Obesity, paternalism and fairness

Paternalism and the principle of fairness

[W]hen a number of persons engage in a just, mutually advantageous, cooperative venture according to rules and thus restrain their liberty in ways necessary to yield advantages for all, those who have submitted to these restrictions have a right to similar acquiescence on the part of those who have benefited from their submission. The principle of fairness has encountered vigorous objections. S...

Fairness and Respect in Obesity Prevention Policies: A Response to David Buchanan

Normative and non-normative concepts: Paternalism and libertarian paternalism

This chapter concerns the normativity of the concepts of paternalism and libertarian paternalism. The first concept is central to evaluation of public health policy, but its meaning is controversial. The second concept is equally controversial and has received much attention recently. It may or may not shape the future evaluation of public health policy. In order to facilitate honest and fruitf...

Welfare and Paternalism

Citizens’ desires to assist the poor reflect a mixture of insurance motives, altruism, and paternalism. Consequently, government policies toward the poor have always been a mixture of income supports and regulations of recipient behavior. Unfortunately, there have been very few analyses of the how these distinct motives interact to generate various policies to the poor. In this paper, we develo...

Optimal Paternalism∗

If one accepts some paternalistic objectives, how should this shape policy? This paper addresses this issue by considering the trade-off that results when agents have superior information regarding their own situation and tastes but a paternalistic principal views agents’ tastes as as being biased. Applications include: savings behavior by hyperbolic discounting consumers, schooling choice by t...