[Vision2020] Three Cheers for the Nanny State

[Paul Rumelhart]

I am against this kind of "Nanny State" behavior just on general principles.  It doesn't matter to me that it's only the ability to buy soda in quantities above a certain amount in one container that we are talking about.  It comes down to whether or not you think the individual has the right to make personal health choice decisions themselves.  If they do, then they also have the right to make bad decisions.  I'm all for education; I'd be happy if they were discussing ways that the health problems associated with drinking soda in large quantities could be communicated to the public more effectively.  The more data that an individual has to go on, the better choices they have the potential to make.  I'm not OK with the government trying to make certain choices unavailable through these kinds of bans.  If soda was immediately poisonous, or immediately addictive, then this would be a different story.  It's not though.  If you've never had any
 before, and you drink one large capacity cup of soda, you won't experience any measurable effects from the soda.

Paul





________________________________
 From: Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com>
To: vision2020 at moscow.com 
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2013 3:44 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] Three Cheers for the Nanny State
 

 
________________________________
 
March 24, 2013
Three Cheers for the Nanny State
By SARAH CONLY
Brunswick, Me. 
WHY has there been so much fuss about New York City’s attempt to impose a soda ban, or more precisely, a ban on large-size “sugary drinks”? After all, people can still get as much soda as they want. This isn’t 
Prohibition. It’s just that getting it would take slightly more effort. 
So, why is this such a big deal? 
Obviously, it’s not about soda. It’s because such a ban suggests that 
sometimes we need to be stopped from doing foolish stuff, and this has 
become, in contemporary American politics, highly controversial, no 
matter how trivial the particular issue. (Large cups of soda as symbols 
of human dignity? Really?) 
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 behavior 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 behavioral 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. It’s not 
quite the simple ignorance Mill was talking about, but it turns out that our minds are more complicated than Mill imagined. Like the guy about 
to step through the hole in the bridge, we need help. 
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. 
So do these laws mean that some people will be kept from doing what they really want to do? Probably — and yes, in many ways it hurts to be part of a society governed by laws, given that laws aren’t designed for each one of us individually. Some of us can drive safely at 90 miles per 
hour, but we’re bound by the same laws as the people who can’t, because 
individual speeding laws aren’t practical. Giving up a little liberty is something we agree to when we agree to live in a democratic society 
that is governed by laws. 
The freedom to buy a really large soda, all in one cup, is something we 
stand to lose here. For most people, given their desire for health, that results in a net gain. For some people, yes, it’s an absolute loss. 
It’s just not much of a loss. 
Of course, what people fear is that this is just the beginning: today 
it’s soda, tomorrow it’s the guy standing behind you making you eat your broccoli, floss your teeth, and watch “PBS NewsHour” every day. What 
this ignores is that successful paternalistic laws are done on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis: if it’s too painful, it’s not a good law. 
 Making these analyses is something the government has the resources to 
do, just as now it sets automobile construction standards while 
considering both the need for affordability and the desire for safety. 
Do we care so much about our health that we want to be forced to go to 
aerobics every day and give up all meat, sugar and salt? No. But in this case, it’s some extra soda. Banning a law on the grounds that it might 
lead to worse laws would mean we could have no laws whatsoever. 
In the old days we used to blame people for acting imprudently, and say 
that since their bad choices were their own fault, they deserved to 
suffer the consequences. Now we see that these errors aren’t a function 
of bad character, but of our shared cognitive inheritance. The proper 
reaction is not blame, but an impulse to help one another. 
That’s what the government is supposed to do, help us get where we want 
to go. It’s not always worth it to intervene, but sometimes, where the 
costs are small and the benefit is large, it is. That’s why we have 
prescriptions for medicine. And that’s why, as irritating as it may 
initially feel, the soda regulation is a good idea. It’s hard to give up the idea of ourselves as completely rational. We feel as if we lose 
some dignity. But that’s the way it is, and there’s no dignity in 
clinging to an illusion. 
Sarah Conly, an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College, is the author of “Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.” 

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com



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