EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Sanfter Paternalismus, meritorische Güter, und der normative Individualismus

Gebhard KirchgÄssner

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: Paternalism is an attempt to influence the decisions of individuals for their own benefit even if there are no third parties involved. This seems to be a contradiction to normative individualism which provides the general or ientation of our modern demo cracies. Soft or libertarian paternalism accepts the necessity of paternalism due to the existence of behavioural anomalies, but intends to apply only such measures that do not restrict the decision leeway of individuals. Nevertheless, the same objections which can be raised against its strong version can also be raised against soft paternalism. On the other hand, as soon as we accept that human beings are able to reflect not only on their actions but also on the preferences guiding them, there exists no longer a necessary contradiction between paternalism and normative individualism. As far as we know today, the possibilities to successfully apply soft paternalistic measures are rather limited. On the other hand, while some of its criticisms are justified, others are largely overshooting the mark and seem at least partly to be ideologically motivated.

Keywords: Libertarian Paternalism; Soft Paternalism; Merit Goods; Normative Individualism; Democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D72 H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crema-research.ch/papers/2012-09.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.crema-research.ch/abstracts/2012-09.htm Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cra:wpaper:2012-09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anna-Lea Werlen (info@crema-research.ch this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).

 
Page updated 2025-01-05
Handle: RePEc:cra:wpaper:2012-09