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Some challenges to the new paternalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2020

JULIAN LE GRAND
JULIAN LE GRAND*
Affiliation:
Professor of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
*
*Correspondence to: Marshall Institute, London School of Economics, 5 Lincoln's Inn Fields, LondonWC2A 3BP, UK. E-mail: j.legrand@lse.ac.uk
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Abstract

Behavioural public policy analysts have examined cases of individuals’ failures of reason or judgement to attain their ends and have used these to justify ‘means’ paternalism: a form of government intervention that tries to save individuals from the consequences of those reasoning failures and to enable them better to achieve those ends. This has been challenged on a number of grounds, including too great a focus on choice-preserving interventions such as nudges, the privileging of future preferences over current ones and the possibility of state failures as damaging to individual well-being as the original reasoning failure. This paper summarizes the principal arguments in favour of means paternalism and then addresses these challenges.

Type
Annual LSE Behavioural Public Policy Lecture
Information
Behavioural Public Policy , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 160 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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