[Vision2020] Three Cheers for the Nanny State

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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March 24, 2013
Three Cheers for the Nanny State By SARAH CONLY

Brunswick, Me.

WHY has there been so much fuss about New York City’s attempt to impose a
soda ban, or more precisely, a ban on large-size “sugary drinks”? After
all, people can still get as much soda as they want. This isn’t
Prohibition. It’s just that getting it would take slightly more effort. So,
why is this such a big deal?

Obviously, it’s not about soda. It’s because such a ban suggests that
sometimes we need to be stopped from doing foolish stuff, and this has
become, in contemporary American politics, highly controversial, no matter
how trivial the particular issue. (Large cups of soda as symbols of human
dignity? Really?)

Americans, even those who generally support government intervention in our
daily lives, have a reflexive response to being told what to do, and it’s
not a positive one. It’s this common desire to be left alone that prompted
the Mississippi Legislature earlier this month to pass a ban on bans — a
law that forbids municipalities to place local restrictions on food or
drink.

We have a vision of ourselves as free, rational beings who are totally
capable of making all the decisions we need to in order to create a good
life. Give us complete liberty, and, barring natural disasters, we’ll end
up where we want to be. It’s a nice vision, one that makes us feel proud of
ourselves. But it’s false.

John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859 that the only justifiable reason for
interfering in someone’s freedom of action was to prevent harm to others.
According to Mill’s “harm principle,” we should almost never stop people
from behavior that affects only themselves, because people know best what
they themselves want.

That “almost,” though, is important. It’s fair to stop us, Mill argued,
when we are acting out of ignorance and doing something we’ll pretty
definitely regret. You can stop someone from crossing a bridge that is
broken, he said, because you can be sure no one wants to plummet into the
river. Mill just didn’t think this would happen very often.

Mill was wrong about that, though. A lot of times we have a good idea of
where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there. It’s
well established by now that we often don’t think very clearly when it
comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We make errors. This
has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few
decades, and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to
identifiable and predictable miscalculations.

Research by psychologists and behavioral economists, including the Nobel
Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky,
identified a number of areas in which we fairly dependably fail. They call
such a tendency a “cognitive bias,” and there are many of them — a lot of
ways in which our own minds trip us up.

For example, we suffer from an optimism bias, that is we tend to think that
however likely a bad thing is to happen to most people in our situation,
it’s less likely to happen to us — not for any particular reason, but
because we’re irrationally optimistic. Because of our “present bias,” when
we need to take a small, easy step to bring about some future good, we fail
to do it, not because we’ve decided it’s a bad idea, but because we
procrastinate.

We also suffer from a status quo bias, which makes us value what we’ve
already got over the alternatives, just because we’ve already got it —
which might, of course, make us react badly to new laws, even when they are
really an improvement over what we’ve got. And there are more.

The crucial point is that in some situations it’s just difficult for us to
take in the relevant information and choose accordingly. It’s not quite the
simple ignorance Mill was talking about, but it turns out that our minds
are more complicated than Mill imagined. Like the guy about to step through
the hole in the bridge, we need help.

Is it always a mistake when someone does something imprudent, when, in this
case, a person chooses to chug 32 ounces of soda? No. For some people,
that’s the right choice. They don’t care that much about their health, or
they won’t drink too many big sodas, or they just really love having a lot
of soda at once.

But laws have to be sensitive to the needs of the majority. That doesn’t
mean laws should trample the rights of the minority, but that public
benefit is a legitimate concern, even when that may inconvenience some.

So do these laws mean that some people will be kept from doing what they
really want to do? Probably — and yes, in many ways it hurts to be part of
a society governed by laws, given that laws aren’t designed for each one of
us individually. Some of us can drive safely at 90 miles per hour, but
we’re bound by the same laws as the people who can’t, because individual
speeding laws aren’t practical. Giving up a little liberty is something we
agree to when we agree to live in a democratic society that is governed by
laws.

The freedom to buy a really large soda, all in one cup, is something we
stand to lose here. For most people, given their desire for health, that
results in a net gain. For some people, yes, it’s an absolute loss. It’s
just not much of a loss.

Of course, what people fear is that this is just the beginning: today it’s
soda, tomorrow it’s the guy standing behind you making you eat your
broccoli, floss your teeth, and watch “PBS NewsHour” every day. What this
ignores is that successful paternalistic laws are done on the basis of a
cost-benefit analysis: if it’s too painful, it’s not a good law.  Making
these analyses is something the government has the resources to do, just as
now it sets automobile construction standards while considering both the
need for affordability and the desire for safety.

Do we care so much about our health that we want to be forced to go to
aerobics every day and give up all meat, sugar and salt? No. But in this
case, it’s some extra soda. Banning a law on the grounds that it might lead
to worse laws would mean we could have no laws whatsoever.

In the old days we used to blame people for acting imprudently, and say
that since their bad choices were their own fault, they deserved to suffer
the consequences. Now we see that these errors aren’t a function of bad
character, but of our shared cognitive inheritance. The proper reaction is
not blame, but an impulse to help one another.

That’s what the government is supposed to do, help us get where we want to
go. It’s not always worth it to intervene, but sometimes, where the costs
are small and the benefit is large, it is. That’s why we have prescriptions
for medicine. And that’s why, as irritating as it may initially feel, the
soda regulation is a good idea. It’s hard to give up the idea of ourselves
as completely rational. We feel as if we lose some dignity. But that’s the
way it is, and there’s no dignity in clinging to an illusion.

Sarah Conly <http://www.bowdoin.edu/faculty/s/sconly/>, an assistant
professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College, is the
author<http://www.cambridge.org/aus/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9781107024847>of
“Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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