By Dr. Niclas Berggren

There is a strong tendency in some societies to restrict or limit the action space of its citizens, not only in the field of activities which cause unwanted harm to others, but also in the field of actions where the executing parties participate voluntarily. The latter types of behavior are the focus of this note, the purpose of which is to argue that such restriction or limitation is most often undesirable. Some examples of areas which are often targeted by governmental attempts to decrease their occurrence: smoking, drinking, drug usage, and sex outside of a monogamous relationship. For the sake of argument, we assume that the types of behavior discussed here do not give rise to external effects on third parties - and we make this assumption in order to isolate the paternalist argument from the (similarly problematic) efficiency argument of correcting "market failures", common in economics.

First, the basis for governmental interference in actions of its citizens involving only individuals who participate voluntarily is a doctrine which is often referred to as paternalism. This term can be defined as "a protective attitude of a decision maker toward his subjects, on the basis of a presumption of informational superiority." In other words, in some areas of life, someone thinks that he knows better than others what is in the latters' best interests and hence feels that he has the right and obligation to impose his own values on others in order to direct their behavior. This view is, perhaps, most often associated with the political ideology of conservatism.

So it is that governments introduce taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, and so it is that governments prohibit drugs and, less frequently in the Western world today, certain forms of sexual behavior. Some people have decided to try to make people choose other courses of actions than they would have chosen freely, without government interference.

The arguments against such paternalism are manifold; here, I wish to introduce one point of view which I submit has most often been overlooked by paternalists and which, consequently, make paternalism based on an erroneous calculus. Let me elaborate.

A person decides to initiate action x on the basis of his expecting x to render him a net utility gain larger than alternative actions available to him. Paternalism commits a mistake by only focusing on the cost side of this evaluation (and note that "cost" may very well be of a non-monetary sort). Paternalists say: "Action x entails a substantial cost c and must therefore be opposed in various ways." I say: "Yes, it is true that action x may entail cost c, but the reason that the person would choose action x is that he perceives the utility of x to be larger than c, hence giving him a net utility gain. For this reason, x should not be opposed."

It is important, then, to realize that a person may engage in action x in spite of its being costly, not because he is uninformed about the costs but because he perceives them to be smaller than the utility gain of x. This insight renders paternalism effectively weakened, not the least since government planners cannot identify these utility gains, since they are subjective and specific to the evaluating agent. It is my impression, however, that government planners in general do not even, in principle, consider the utility gains to be of any importance at all (even if they were to be in possession of information about them). This inability to identify the relevant effects of actions makes paternalism de facto unusable as a basis for policy: it cannot be expected to lead to the effects it, itself, desires. Incomplete analyses resulting from these problems can be said to constitute the cardinal error of paternalism.

In other words, paternalism is based on the idea that a government planner of some sort can identify the costs of various actions and that it is his duty to stop people from engaging in costly pursuits, presumably since they do not realize that costly actions are not good for them. Against this view, then, I argue that even if a government planner of some sort can identify the costs of various actions, and even if he can do this more accurately than individual citizens (both highly questionable assumptions), then it still does not follow that he should try to stop people from pursuing these actions. The reason that he should not try to interfere in such a manner, which is clear from above, is that there is an income side to the calculus which the government planner generally cannot know (due to the subjective nature of utility) and which he does not pay attention to, in the cases where he thinks he knows it (an empirical observation). By forming laws without taking sufficient account of the income side, the result is inefficient (and, on a utilitarian moral theory, immoral) in the sense that actions which persons would have chosen and which would have increased their net utilities more than alternative actions are not carried out. Government should, consequently, stay out of the space of voluntary action - at least to the extent that interference with this action space is motivated by invoking paternalist arguments.

Lastly, let us exemplify this critique of paternalist government intervention by considering smoking and homosexual group sex. As for smoking, if one argues that government should try to stifle it because it causes negative things for the smokers (such an increased risk for lung cancer and heart disease), then one is falling prey to the cardinal error of paternalism, viz., that this may be true but that it is only half the story. People choose to smoke since they perceive their gains from smoking to supercede the losses; i.e., they are willing to accept an increased risk for disease because they think smoking contributes to making their life better, in some way - and this improvement in the quality of life is thought to be greater than the increased risk. Thus, government intervention causes inefficiency by inducing actions which entail smaller a net utility than the actions people would have wished to make.

As for voluntary homosexual group sex, the laws of many U.S. states and the U.K. prohibit it. If one argues that such laws are good because they help people not to engage in actions which are costly to them, perhaps because it increases the risks for venereal disease or because it is thought to corrupt people's moral character, then, once again, one commits the cardinal error of paternalism: one only focuses on the cost side. What one must do is to also take the income side into account and realize that people do not engage in homosexual group sex unless they perceive the positive sides of it to outweigh the costs. In other words, if one values the interests of the people who are pondering upon engaging in this type of behavior, they are better off having group sex than not, as the joy of having sex is thought sufficiently great. Laws which do not take this into account are inefficient and, on a utilitarian moral theory, immoral.

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