Non-Libertarian Anti-Paternalism
I'd been meaning to comment on this Matt Yglesias post on paternalism. Matt says:
[An] important thing to do is to separate questions about paternalism from other issues about the legitimate bounds of state power. Many people believe it is illegitimate to use the coercive authority of the state in order to help people buy, for example, taxing some people in order to give food to starving people. If you believe that you should, naturally enough, also oppose efforts at state paternalism. But most people who object to collective charity ventures of that sort have no problem with charity as an individual initiative, and many even believe there is an obligation to act charitably on an individual basis. If you believe that, you ought to also believe in a duty to practice paternalism on an individual level, trying to dissuade people from making bad choices about their lives. If, like a normal person, you think it's legitimate—and, indeed, obligatory—to use the coercive power of the state in order to help people, then you should also find it obligatory to deploy the coercive power of the state for paternalistic purposes when pragmatically appropriate.
Seems to me that Matt is making precisely the error here he cautions us against at the start. He seems to be attempting to establish that if you're a non-libertarian liberal (i.e. don't object to redistribution to help people) then you shouldn't object to (coercive) paternalistic intervention with people's lives in service of the same end. Liberals of both varieties will probably agree with the idea that there's a personal obligation both to materially help the badly off and to (non coercively) advise people we see about to make poor decisions. The mistake Matt makes is to take the question of whether these obligations are coercively enforceable, part of the scope of justly exercised political power, as a bundle. I doubt I could improve upon the formulation of the distinction offered by one of Matt's old profs, Robert Nozick:
[My argument against redistribution] focuses upon the fact that there are distinct individuals each with his own life to lead….It will prohibit sacrificing one person to benefit another. Further steps would be needed to reach a prohibition on paternalistic aggression: using or threating force for the benefit of the person against whom it is wielded. For this, one must focus upon the fact that there are distinct individuals, each with his own life to lead.
In short, there's an autonomy/identity argument to be made against paternalism that's distinct from the separateness of persons argument. There are, however, independent grounds for treating the cases separately. Like left-libertarians or, for that matter, very many sharp liberal theorists, one might simply have a view that doesn't link control over wealth and physical resources as tightly to individual autonomy as the libertarian view does. Someone might believe, for instance, that the external world constitutes the common heritage of mankind, or some such thing, so that rights over it are much weaker and more conditional than rights over the self. The idea that opposition to paternalism is somehow narrowly or uniquely libertarian just doesn't pass the straight face test, and someone as well schooled as Matt in the history of liberal theory should know better than to advance it.
