It’s For Your Own Good!
MARCH 7, 2013
Cass R. Sunstein
Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism
by Sarah Conly
Cambridge University Press, 206 pp., $95.00
For coercive paternalism to be justified, Conly contends that four criteria must be met. First, the activity that paternalists seek to prevent must genuinely be opposed to people’s long-term ends as judged by people themselves. If people really love collecting comic books, stamps, or license plates, there is no occasion to intervene.
Second, coercive measures must be effective rather than futile. Prohibition didn’t work, and officials shouldn’t adopt strategies that fail. Third, the benefits must exceed the costs. To know whether they do, would-be paternalists must assess both material and psychological benefits and costs (including not only the frustration experienced by those who lose the power to choose but also the losses experienced by those who are coerced into something bad for them). Fourth, the measure in question must be more effective than the reasonable alternatives. If an educational campaign would have the benefits of a prohibition without the costs, then Conly favors the educational campaign.
Applying these criteria, Conly thinks that New York’s ban on trans fats is an excellent example of justifiable coercion. On the basis of the evidence as she understands it, the ban has been effective in conferring significant public health benefits, and those benefits greatly exceed its costs. Focused on the problem of obesity, Conly invokes similar points in support of regulations designed to reduce portion sizes.
She is far more ambivalent about Mayor Bloomberg’s effort to convince the US Department of Agriculture to authorize a ban on the use of food stamps to buy soda. She is not convinced that the health benefits would be significant, and she emphasizes that people really do enjoy drinking soda.
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