Hi Joel, thank you for the detailed and thoughtful comment!
(1) I agree that the post mischaracterized the report. My apologies for that. I’ve updated the corresponding section to make it clear that the adjustments were made due to the surveyed group being unrepresentative of the intervention’s target, not because of circular reasoning.
(2) I agree that autonomy shouldn’t be privileged a priori above life, health, or any other values, but this is the more committed harm reductionist view the post is describing, not defending. What I am arguing for is something like the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ intervention ladder which takes the least intrusive option as the default and puts a rising burden of justification on each more coercive step. In other words, reaching for coercion should require first showing the less intrusive option won’t do, rather than letting a large enough health number outweigh the autonomy cost directly.
The justification for this is that case-by-case pricing of autonomy is unusually unreliable in this specific domain, because the people building the models often don’t share the preference being restricted, so there’s a greater bias in one direction. This is consistent with data on acceptability of paternalistic interventions (unaffected people support them more). Externalities may explain a part of that (e.g. second hand smoke), but that wouldn’t apply to basically self-regarding cases like sodium or helmet laws.
Another example with a similar structure is a dishonesty prior. A consequentialist doesn’t re-run the cost-benefit each time they’re tempted to deceive, not because honesty is privileged for its own sake, but because the case-by-case exceptions are exactly the ones motivated reasoning corrupts. I’m claiming autonomy in this domain is the same kind of case.
Hi Kristof, if the steelman case is that autonomy is valuable and we should be averse to using coercion unless there is strong justification, then I do agree. However, I would add that I—and many others—see public health (i.e. saving lives and preventing unnecessarily disability/pain) as pretty good justification. Also, in this case, we’re talking about taxation and regulatory interventions; people aren’t banned from e.g. eating salty good or drinking sugary drinks. A key point too is that because our tastes are adaptive, people don’t even notice reduced sodium/sugar content if done slowly; there’s also empirical evidence of this from studies on reformulation (i.e. the consumer literally doesn’t notice), in which case it’s not even clear one has reduced freedom in terms of “being able to eat/drink food that tastes X to a certain extent”.
Hi Joel, thank you for the detailed and thoughtful comment!
(1) I agree that the post mischaracterized the report. My apologies for that. I’ve updated the corresponding section to make it clear that the adjustments were made due to the surveyed group being unrepresentative of the intervention’s target, not because of circular reasoning.
(2) I agree that autonomy shouldn’t be privileged a priori above life, health, or any other values, but this is the more committed harm reductionist view the post is describing, not defending. What I am arguing for is something like the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ intervention ladder which takes the least intrusive option as the default and puts a rising burden of justification on each more coercive step. In other words, reaching for coercion should require first showing the less intrusive option won’t do, rather than letting a large enough health number outweigh the autonomy cost directly.
The justification for this is that case-by-case pricing of autonomy is unusually unreliable in this specific domain, because the people building the models often don’t share the preference being restricted, so there’s a greater bias in one direction. This is consistent with data on acceptability of paternalistic interventions (unaffected people support them more). Externalities may explain a part of that (e.g. second hand smoke), but that wouldn’t apply to basically self-regarding cases like sodium or helmet laws.
Another example with a similar structure is a dishonesty prior. A consequentialist doesn’t re-run the cost-benefit each time they’re tempted to deceive, not because honesty is privileged for its own sake, but because the case-by-case exceptions are exactly the ones motivated reasoning corrupts. I’m claiming autonomy in this domain is the same kind of case.
Hi Kristof, if the steelman case is that autonomy is valuable and we should be averse to using coercion unless there is strong justification, then I do agree. However, I would add that I—and many others—see public health (i.e. saving lives and preventing unnecessarily disability/pain) as pretty good justification. Also, in this case, we’re talking about taxation and regulatory interventions; people aren’t banned from e.g. eating salty good or drinking sugary drinks. A key point too is that because our tastes are adaptive, people don’t even notice reduced sodium/sugar content if done slowly; there’s also empirical evidence of this from studies on reformulation (i.e. the consumer literally doesn’t notice), in which case it’s not even clear one has reduced freedom in terms of “being able to eat/drink food that tastes X to a certain extent”.