That looks rather like a ringing endorsement of social perfectionism. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The problem is that, in approving social perfectionism, we don’t get to approve only the benign forms of it. If the state is justified in enacting laws to promote a vision of racial justice, that would include not only the 1964 Act, but all of the previous pernicious laws aimed at subjugating blacks, such as the Jim Crow laws. All in all, state neutrality about race over history would have better served blacks.

One of the Act’s then-controversial sections prohibited discrimination on the basis of race when people rented out rooms in their homes. Critics noted that this would prevent the hypothetical Mrs. Murphy from renting only to fellow Hibernians, and that seemed excessive.

We’ve now lived with the legislation for nearly 50 years, and few people today would want to tinker with it. It constrained choices, to be sure. But it also plausibly changed racial attitudes for the better, and most peole would think that this more than justifies the perfectionism.

Against this, what argument might the anti-perfectionist raise?

More later.

Nevertheless, there is a form of perfectionism or the enforcement of morals  which deserves our attention. This is the claim that the person whose choices are restrained would otherwise harm society by the example offered by his immoral behavior. I call this social perfectionism.

Consider first that, to take part in the debate about enforcing morals, one must agree that moral discourse is meaningful. That is, one can’t be a moral nihilist. Otherwise one wouldn’t have standing to complain about restricting choices.

So there is such a thing as immoral behavior. Moreover, a person might obviously influence another, for good or for ill, by his conduct. The people with whom we associate rub off on ourselves, through their example.

 Lastly, consider John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle”: the only basis for interfering with people’s choices is to prevent harm to others. Now, by this Mill meant physical harm only, not moral harm. But just why should we rule moral harm out of order, if we assume that it exists?

Mill conceded that we influence other by our behavior. He assumed the existence of what an economist would call social externalities or social capital. However, he saw no stopping point, if this justified legislating morals. Social perfectionism would inevitably lead to moral tyranny, because there is no limit to the kinds of laws that might be justified in this way. The only way we might protect ourselves from this, said Mill, would be to ban the argument from social externalities altogether.

Was Mill right? We tend to assume that this is a question of absrtact philosophy, and not of fact. But that’s wrong. It is a factual question. If Mill is right, then every enforcement of morals must lead to an Iranian holy fascism. And that’s not simply wrong–it’s silly. England, America, Iran, no difference really.

More later.

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.

Paternalism seems inconsistent with libertarianism. Paternalism would fetter choices, and libertarianism expand them. But, ask Sunstein and Thaler, what about choices that are strongly influenced by the way in which options are framed? When people are asked whether they want to be organ donors, how they respond depends mostly on whether they are asked to opt in or opt out. If they are presumed to choose to be organ donors unless they opt out, very few people opt out; when they are presumed to choose not to be organ donors unless they opt in, very few people opt in. So it comes down to how the question is framed.

That makes a lot of sense, because we ordinarily don’t want to take the time to understand things for ourselves. I’ll go along with the default option for my pension plan because life is too short to figure it out myself.

From this, Sunstein and Thaler argue for changing the way default rules are framed, “nudging” people in a more progressive direction. For example, they argue, people might be presumed to make particular charitable donations. That looks like paternalism, but they call it libertarian paternalism because it respects opt out rights.

I think that Sunstein-Thaler oversell libertarian paternalism. First, the only kind of paternalism that deserves the sobriquet libertarian is one in which the default rule mimics what people would choose with full information. A pension plan regime which nudges me in the direction of what I probably would want if I waded through all the fine print does not offend on libertarian principles. But a default rule that nudges me to make charitable contributions can’t be called libertarian. I can make those decisions on my own, and don’t need a paternalist to influence my choices.

Second, the logic of libertarian paternalism would suggest that we expand choices by creating more opt out possibilities. Parents might be permitted to opt out of public schools and into private ones through vouchers. Couples might be permitted to opt out of mandatory no-fault divorce laws. Debtors might be permitted to opt out of mandatory bankruptcy legislation. And so on.