John Stuart Mill, soft paternalist

Ramzi Mabsout

Social Choice and Welfare, 2022, vol. 58, issue 1, No 8, 186 pages

Abstract: Abstract According to John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) Liberty Principle, when certain social and cognitive conditions are satisfied and as long as no one else is harmed, an individual’s self-regarding thoughts and actions ought to be protected from interference. The Liberty Principle forged the identity of Mill as a liberal and an anti-paternalist. Almost two centuries later, in fact, Mill is a figurehead for attacks by the new paternalists emerging from the behavioral sciences, in particular behavioral economics. The alleged discoveries of predictable errors in decision-making, and the ensuing corrective soft paternalistic policies, appear to clash with his Liberty Principle in so far as they allow interference with self-regrading acts even when no one else is harmed. This paper questions this narrative and posits that Mill saw favorably choice preserving interventions even when a self-regarding act harmed no one but the individual; he did not object to interference with liberty if individuals are deemed mentally incapacitated, if their self-regarding acts harmed others, or if their acts lead to abnegation of their own freedom. Finally, Mill’s Liberty Principle generates tensions with his doctrine of Free Trade and may not be employed without further qualifications in defense of free markets. I conclude by encouraging the soft paternalists to integrate Mill’s original thoughts on liberty in their work since, like them, he sought the best mix of policies that promote freedom and welfare.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-021-01353-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:sochwe:v:58:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s00355-021-01353-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-021-01353-8

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().