Opinion Who needs a nanny state?

Americans,even those who generally support government intervention in our daily lives,have a reflexive response to being told what to do,and it’s not a positive one. It’s this common desire to be left alone that prompted the Mississippi Legislature earlier this month to pass a ban on bans — a law that forbids municipalities to place local restrictions on food or drink.

We have a vision of ourselves as free,rational beings who are totally capable of making all the decisions we need to in order to create a good life. Give us complete liberty,and,barring natural disasters,we’ll end up where we want to be. It’s a nice vision,one that makes us feel proud of ourselves. But it’s false.

John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859 that the only justifiable reason for interfering in someone’s freedom of action was to prevent harm to others. According to Mill’s “harm principle,” we should almost never stop people from behaviour that affects only themselves,because people know best what they themselves want. That “almost”,though,is important. It’s fair to stop us,Mill argued,when we are acting out of ignorance and doing something we’ll pretty definitely regret. You can stop someone from crossing a bridge that is broken,he said,because you can be sure no one wants to plummet into the river. Mill just didn’t think this would happen very often.

Mill was wrong about that,though. A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to go,but a really terrible idea of how to get there. It’s well established by now that we often don’t think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We make errors. This has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few decades,and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations.

Research by psychologists and behavioural economists,including the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky,identified a number of areas in which we fairly dependably fail. They call such a tendency a “cognitive bias,” and there are many of them — a lot of ways in which our own minds trip us up.

For example,we suffer from an optimism bias,that is we tend to think that however likely a bad thing is to happen to most people in our situation,it’s less likely to happen to us — not for any particular reason,but because we’re irrationally optimistic. Because of our “present bias,” when we need to take a small,easy step to bring about some future good,we fail to do it,not because we’ve decided it’s a bad idea,but because we procrastinate. We also suffer from a status quo bias,which makes us value what we’ve already got over the alternatives,just because we’ve already got it — which might,of course,make us react badly to new laws,even when they are really an improvement over what we’ve got. And there are more.

The crucial point is that in some situations it’s just difficult for us to take in the relevant information and choose accordingly. Is it always a mistake when someone does something imprudent,when,in this case,a person chooses to chug 32 ounces of soda? No. For some people,that’s the right choice. They don’t care that much about their health,or they won’t drink too many big sodas,or they just really love having a lot of soda at once. But laws have to be sensitive to the needs of the majority. That doesn’t mean laws should trample the rights of the minority,but that public benefit is a legitimate concern,even when that may inconvenience some.

Conly,an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College,is the author of ‘Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism’