Fair Governance
Posted February 17, 2009, 07:02 ET
I am asked to present my book, Fair Governance, on Reason TV. That will be a bit of a challenge, becuse the book can be technical and I’ll have to simplify.
The book describes two principal rationales goverments might offer for interfering with personal preferences. First, the state might do so with the goal of making individuals better off (paternalism). Second, it might do so to advance a moral goal (perfectionism).
Those are different things. We might make people better off without advancing a compelling moral goal. For example, we might urge them to quit smoking. That would amount to paternalism, but not perfectionism. Or we might restrict personal choices to prevent people from degrading others by their example. That’s perfectionism, because it advances a moral goal, but it’s not paternalism because it doesn’t care about the person whose choices are curbed but rather those he might influence.
The libertarian would oppose both kinds of state interference. But there are very few libertarians around. Most people, right or left, have some theory of morals they would enforce on the rest of us. And not infrequently they’ll seek to justify this on the basis that they’re making us beter off.
In general, I believe we should have a strong bias against both forms of interference. However, I don’t think we should apply an irrebutable presumption in favor of libertarianism. That seems like theology, not social science, to me. In addition, the paternalist can make the interesting claim that we’d all really like some kinds of restrictions.
I’ll talk about that later.
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