This book examines justifications for interfering with personal preferences. The paternalist would second-guess a person's choices with the goal of making him better off; the perfectionist would do so to enforce morals by eliminating immoral choices. The two categories overlap to a large extent, but remain different. The paternalist is not a perfectionist when he would impugn morally neutral choices which would nevertheless leave a person worse off. This book calls this “soft paternalism” and contrasts this to a “hard paternalism” that overlaps with perfectionism and enforces a moral vision. W ... More

This book examines justifications for interfering with personal preferences. The paternalist would second-guess a person's choices with the goal of making him better off; the perfectionist would do so to enforce morals by eliminating immoral choices. The two categories overlap to a large extent, but remain different. The paternalist is not a perfectionist when he would impugn morally neutral choices which would nevertheless leave a person worse off. This book calls this “soft paternalism” and contrasts this to a “hard paternalism” that overlaps with perfectionism and enforces a moral vision. Whether soft or hard, paternalism would embrace state interference based on judgment errors, weakness of the will, information costs and endogenous preferences. In general this book keeps a sceptical view that such arguments make a strong case for state intervention with people's choices. There are different ways of influencing choices, and liberal perfectionists would use moderate means (carrots more than sticks) to do so. Rules that nudge people towards particular choices are less troubling when they permit people to opt out, but such rules might still be illiberal if they direct people to choices that they would never want to make if they thought about it. The perfectionist is not a paternalist when he enforces a moral code without seeking to make a person better off, but instead to protect people influenced by his bad behavior. The book calls this “social perfectionism” as contrasted with the “private perfectionism” that is concerned with the morals of the person making the choice. Rules that promote nationalism are a prominent example of social perfectionism.