Paternalism and the Ill-Informed Agent

The Journal of Ethics 16 (4):421-439 (2012)
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Abstract

Most anti-paternalists claim that informed and competent self-regarding choices are protected by autonomy, while ill-informed or impaired self-regarding choices are not. Joel Feinberg, among many others, argues that we can in this way distinguish impermissible “hard” paternalism from permissible “soft” paternalism. I argue that this view confronts two related problems in its treatment of ill-informed decision-makers. First, it faces a dilemma when applied to decision-makers who are responsible for their ignorance: it either permits too much, or else too little, intervention to satisfy its proponents. Second, the most promising rationales in favor of the view ignore the distinction between an agent’s voluntarily bringing about some state of affairs, on the one hand, and an agent’s voluntarily assuming a risk, on the other. I conclude that a decision-maker’s ignorance is irrelevant to the permissibility of intervention on her behalf. If it is permissible to intervene in a given ill-informed choice, it would be permissible to intervene in an otherwise similar but informed choice, at least provided that intervention would produce similar benefits in both cases. This shows that we should sometimes accept straightforwardly paternalistic rationales

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Author's Profile

Jason Hanna
Northern Illinois University

References found in this work

The Theory and Practice of Autonomy.Gerald Dworkin - 1988 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harm to Self.Joel Feinberg - 1986 - Oxford University Press USA.
Paternalism.Gerald Dworkin - 1972 - The Monist 56 (1):64-84.
The Theory and Practice of Autonomy.Gerald Dworkin - 1988 - Philosophy 64 (250):571-572.
Paternalism.Gerald Dworkin - 1972 - The Monist.

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