
The guy who coined the phrase "ideological Turing test" might benefit from applying it. Your post treats drug addiction purely in terms of atomized individuals who only interact through the political system. Whereas the prohibitionist would conceive more in terms of community, recognizing that that drug addict is someone's son, daughter, nephew, sister-in-law, etc. They'd also likely say that, even for the atomized individual, it's vastly better to live around stupid people who don't do Fentanyl than stupid people who do.