Response to Rabin. 1

Rabin argues that these biases are irrational and details the self-harm they cause in the presence of habit-forming choices. (This harm is understood in a liberal manner as a lesser degree of satisfaction of an individual’s informed, long-term preferences.) He also argues that, to prevent this harm, governments should tax behaviour that leads to unhealthy habits. Rabin’s proposal invites the charge of paternalism. This charge is unwelcome to governments. To avoid it, they commonly appeal not to self-harm, but to the costs to others of unhealthy behaviour (e.g., in terms of higher state-funded health care provision) to justify intervention in choices regarding smoking, exercise, and the consumption of fatty and sugary foods (de Marneffe, 2006). I believe it is indeed important to avoid paternalistic interference when such interference limits informed, rational individuals’ autonomy. However, with regards to unhealthy behaviour, the strategy of avoiding paternalism by appealing to harms to others has two weaknesses. First, it is unclear whether commonly targeted forms of unhealthy behaviour really do impose net costs on others. For example, a recent study concludes that while smoking and obesity reduce the life expectancy of 20-year-olds by 8 and 5 years respectively and increase health spending related to these behaviours, “total lifetime health spending was greatest for healthy-living people, lowest for smokers, and intermediate for the obese” (van Baal et al. 2008, p. 249, emphasis added). Second, the focus on third-party effects ignores the ways that interventions to prevent self-harm can be justified consistently with respect for autonomy. One way is to seek the consent of those who are interfered with. After all, an intervention to which an individual consents does not represent paternalistic interference (Feinberg 1986, chapter 17). If Rabin is right about people’s tendencies to choose outcomes that are contrary to their own considered preferences and about the ability of taxes to counteract these tendencies, then an enlightened majority might well consent to such taxes (the dissenting minority would then not be taxed paternalistically, but rather for the sake of others, who wish the taxes on themselves). But even when such consent cannot be secured, one may appeal to so-called soft paternalism, which holds that the state has reason to constrain self-harming conduct without the consent of the people it constrains “when but only when that conduct is substantially nonvoluntary” (Feinberg 1986, p. 12, emphasis in original). Conduct is substantially nonvoluntary, in the sense here intended, when it is insufficiently informed or performed by someone insufficiently capable of rational self-governance. Soft paternalism attractively combines a concern with promoting individual wellbeing with respect for the rights of individuals to govern themselves when their decisions are