The Way We Live Now

The New, Soft Paternalism

By JIM HOLT

Published: December 3, 2006

When the government tells you that you can’t smoke marijuana or that you must wear a helmet when you ride your motorcycle even if you happen to like the feeling of the wind in your hair, it is being paternalistic. It is largely treating you the way a parent treats a child, restricting your liberty for what it deems to be your own good. Paternalistic laws aren’t very popular in this country. We hew to the principle that, children and the mentally ill apart, an individual is a better judge of what’s good for him than the state is and that people should be free to do what they wish as long as their actions don’t harm others. Contrary to what many people believe, you can even commit suicide legally (although if you don’t live in Oregon, you should think twice about seeking assistance).

But what if it could be shown that even highly competent, well-informed people fail to make choices in their best interest? And what if the government could somehow step in and nudge them in the right direction without interfering with their liberty, or at least not very much? Welcome to the new world of “soft paternalism.” The old “hard” paternalism says, We know what’s best for you, and we’ll force you to do it. By contrast, soft paternalism says, You know what’s best for you, and we’ll help you to do it.

Here’s an example. In some states with casino gambling, like Missouri and Michigan, compulsive gamblers have the option of putting their names on a blacklist, or “self-exclusion” list, that bars them from casinos. Once on the list, they are banned for life. If they violate the ban, they risk being arrested and having their winnings confiscated. In Missouri, more than 10,000 people have availed themselves of this program. In Michigan, the first person to sign up for it was, as it happens, also the first to be arrested for violating its terms when he couldn’t resist sneaking back to the blackjack tables; he was sentenced to a year’s probation, and the state kept his winnings of $1,223.

The voluntary gambling blacklist is an example of what’s called a self-binding scheme. It is a way of restructuring the external world so that when future temptations arise, you will have no choice but to do what you’ve judged to be best for you. The classic case is that of Ulysses, who ordered his men to tie him to the mast of his ship so that he could hear the song of the Sirens without being lured to his destruction. As a freely chosen hedge against weakness of the will, self-binding would seem to enlarge individual liberty, not reduce it. So what is there to object to in a program like Missouri’s or Michigan’s?

Plenty, say libertarian critics. To begin with, they don’t like soft paternalism when it involves the state’s coercive power; they are much happier with private self-binding schemes, like alcoholism clinics, Christmas savings clubs and Weight Watchers. They also worry that soft paternalism can be a slippery slope to the harder variety, as when campaigns to discourage smoking give way to “sin taxes” and outright bans. But some libertarians have deeper misgivings. What bothers them is the way soft paternalism relies for its justification on the notion that each of us contains multiple selves — and that one of those selves is worth more than the others.

You might naïvely imagine that you are one person, the same entity from day to day. To the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, however, the idea of a permanent “I” was a fiction. Our mind, Hume wrote, “is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” According to this way of thinking, the self that inhabits your body today is only similar to, not identical with, the self that is going to inhabit your body tomorrow. And the self that will inhabit your body decades hence? A virtual stranger.

The idea of multiple selves may seem like a stoner’s fantasy, but economists who study human decision-making have found it surprisingly useful. Consider: Most people, if given a choice today between doing seven hours of irksome work on May 1, 2007, versus eight hours on May 15, 2007, opt for the former. When May 1 arrives, however, they will find that their preference has flipped: they now wish to put off the work for a couple of weeks, even at the cost of having to do the extra hour’s worth. Why this inconsistency, if the self calling the shots is one and the same?

Further evidence for the fragmented self comes from neuroscience. Brain scans show that the emotional part of the brain, the limbic system, is especially active when the prospect of immediate gratification presents itself. But choice among longer-term options triggers more activity in the “reasoning” part of the brain, located (suitably enough) higher up in the cortex. Now suppose you’re tempted by a diet-violating Twinkie. Which part of your brain — the shortsighted emotional part or the farsighted reasoning part — gets to be the decider? There may be no built-in hierarchy here, just two autonomous brain modules in competition. That is why you might find yourself eating the Twinkie even while knowing it’s bad for you. (A similar disconnect between two parts of your brain occurs when a visual illusion doesn’t go away even after you learn it’s an illusion.)

The short-run self cares only about the present. It is perfectly happy to indulge today and offload the costs onto future selves. For example, recent studies show that teenage smokers do not underestimate the risk of getting lung cancer as an adult (if anything, they tend to overestimate it); they simply don’t mind making the future self suffer for the pleasure of the moment. The long-run self may deplore this ruinous behavior, but its prudent resolutions are continually ignored. Yet it can enforce its will indirectly by shaping the environment to constrain some short-run selves from exploiting others — by, say, putting a time lock on the refrigerator.

But why, some skeptics ask, should the government side with your prudent long-run self against your hedonistic short-run selves? What’s so great about the long-run self, anyway? As the economist Glen Whitman has observed in a shrewd critique of soft paternalism, the harms that selves impose on one another are reciprocal: “The long-run self can harm the short-run self by adopting self-control devices — such as flushing cigarettes down the toilet, refusing to allow ice cream in the house, checking into a clinic and so on.” It is not good to be profligate, lazy and obese, but neither is to good to be a miser, a workaholic or an anorexic.

If the goal is to promote freedom, though, there is an interesting argument favoring the long-run self. A distinctive quality of humans, as the third earl of Shaftesbury observed three centuries ago, is that we do not simply have desires; we also have feelings about our desires. Take the unhappy heroin addict: he gives himself an injection because he desires the drug, but he also has a desire to be rid of this desire. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt has given such “second order” desires a central role in his analysis of free will: we act freely, he submits, when we act on a desire that we actually desire to have, one that we endorse as our own. Beings that do not reflect on the desirability of their desires — like animals and infants and, perhaps, our short-run selves — are what Frankfurt calls “wantons.”

People have fashioned a wide range of techniques for keeping their inner wantons under control — like buying a pint of ice cream instead of the more economical quart because they know they would end up consuming the latter in one sitting. So why can’t soft paternalism be left to the private sector, as some libertarians prefer? The problem is that private self-binding schemes are easily subverted when someone can make a buck off your weakness of will. One Michigan man who signed up for a casino’s private self-blacklisting program found the owners all too accommodating when he had a change of heart. “Within a half an hour, I was back in,” he said.

Editorializing against soft paternalism earlier this year, The Economist warned that “life would be duller if every reckless spirit could outsource self-discipline to the state.” There are certainly more exalted ways to achieve mastery over unwelcome impulses. Thinkers of an existentialist kidney, like Jean-Paul Sartre, used to insist that each of us is free to redefine his character through an act of radical choice. For the religiously inclined, an access of divine grace might be what is needed to stiffen the will.

But what if you are one of those people who rely on more mundane stratagems, like self-binding? The general problem you face (as put by the political theorist Jon Elster) is this: For a given uphill goal and a given strength of will, does there exist a path, however circuitous, that will get you to the top of the hill? By adding a new path here and there, state soft paternalism makes it more likely that the answer will be yes.

Jim Holt, a regular contributor to the magazine, is working on a book about the puzzle of existence.

jenna fischer, on acting.

:) love this.

Bill from Bothell, Wash.: "How long does it take you to memorize your lines for any given episode?"
I know the character of Pam so well and she is so well written that the memorization comes very naturally. It isn't so much a matter of memorizing the words, it's more about discovering the truth and emotion of the moments.

Every night before bed, I read the entire script for that week. (It takes us one week to shoot an episode.) I read the script to remind myself of the overall story and of Pam's journey in particular. Then I focus on the scenes we are shooting the next day. I read them several times over again — sometimes I read aloud. If there is an important scene, either emotionally or comedically, I will ask my husband to read it with me and give me pointers. I make notes in the script. At work, I keep the script at my desk and I glace at the scenes once or twice before we start rolling.

I spend more time rehearsing the interview segments because those are harder. Angela and I often run our interview segments for one another. We check to be sure we have the lines correct.