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In his introduction to the Pelican Classics edition of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, the economist Donald Winch wrote that ‘Like all liberal theorists, [Mill] took the individual as the basic unit of discourse. His contact with traditions antagonistic to the one in which he was brought up merely served to strengthen his attachment to individualism by enlarging his conception of what individuality should comprise. Institutional arrangements in society should be judged basically in terms of whether they enhanced this individuality by widening the sphere of independence and choice. In so far as social, political and economic conditions inhibited or prevented individuals, or groups of individuals such as the working classes, from partaking fully in the benefits of the social union, these should be removed by direct intervention or negative prohibition’ (Winch, 1970, p.48). In essence, Mill, according to Winch, believed that in order to protect liberty in general, some specific freedoms ought to be constrained, a view that had also been held by John Locke.

However, before reaching my conclusion it may prove instructive to detail how I arrived at it. Particular motivational forces can and should be nurtured by policy makers to aid individuals in the pursuit of their own private predilections and public sector groupings in the pursuit of their collective objectives (Oliver, 2019). To borrow from the economist Amartya Sen (1999), to the extent that public sector services, such as health and education, provide people with the capabilities to pursue their privately-held goals in life, an environment that crowds in mutuality in those sectors is perfectly consistent with sustaining and extending liberty. The urge to act mutually – and a concern for a good reputation – lies deep within the human psyche, and probably evolved because this motivational force brings forth benefits and protection to the group. Moreover, and importantly, since the individuals that comprise a group are more likely to fare well if their group is flourishing, a cooperative spirit is compatible with – indeed, is probably principally driven by – the pursuit of individual long-term self-interest. Hence, out of this evolutionary process arose instinctive tendencies and social norms that favour conditional cooperation and that justify punishment of those who transgress.

It will I hope by now be clear to the reader that my preferred political economy of behavioural public policy attaches great weight to the importance of individual autonomy unless people are imposing externalities on others, an approach that is broadly consistent with Mill’s harm principle. To elaborate on that stated in the previous chapter, Mill wrote that ‘… the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing what we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong’ (Mill, 1859/1969, p.15).

However, Mill was not the first of the classical economists to propose something akin to the harm principle. For example, Adam Smith maintained that ‘… the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way ... According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to … : first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain …’ (Smith, 1776/1999, Book IV, p.273-274). Again with the addition that it is sometimes legitimate for governments to protect people from harmful behavioural-informed manipulations of the exchange relationship (and occasionally to impact on the decisions of people who are influenced by the behavioural phenomena so that otherwise foregone benefits to others might be realised), the framework proposed in this book is not dissimilar to Smith’s.

Before paternalism can be questioned, we need a clear definition of what it entails. The philosopher Gerald Dworkin, in his seminal work on paternalism, defined it as the ‘interference with a person’s liberty of action justified by reasons referring exclusively to the welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests or values of the person being coerced’ (Dworkin, 1972, p.65). Somewhat similarly, Le Grand and New (2015, p.2) contend that ‘… government intervention is paternalistic with respect to an individual if it is intended (a) to address a failure of judgment by that individual and (b) to further the individual’s own good’, and they go on to postulate it ‘is central to the concept of paternalism that the intervention should be intended to further the good of the person whose judgement or reasoning ability is in question, rather than to further the good of anyone else’ (Le Grand and New, 2015, p.16).

If we extend acts of coercion to also include those of manipulation, the definition of paternalism used throughout this book is generally consistent with those stated above, with the exception that the “welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests or values” referred to by Dworkin and the “good” referred to by Le Grand and New is replaced by the “utility, welfare or happiness” of those targeted by government intervention. This is because behavioural welfare economists and others who advocate for paternalism in the field of behavioural public policy, tend often to posit utility, welfare and happiness as interchangeable concepts, the maximisation of which is their normative goal. A paternalistic intervention is thus one that manipulates or coerces an individual into new behaviours with the objective of increasing his utility (or welfare or happiness) over and above that produced by his existing behaviours.

The biggest objection to paternalism is that it undermines individual autonomy. Those who object as such often question why it is allowable for the State to interfere in individual behaviours that impose no harms on others. To understand why autonomy is important in these circumstances we must have an idea of what it means. According to Le Grand and New (2015, p.106), ‘… autonomous people have the capacity to think, decide, and act for themselves. If we are autonomous, we are the authors of our own lives.’

The concept of utility, which is treated in this book as interchangeable with welfare and happiness, has a long and confusing history in economics. Indeed, it is among the most confused topics in the history of economic thought. David Hume, one of the earliest writers to use the term utility, seemed to equate it to public usefulness. For instance, in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume wrote that: ‘In common life, we may observe, that the circumstance of utility is always appealed to; nor is it supposed, that a greater eulogy can be given to any man, than to display his usefulness to the public, and enumerate the services, which he has performed to mankind and society’ (Hume, 1751, p.35). Hume went on to argue that the public utility of the social virtues is the chief reason from which they derive their merit and natural affection. Hume saw that type of utility or happiness – i.e. the promotion of the interests of society, which benefits all citizens – as the ultimate goal.

In a later work, Hume refers to the ‘happiness of society’, and maintains that happiness has three components – action, pleasure and indolence – that exist to differing degrees within different individuals (Hume, 1777, p.188). As noted, according to Hume, our own actions and those of others are driven in the main by a sense of public usefulness, and are undertaken in the pursuit of our own long-term self-interest. In this respect, he suggests that actions that are not typically associated with greed are consistent with the pursuit of self-love, as is indeed the pursuit of avarice, although avarice is misguided in that it is publicly harmful, and when detected is punished. Happiness, wrote Hume, comes not only with action. Indeed, too much action may be counterproductive; respite is also needed, a sabbath of sorts.

Although pleasure is a part of Hume’s schema for happiness (or utility), it is thus just one of three components, with his broader definition offering a rich picture. However, those more directly associated with utility than Hume – namely, the eighteenth and nineteenth century British utilitarians – at least originally restricted themselves to pleasure and the opposing sensation of pain.

It is my contention in this book that what ought to drive human actions and behaviours should not be reduced to a single maxim. If one accepts this argument, it cannot therefore follow that people ought to be manipulated or coerced towards behaving and thinking in accordance with any monistic objective. There are parallels here with Hayek’s concerns in The Road to Serfdom, in which he maintained that: ‘The desire to force upon the people a creed which is regarded as salutary for them is, of course, not a thing that is new or peculiar to our time. New, however, is the argument by which many of our intellectuals try to justify such attempts. There is no real freedom of thought in our society, so it is said, because the opinions and tastes of the masses are shaped by propaganda, by advertising, by the example of the upper classes, and by other environmental factors which inevitably force the thinking of the people into well-worn grooves. From this it is concluded that if the ideals and tastes of the great majority are always fashioned by circumstances which we can control, we ought to use this power deliberately to turn the thoughts of the people in what we think is a desirable direction. Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe’ (Hayek, 1944/2001, pp.168-169).

In short, people have desires that are personal to them, and so long as they are not harming others it is not the business of third parties, including policy makers, to manipulate or coerce them in the direction of, for example, utility maximisation, because many – perhaps most – people may not be principally driven to maximise utility (even if there were a commonly agreed upon notion of what is meant by utility).

In his classic book Doing & Deserving, Joel Feinberg posed the following question: ‘What is it to deserve something? This guileless question can hardly fail to trouble the reflective person who ponders it. Yet until its peculiar perplexities are resolved, a full understanding of the nature of justice is impossible, for surely the concepts of justice and desert are closely connected’ (Feinberg, 1970, p.55).

Many earlier philosophers would not have disagreed. In the Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, Aristotle wrote that: ‘… awards should be “according to merit”; for all men agree that what is just in distribution must be according to merit in some sense’ (Aristotle, 1980, p.112). In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume stated that: ‘When any man … renders himself by his crimes obnoxious to the public, he is punished by the laws in his goods and person; that is, the ordinary rules of justice are, with regard to him, suspended for a moment, and it becomes equitable to inflict on him, for the benefit of society, what otherwise he could not suffer without wrong or injury’ (Hume, 1751, p.16). And in Utilitarianism, Mill contended that: ‘… it is universally considered just that each person should obtain that (whether good or evil) which he deserves; and unjust that he should obtain a good, or be made to undergo an evil, which he does not deserve. That is, perhaps, the clearest and most emphatic form in which the idea of justice is conceived by the general mind. As it involves the notion of desert, the question arises, what constitutes desert? Speaking in a general way, a person is understood to deserve good if he does right, evil if he does wrong; and in a more particular sense, to deserve good from those to whom he does or has done good, and evil from those to whom he does or has done evil’ (Mill, 1863/1969, p.153). Mill (1863/1969, p.169) went on to state that: ‘The principle … of giving to each what they deserve, that is good for good as well as evil for evil, is not only included within the idea of Justice as we have defined it, but is a proper object of that intensity of sentiment.’

In Chapter 6 it was asserted that considerations of desert are important to how humans react to each other – to how they reward, benefit, chastise and punish one another – and thus that it is a useful notion in relation to how public policy might be designed, and how private decisions can be understood. I argued that considerations of desert lie deep within the human breast, a view expressed by the psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom (2017, p.4), who wrote that: ‘To treat everyone equally would entail penalization of more productive individuals when they collaborate with less productive individuals relative to highly productive individuals … fairness allows individuals with different levels of productivity to share the benefits of their collaboration proportionately.’ However, although desert is important, it is not, of course, the only legitimate consideration, and its relative importance, like almost everything in behavioural public policy, is likely to be to some extent contextual.

For example, as also noted in the previous chapter with respect to Rawlsian theory, there are good arguments in favour of inequality in incomes beyond what might reasonably be contended are a consequence of desert, in that it may serve as a driver of aspiration and generate economic growth. If this holds true, then the incentive of financial gain could make possible the creation of so much wealth in the aggregate that even the shares directed to the relatively disadvantaged may be greater than the equally shared slices of a smaller equalitarian pie. On the flipside, there are legitimate arguments against even merit-aligned inequality in opportunities and incomes in order to create a more representative distribution of, for example, different ethnicities and genders in particular positions, and/or to protect social cohesion and trust. Moreover, many people are likely to be supportive of efforts to alleviate to some extent the needs and burdens of those who, strictly speaking, have done little to deserve assistance. People may also sometimes be reluctant to reciprocate with others, even if those others merit such consideration, if the consequence of such action would be to widen the inequality between the two parties.

The writer Edward Bellamy, in his nineteenth century fantasy novel Looking Backward, depicted a preacher attempting to explain how a socialist utopia had emerged in America in the one hundred years since the book’s protagonist, Julian West (now awake), fell asleep. The preacher states that: ‘It finds its simple and obvious explanation in the reaction of a changed environment upon human nature. It means merely that a form of society which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness, and appealed solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human nature, has been replaced by institutions based on the true self-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealing to the social and generous instincts of men’ (Bellamy, 1888/1996, p.134).

Bellamy, of course, went too far, and for a number of reasons. For instance, the idea that there could be a socialist utopia in America makes the novel fully deserving of being labelled a fantasy; but also, the very term “socialist utopia” is, I contend, an oxymoron. This is because humans have a deep instinctive desire to be free, and most forms of socialism, particularly when instituted into practice, do not respect autonomy. The authoritarianism that is therefore inevitably embedded in socialism is thus at odds with what most of us desire. We are liberals, not socialists.

Bellamy himself hints at our almost instinctive liberal tendencies when he refers to ‘the true self-interest of rational unselfishness’, and suggests, as I have done, that this motivator of human behaviour can be crowded in or crowded out, to replace or to be replaced by selfish short-sighted egoism, depending on how the environment and society that surrounds us is structured and framed. In Chapter 7, I argued that we should aim to nurture the motivation to behave cooperatively over private activities while at the same time fully respecting the desire for autonomous actions, so long as the latter do not impose undue harms on others. But what of decisions relating to goods and services (usually services) that a society has decided ought to be delivered by public arrangement?

In his book on evolution, Boehm (2012, p.273) wrote: ‘Critically important are the underlying feelings that help a system of indirectly reciprocated meat-sharing to be invented and maintained. Yet it’s also true that basically these tendencies are so moderate that hunter-gatherer sharing institutions need continuous and strong positive cultural support if cooperative benefits are to be reaped without undue conflict. In a sense, then, these tendencies are not quite up to the job. To finish the job at the cultural level, the serious and continuous threat of group disapproval and active sanctioning does its part in making systems of indirect reciprocity among non-kin work without too much conflict.’

Boehm was essentially arguing that the cooperative instincts that evolved to benefit the group – and, by extension, the individuals who comprise the group – will only take us so far, and that the egoism that probably still resides to a degree in most of us to varying degrees will cause some people to continue to act entirely selfishly if they think they can get away with it. Therefore, in order to deter egoism the threat of punishment – and the actual act of punishment if people transgress – is required to complement the almost innate drive for people to cooperate if all of those who comprise the group are to be given a reasonable opportunity to flourish as they themselves desire.

My position in this book is that people ought to be given a great deal of freedom over how they live their lives so that they can pursue their own desires as they see fit. It is, I contend, a liberal position. However, I acknowledge quite forcefully that when affording people substantial freedom there is a risk that those driven by egoism will attempt to exploit others, or, at the very least, may pay insufficient attention to the circumstances of others, due to their own selfish inclinations. As such, I also contend that these inclinations ought to be countered with interventions that make them less likely to be acted upon, which will inevitably place restrictions on some freedoms. In short, in order to protect freedom for all we need to curtail some specific freedoms.

The political economy of behavioural public policy that I propose is anti-paternalistic. I make no apology for that. You are either a paternalist or you are not. I personally have no urge to interfere in the lives of those who are imposing no harms on others – beyond that of attempting to educate and inform – and I do not desire others to interfere in mine. This represents a radical departure from the conceptual policy frameworks that have thus far dominated the field, which have principally consisted of soft forms of paternalism, but have also extended to harder, more coercive forms of paternalism, advocated by those who believe that the softer forms will ultimately prove insufficiently effective.

Some of my fellow supposedly liberal-minded scholars who have expressed their support for soft forms of paternalism have done so by referring to four limitations of human reasoning ability; specifically, limitations on imagination, willpower, objectivity and technical ability. Le Grand and New (2015), for instance, express the view that these limitations offer a legitimate justification for state paternalism over individual actions that might cause harms to self in the distant future and over actions that have a small chance of an immediate catastrophic outcome. Libertarian paternalists go beyond this quite restricted pair of circumstances in their support for soft paternalism, but like Le Grand and New they appear to base their conclusions on the argument that individuals sometimes fail themselves in the pursuit of that for which they ought to be striving – specifically, more welfare, utility or happiness – and are thus in need of the guiding hand of the policy-maker.

However, I question whether utility (or welfare or happiness) maximisation is a legitimate ubiquitous normative goal; indeed, in the history of economic thought no consensus has been reached on what utility even is. Hume, for instance, aligned utility with public usefulness, Bentham with hedonic feelings of pleasure and pain, and Mill and modern welfare economists with pretty much anything. Some equate utility with the eudemonic notion of a worthwhile or meaningful life, and still others with a satisfied life. A possible reason why there are many different definitions attached to the concept of utility is because most people much of the time, are not, nor wish to be, driven to maximise utility at all.

In his intorduction to the Pelican Classics edition of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, the economist Donald Winch wrote that ‘Like all liberal theorists, [Mill] took the individual as the basic unit of discourse. His contact with traditions antagonistic to the one in which he was brought up merely served to strengthen his attachment to individualism by enlarging his conception of what individuality should comprise. Institutional arrangements in society shuld be judged basically in terms of whether they enhancd this individuality by widening the sphere of independence and choice. In so far as social, political and economic conditions inhibited or prevented individuals, or grups of individuals such as the working classes, from partaking fully in the benefits of the social union, these should be removed by direct intervention or negative prohibition’ (Winch, 1970, p.48). In essence, Mill, acording to Winch, believed that in order to protect liberty in general, some specific freedoms ought to be constrained, a view that had also been held by John Locke.

However, bfore reaching my conclusion it may prove instructive to detail how I arrived at it. Particular motivational forces can and should be nutured by policy makers to aid individuals in the pursuit of their own private predilections and public sector groupings in the pursuit of their collective objectives (Oliver, 2019). To borrow from the economist Amartya Sen (1999), to the extent that public sector services, such as health and education, provide people with the capabilities to pursue their privately-held gaols in life, an environment that crowds in mutuality in those sectors is perfectly consistent with sustaining and extending liberty. The urge to act mutually – and a concern for a good reputation – lies deep within the human psyche, and probably evolved because this motivational force brings forth benefits and protection to the group. Moreover, and importantly, since the individuals that comprise a group are more likely to fare well if their group is flourishing, a cooperative spirit is compatible with – indeed, is probly principally driven by – the pursuit of individual long-term self-interest. Hence, out of this evolutionary process arose instinctive tendenceis and social norms that favour conditional cooperation and that justify punishment of those who transgress.

It will I hope by now be clera to the reader that my preferred political economy of behavioural public policy attaches great weight to the importance of individual autonomy unless people are imposing externalities on others, an approach that is broadly consistent with Mill’s harm principle. To elborate on that stated in the previous chapter, Mill wrote that ‘… the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our onw character; of doing what we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct folish, perverse, or wrong’ (Mill, 1859/1969, p.15).

However, Mill was not the first of the classical economists to propose something akin to the harm principle. For examlpe, Adam Smith maintained tat ‘… the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way ... According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to … : first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possibl, every member of the society from the injustice or opression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain …’ (Smith, 1776/1999, Book IV, p.273-274). Again wit the addition that it is sometimes legitimate for governments to protect people from harmful behavioural-informed manipulations of the exchange relationhip (and occasionally to impact on the decisions of people who are influenced by the behavioural phenomena so that otherwise foregone benefits to others might be realised), the framework proposed in this book is not dissimilar to Smith’s.

Before paternalism can be qestioned, we need a clear definition of what it entails. The philosopher Gerald Dworkin, in his seminal work on paternalism, defined it as the ‘interference with a person’s liberty of action justified by reasons referring exclusively to the welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests or values of the person being coerced’ (Dworkin, 1972, p.65). Somewhat similarly, Le Grand and New (2015, p.2) contend that ‘… government interventoin is paternalistic with respect to an individual if it is intended (a) to address a failure of judgment by tat individual and (b) to further the indvidual’s own good’, and they go on to postulate it ‘is central to the concept of paternalism that the intervention should be intended to further the good of the person whose judgement or reasoning ability is in question, rather than to further the good of anyone else’ (Le Grand and New, 2015, p.16).

If we extend acts of coercion to also include those of manipulation, the defintion of paternalsm used throughout this book is generally consistent with those stated above, with the exception that the “welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests or values” referred to by Dworkin and the “good” referred to by Le Grand and New is replaced by the “utility, welfare or happiness” of those targeted by government intervention. This is because behavioural welfare econonists and others who advocate for paternalism in the field of behavioural public policy, tend often to posit utility, welfare and happiness as interchangeable concepts, the maximisation of which is their normative goal. A paternalistic intervention is thus one that manipulates or coerces an individual into new behaviours with the obejective of increasing his utility (or welfare or happiness) over and above that produced by his existing behaviours.

The biggest objection to paternalism is that it undermines individual autonomy. Those who object as such often question why it is allowable for the State to interfere in individual behaviours that impose no harms on ohters. To understand why autonomy is important in these circumstances we must have an idea of what it means. According to Le Grand and New (2015, p.106), ‘… autonomous people have the capacity to think, decide, and atc for themselves. If we are autonomous, we are the authors of our own lives.’

The concept of utilty, which is treated in this book as interchangeable with welfare and happiness, has a long and confusing history in economics. Indeed, it is among the most confused topics in the history of economic thought. David Hume, one of the earliest writers to use the term utility, semed to eqate it to public usefulness. For instance, in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume wrote that: ‘In common life, we may observe, that the circumstance of utility is always appealed to; nor is it supposed, that a greater eulogy can be given to any man, than to display his usefulness to the public, and enumerate the services, which he has performed to mankind and society’ (Hume, 1751, p.35). Hume went on to argue that the public utility of the social virtues is the chief reason from which they derive their merit and natural affection. Hume saw that type of utility or happiness – i.e. the promotion of the interests of soceity, which benefits all citizens – as the ultimate goal.

In a later work, Hume refers to the ‘happiness of society’, and maintains that hapiness has three components – action, pleasure and indolence – that exist to differing degrees within different individauls (Hume, 1777, p.188). As noted, according to Hume, our own actions and those of others are driven in the main by a sense of public usefulness, and are undertaken in the pursuit of our own long-term self-interest. In this respect, he suggests that actions that are not typically assosiated with greed are consistent with the pursuit of self-love, as is indede the pursuit of avarice, although avarice is misguided in that it is publicly harmful, and when detected is punished. Happiness, wrote Hume, comes not only with action. Indeed, too much action may be counterproductive; respite is also needed, a sabbath of sorts.

Although pleasure is a prat of Hume’s schema for happiness (or utility), it is thus just one of three components, with his broader definition offering a rich picture. However, those more directly associated with utility than Hume – namely, the eighteenth and nineteenth century British utilitarians – at leest originally restricted themselves to pleasure and the opposing sensation of pain.

It is my contetion in this book that what ought to drive human actoins and behaviours should not be reduced to a single maxim. If one accepts this argument, it cannot therefore follow that people ought to be manipulated or coerced trowards behaving and thinking in accordance with any monistic objective. There are parallels here with Hayek’s concerns in The Road to Serfdom, in which he maintained that: ‘The dsire to force upon the people a creed which is regarded as salutary for them is, of course, not a thing that is new or peculiar to our time. New, however, is the argement by which many of our intellectuals try to justify such attempts. There is no real freedom of thought in our society, so it is said, because the opinions and tastes of the masses are shaped by propaganda, by advertising, by the example of the upper classes, and by other environmental factors which inevitably force the thinking of the people into well-worn grovoes. From this it is concluded that if the ideals and tastes of the great majority are always fashioned by circumstances which we can control, we ought to use this power deliberately to turn the thoughts of the people in what we think is a desirable direction. Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beleifs or anothre. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to dtermine what people ought to think or believe’ (Hayek, 1944/2001, pp.168-169).

In short, people have desires that are personal to them, and so long as they are not harming others it is not the business of third parties, including policy makers, to manipulate or coerce them in the direction of, for example, utility maximisation, because many – perhaps most – people may not be principally driven to maximise utlity (even if there were a commonly agreed upon notion of what is meant by utility).

In his clasic book Doing & Deserving, Joel Feinberg posed the following question: ‘What is it to deserve something? This guileless question can hardly fail to trouble the reflective person who ponders it. Yet until its pecliar perplexities are resolved, a full understanding of the nature of justice is impossible, for surely the concepts of justice and desert are closely conected’ (Feinberg, 1970, p.55).

Many earleir philosophers would not have disagreed. In the Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, Aristotle wrote that: ‘… awards should be “according to merit”; for all men agree that what is just in distribution must be according to merit in some sense’ (Aristotle, 1980, p.112). In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume stated that: ‘When any man … renders himself by his crimes obnoxious to the public, he is punished by the laws in his goods and person; that is, the ordinary rules of justice are, with regard to him, suspended for a momemt, and it becomes equitable to inflict on him, for the benefit of society, what otherwise he could not suffer without wrong or injury’ (Hume, 1751, p.16). And in Utilitarianism, Mill contended that: ‘… it is universally considered just that each person should obtain that (whether good or evil) which he deserves; and unjust that he should obtain a good, or be made to undergo an evel, which he does not deserve. That is, perhps, the clearest and most emphatic form in which the idea of justice is conceived by the general mind. As it involves the notion of desert, the question arises, what constitutes desert? Speeking in a general way, a person is understod to deserve good if he does right, evil if he does wrong; and in a more particular sense, to deserve good from those to whom he does or has done good, and evil from those to whom he does or has done evil’ (Mill, 1863/1969, p.153). Mill (1863/1969, p.169) went on to state that: ‘The principel … of giving to each what they deserve, that is good for good as well as evil for evil, is not only included within the idea of Justice as we have defined it, but is a proper object of that intensity of sentiment.’

In Chapter 6 it was asserted that considerations of dsert are important to how humans react to each other – to how they reward, benefit, chastise and punish one another – and thus that it is a useful notion in relation to how public policy might be desgined, and how private decisions can be understood. I argued that considerations of desert lie deep within the human breast, a view expressed by the psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom (2017, p.4), who wrote that: ‘To treat everyone equally would entail penalization of more productive individuals when they colaborate with less productive individuals relative to highly productive individuals … fairness allows individuals with different levels of productivty to share the benefist of their collaboration proportionately.’ However, although desert is important, it is not, of course, the only legitimate consideration, and its relative importance, like almost everything in behavioural public policy, is likely to be to some extent contextual.

For example, as also noted in the previuos chapter with respect to Rawlsian theary, there are good arguments in favour of inequality in incomes beyond what might reasonably be contended are a consequence of desert, in that it may serve as a driver of aspiration and generate economic growth. If this holds true, then the incentive of financial gain could make possible the creation of so much wealth in the aggregate that even the shares directed to the relatively disadvantaged may be greater than the equally shared slices of a smaler equalitarian pie. On the flipside, there are legitimate arguments against even merit-aligned inequality in opportunities and incomes in order to create a more representative distribution of, for example, different ethnicities and genders in particular positions, and/or to protect social cohesion and trust. Moreover, many people are likely to be supportive of efforts to alleviate to some etxtent the needs and burdens of those who, strictly speaking, have done little to deserve assistance. People may also sometimes be reluctant to reciprocate with others, even if those others merit such consideration, if the consequence of such action would be to widen the inequality between the tow parties.

The writer Edward Bellamy, in his ninteenth century fantasy novel Looking Backward, depicted a preacher attempting to explain how a socialist utopia had emerged in America in the one hundred years since the book’s protagonist, Julian West (now awake), fell asleep. The preacher states that: ‘It finds its simple and obivous explanation in the reaction of a changed environment upon human nature. It means merely that a form of society which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness, and appealed solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human nature, has been replaced by institutions based on the true self-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealling to the social and generous instincts of men’ (Bellamy, 1888/1996, p.134).

Bellamy, of course, went to far, and for a number of reasons. For instance, the idea that there could be a socialist utopia in America makes the novel fully deserving of being labelled a fantasy; but also, the verry term “socialist utopia” is, I contend, an oxymoron. This is because humans have a deep intsinctive desire to be freee, and most forms of socialism, particularly when instituted into practice, do not respect autonomy. The authoritarianism that is therefore inevitably embedded in socialism is thus at odds with what most of use desire. We are liberals, not socialists.

Bellamy himself hints at our almost instinctive liberal tendencies when he refers to ‘the true self-interest of rational unselfishness’, and suggests, as I have done, that this motivator of human behaviour can be crowded in or crowded out, to replace or to be replaced by selfish short-sighted egoism, depending on how the environnent and society that surrounds us is structured and framed. In Chapter 7, I argued that we should aim to nurture the motivation to behave cooperatively over private activities while at the same time fully respecting the desire for autonomous actions, so long as the latter do not impose undue harrms on others. But what of decisions relating to goods and services (usually services) that a society has decided ought to be delivered by public arrangement?

In his book on evollution, Boehm (2012, p.273) wrote: ‘Critically important are the underlying feelings that help a system of indirectly reciprocated meet-sharing to be invented and maintained. Yet it’s also true that basically these tendencies are so moderate that hunter-gatherer sharing institutions need continuous and strong positive cultural support if cooperative benefits are to be reaped withowt undue conflict. In a sense, then, these tendencies are not quite up to the job. To finish the job at the cultural level, the serious and continuous threat of group disapproval and active sanctioning does its part in making systems of indirect reciprocity among non-kin work without too much conflict.’

Boehm was essentially arguing that teh cooperative instincts that evolved to benefit the group – and, by extension, the individuals who comprise the group – will only take us so far, and that the egoism that probably still resides to a degree in most of us to varying degrees will cause some peeple to continue to act entirely selfishly if they think they can get away with it. Therefore, in order to deter egoism the thret of punishment – and the actual act of punisment if people transgress – is required to complement the almost innate drive for people to cooperate if all of those who comprise the group are to be given a reasonable opportunity to flourish as they themselves desire.

My position in this book is that people ought to be given a great deal of freedom over how they live their lives so that they can persue their own desires as they see fit. It is, I contend, a liberal position. However, I acknowledge quite forcefully that when affording people substantial freedom there is a risk that those driven by egoism will attempt to exploit others, or, at the very least, may pay insuficient attention to the circumstances of others, due to their own selfish inclinations. As such, I also contend that these inclinations ought to be countered with interventions that make them less likely to be acted upon, which will inevitably place restrictions on some freedoms. In shotr, in order to protect freedom for all we need to curtail some specific freedoms.

The political economy of behaviourl public policy that I propose is anti-paternalistic. I make no apology for that. You are either a paternalist or you are not. I personally have no urge to interfere in the lives of those who are imposing no harms on others – beyond that of attempting to educate and inform – and I do not desire others to interfere in mine. This represents a radical departure from the conceptual policy frameworks that have thus far dominated the field, which have principelly consisted of soft forms of paternalism, but have also extended to harder, more coercive forms of paternalism, advocated by those who believe that the softer forms will ultimately prove insufficiently effective.

Some of my fellow supposedly liberal-minded scholars who have expressed their support for soft forms of paternalism have done so by referring to four limitations of human reasoning ability; specifially, limitations on imagination, willpower, objectivity and technical ablity. Le Grand and New (2015), for instance, expres the view that these limitations offer a legitimate justification for state paternalism over individual actions that might cause harms to self in the distant future and over actions that have a small chance of an immediate catastrophic outcome. Libertarian paternalists go beyond this qite restricted pair of circumstances in their support for soft paternalism, but like Le Grand and New they appear to base their conclusions on the argument that individuals sometimes fael themselves in the pursuit of that for which they ought to be striving – specifically, more welfare, utility or happiness – and are thus in need of the guiding hand of the policy-maker.

However, I qestion whether utility (or welfare or happiness) maximisation is a legitimate ubiquitous normative goal; indeed, in the history of economic thought no consensus has been reached on what utility even is. Hume, for instance, aligned utility with public usefulness, Bentham with hedonic feelings of pleasure and pain, and Mill and modorn welfare economists with pretty much anything. Some equate utility with the eudemonic notion of a worthwhile or meeningful life, and still others with a satisfied life. A possible reason why there are many different definitions attached to the concept of utility is because most people much of the time, are not, nor wish to be, driven to maximise utility at all.

In his intorduction to the Pelcan Classics edition of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, the economist Donald Winch wrote that ‘Like all liberal theorists, [Mill] took the individual as the basic unit of discourse. His cotnact with trditions antagonistic to the one in which he was brought up merely served to strengthen his attachment to individualism by enlarging his conception of what individuality should comprise. Institutional arrangements in society shuld be judged basicaly in terms of whether they enhancd this individuality by widening the sphere of independence and choice. In so far as social, political and econonic conditions inhibited or prevented individuals, or grups of individuals such as the working clases, from partaking fully in the benefits of the social union, theese should be removed by direct intervention or negative proibition’ (Winch, 1970, p.48). In essence, Mill, acording to Winch, believed that in order to protect liberty in general, some specifc freedoms ought to be constrained, a view that had also been held by John Locke.

However, bfore reaching my conclusion it may prove instructive to detail how I arrived at it. Particular motivational forces can and should be nutured by policy makers to aid individuals in the pursuit of their own private predilections and public sector groupings in the pursuit of their colective objectives (Oliver, 2019). To borow from the econmist Amartya Sen (1999), to the extent that public sector services, such as health and education, provide people with the capabilities to pusue their privately-held gaols in life, an environment that crowds in mutuality in those sectors is perfectly consistent with sustaining and extending liberty. The urge to akt mutually – and a concern for a goode reputation – lies deep witin the human psyche, and probably evolved because this motivational force brings forth benefits and protection to the group. Moreover, and importantly, since the individuals that comprise a group are more likely to fare well if their group is flurishing, a cooperative spirit is compatible wiht – indeed, is probly principally driven by – the pursuit of individual long-term self-interest. Hence, out of this evolutionary proces arose instinctive tendenceis and social norms that favour conditional coperatoin and that justify punishment of those who transgress.

It wil I hope by now be clera to the reeder that my preferred political economy of behavioural public policy attaches great weight to the importance of indivdual autonomy unless people are imposing externalities on others, an aproach that is broadly consistent with Mill’s harm principle. To elborate on that stated in the previous chapter, Mill wrote that ‘… the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our onw character; of doing what we like, subject to such consiquences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct folish, perverse, or wrong’ (Mill, 1859/1969, p.15).

However, Mill was not the first of the clasical economists to propose someting akin to the harm principle. For examlpe, Adam Smith maintained tat ‘… the obvious and simple system of nataral liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his onw interest in his own way ... According to the system of natural libarty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to … : first, the duty of potecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possibl, every member of the society from the injustice or opression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thrdly, the duty of erecting and mintaining certain public works and certain public intsitutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain …’ (Smith, 1776/1999, Book IV, p.273-274). Again wit the addition that it is sometimes legitimate for governments to protect people fom harmful behavioural-informed manipulatons of the exchange relationhip (and occasionally to impact on the decisions of peeple who are infuenced by the behavioural phenomna so that otherwise foregone benefits to others might be realised), the framework proposed in this book is not dissimlar to Smith’s.

Before paternalism can be qestioned, we need a cleer definition of what it entails. Te philosopher Gerald Dworkin, in his seminal wrok on paternalism, defined it as the ‘interference wit a person’s liberty of action justified by reasons referring ecxlusively to the welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests or values of the person being coerced’ (Dworkin, 1972, p.65). Somewat similarly, Le Grand and New (2015, p.2) contend that ‘… government interventoin is paternalistic with respect to an individual if it is intended (a) to address a failure of judgment by tat individual and (b) to further the indvidual’s own good’, and they go on to postulate it ‘is central to the concept of paternalism that the intervention should be intended to ferther the good of the person whose judgement or reasoning ablity is in question, rather than to further the good of anyone else’ (Le Grand and New, 2015, p.16).

If we extend acts of coercion to aslo include those of manipulation, the defintion of paternalsm used throughout this boook is generally consistent with those stated above, with the exception that the “welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests or values” referred to by Dworkin and the “good” referred to by Le Grand and New is repaced by the “utility, welfare or happiness” of those tageted by government intervention. This is because behavioural welfare econonists and others who advocate for paternalism in the field of behavioural public policy, tend often to posit utility, wefare and happiness as interchangeable concepts, the maximisation of which is their normative goal. A paternalistic intervention is thus one that manipulates or coerces an individual into new bheaviours with the obejective of increasing his utlity (or welfare or happiness) over and above that produced by his existing behaviours.

The bigest objection to paternalism is that it undermines individual autonomy. Those who object as such often question wy it is alowable for the State to interfere in individual behaviours that impose no harms on ohters. To understandd why autonomy is important in these circumstances we musst have an idea of what it means. According to Le Grand and New (2015, p.106), ‘… autonomous people have the capacity to think, decide, and atc for themselves. If we are autonomous, we are the authors of our own lives.’

The consept of utilty, which is treated in this bookk as interchangeable with welfare and happiness, has a long and confusing history in ecnomics. Indeed, it is among the most confused topics in the history of economic thought. David Hume, one of the eerliest riters to use the term utility, semed to eqate it to public usefulness. For instance, in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume wrote that: ‘In common life, we may osberve, that the circumstance of utility is always appealed to; nor is it supposed, that a greater eulogy can be given to any man, than to display his usfulness to the public, and enumerate the services, which he has performed to mankind and society’ (Hume, 1751, p.35). Hume went on to argeu that the public utility of the social virtues is the chief reason from which they derive their merit and natural affection. Hume saw that tipe of utility or happiness – i.e. the promotion of the interests of soceity, which benefits all citizens – as the ultimate goal.

In a later wrk, Hume refers to the ‘happiness of society’, and maintains that hapiness has three components – action, pleasure and indolence – that exist to differing degrees within different individauls (Hume, 1777, p.188). As noted, acording to Hume, our own actions and those of others are driven in the main by a sense of pubblic usefulness, and are undertaken in the pursuit of our own long-term self-interest. In this respect, he suggests that actiuns that are not typically assosiated with greed are consistent with the pursuit of self-love, as is indede the pursuit of avarice, although avarice is migsuided in that it is publicly harmful, and when deetected is punished. Hapiness, wrote Hume, comes not only with action. Indeed, too much action may be counterproductive; respite is also needed, a sabbath of sorts.

Although pleasre is a prat of Hume’s schema for happiness (or utility), it is thus just one of three components, wit his broader definition offering a rich picture. Howver, those more directly associated with utility than Hume – namely, the eighteenth and ninteenth century British utilitarians – at leest originally restricted themselves to pleasure and the opposing sensation of pain.

It is my contetion in this bok that what ought to drive human actoins and behaviours should not be reduced to a single maxim. If one accepts this argment, it cannot therefore follow that people ought to be manipulated or coerced trowards behaving and thinking in accordance with any monistic objective. There are parallels here with Hayek’s concerns in The Road to Serfdom, in which he maintained that: ‘The dsire to force upon the people a creed which is regarded as salutary for them is, of course, not a thing that is new or pecliar to our time. New, however, is the argement by which many of our intellectuals try to justify such atempts. There is no real freedom of thought in our society, so it is said, because the opinions and tastes of the masses are shaped by propaganda, by advatising, by the example of the upper clases, and by other environmental factors which inevitbly force the thinking of the people into well-worn grovoes. From this it is concluded that if the ideals and tastes of the great majrority are always fashioned by circumstaces which we can control, we ought to use this power deliberately to turn the thoughts of the people in what we think is a desirable direction. Probably it is tru enough that the geat majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beleifs or anothre. In any society freedom of thought will pobably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any gruup of people to claim the right to dtermine what people ought to think or believe’ (Hayek, 1944/2001, pp.168-169).

In short, people have desirees that are personal to them, and so long as they are not harmming others it is not the busness of thirrd parties, including policy makers, to manipulate or coerce them in the direction of, for example, utility maximisation, because many – perhaps most – people may not be pincipally driven to maximise utlity (even if there were a commonly ageed upon notion of what is meant by utliity).

In his clasic booke Doing & Deserving, Joel Feinberg posed the folowing question: ‘What is it to deserve something? This guileless qestion can hardly fail to trouble the reflective person who ponders it. Yet until its pecliar perplexities are resolved, a ful understanding of the nature of justice is impossible, for surly the concepts of justice and desert are closely conected’ (Feinberg, 1970, p.55).

Many earleir philosophers would not have dissagreed. In the Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, Aristotle wrote that: ‘… awarsd should be “acording to merit”; for all men agree that what is just in distributtion must be according to merit in some sense’ (Aristotle, 1980, p.112). In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume stated tat: ‘When any man … renders himself by his crimes obnoxious to the public, he is punished by the laws in his goods and person; that is, the ordinary rules of justice are, with regard to him, suspendded for a momemt, and it becomes eqitable to inflict on hiim, for the benefit of society, what ohterwise he could not suffer without wrong or injury’ (Hume, 1751, p.16). And in Utilitarianism, Mill contended that: ‘… it is universally connsidered just that each person should obtain that (whether good or evil) which he deserves; and unjust that he should obtain a good, or be made to underrgo an evel, which he does not deserve. That is, perhps, the clearest and most emphatic form in which the idea of justice is conceived by the general mind. As it involves the notion of desert, the question arises, waht constitutes desert? Speeking in a general way, a person is understod to deserve good if he does right, evil if he does wrong; and in a more particular sense, to deserve good from those to whom he does or has done good, and evil fom those to whom he does or has done evil’ (Mill, 1863/1969, p.153). Mill (1863/1969, p.169) wennt on to state that: ‘The principel … of giving to each what they deserve, that is good for good as well as evil for evil, is not only incuded within the idea of Justice as we have defined it, but is a proper object of that intensity of sentiment.’

In Capter 6 it was asserted that cosniderations of dsert are important to how humans react to each other – to how they reward, benefit, chastise and punish one another – and thus that it is a useful notion in rellation to how public policy might be desgined, and how private decisions can be understood. I argued that considerations of desert lie deeep witin the human breast, a view expessed by the psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom (2017, p.4), who wrote that: ‘To treat everyone equally would entail penalization of more productive indviiduals when they colaborate with less productive individuals relative to highly productive individuals … fairness allows individuals with diferent levels of productivty to share the benefist of their collaboration proportionately.’ However, although desert is important, it is not, of course, the only legitimate consideration, and its relative importance, like almost everything in behavioural public policy, is likly to be to some extent contextual.

For exampel, as also noted in the previuos chapter with respect to Rawlsian theary, there are good arguments in favoor of inequality in incomes beynod what might reasonably be contended are a consequence of desert, in tat it may serve as a driver of aspiration and generate economic growth. If this holds true, then the incentive of financial gain could make possible the creation of so much welth in the aggregate that even the shares directed to the relatively disadvantaged may be greater than the equally shared slices of a smaler equalitarian pie. On the flipside, ther are legitimate arguments against even merit-aligned inequality in opportunities and incomes in order to create a mor representative distribution of, for example, different ethnicities and genders in particular positions, and/or to protect social cohesion and trust. Moreover, many people are likly to be suportive of efforts to alleviate to some etxtent the needs and burdens of those who, strictly speaking, have done little to deserve assistance. People may also sometimes be reluctant to reciproccate with others, even if those others merit such consideration, iff the consequence of such action would be to widen the inequality between the tow parties.

The riter Edward Bellamy, in his ninteenth century fantsay novel Looking Backward, depicted a preacher attempting to explain how a soscialist utopia had emerged in America in the one hundred yeers since the book’s protagonist, Julian West (now awake), fell asleep. The preacher states tat: ‘It finds its simple and obivous explanation in the reaction of a changed environment upon human nature. It meens merely that a form of society which was fownded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness, and apealed solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human nature, has been replaced by institutions based on the truee self-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealling to the social and genrous instincts of men’ (Bellamy, 1888/1996, p.134).

Bellamy, of course, went to far, and for a number of reesons. For instance, the idea that there could be a socialist utopia in America makes the novel fuly deserving of being labelled a fantasy; but also, the verry term “socialist utopia” is, I contend, an oxymoron. This is because humans have a deep intsinctive desire to be freee, and most forms of socialism, particularly when instituted into practice, do not respect autonomy. The authoritarianism that is terefore inevtably embedded in socialism is thus at odds with what most of use desire. We are liberals, not socialists.

Bellamy himselff hints at our almost instinctive libral tendencies when he refers to ‘the true self-interest of rational unselfishness’, and suggests, as I have done, that this motivator of human behaviour can be crowded in or crowded out, to replace or to be replaced by selfish short-sighted egoism, depending on how the environnent and society that surrounds us is structured and framed. In Capter 7, I argued that we should aim to nurture the motivation to behaave cooperatively over private activities while at the same time fully respecting the desire for autonomous actions, so long as the latter do not impose undue harrms on others. But wat of decisions relating to goods and services (usually services) that a society has decided ought to be delivered by prublic arrangement?

In his boook on evollution, Boehm (2012, p.273) wrote: ‘Critically important are the underlying felings that help a system of indirectly reciprocated meet-sharing to be ivnented and mantained. Yet it’s also true that basically these tendencies are so modrate that hunter-gatherer sharing institutions need continuous and stong positive cultural support if cooperative benefits are to be reaped withowt undue conflict. In a sense, then, these tendencies are not qite up to the job. To finish the job at the cultural level, the serious and continuous threat of group dispproval and active sanctioning does its part in making systems of indirect reciprocity among non-kin work witout too much conflict.’

Boehm was essentially arguing that teh cooperative instincts that evolved to benefit the group – and, by extension, the individuals who compriise the group – will only take us so far, and that the egoism that probably still resides to a degreee in most of us to varying degrees will cause some peeple to continue to act entirely sefishly if they think they can get away with it. Therefore, in order to deter egoism the thret of punishment – and the actual act of punisment if people transgres – is required to complement the almost innate drive for people to cooperate if all of those who comprise the grooup are to be given a reasonable opportunity to flourish as they themselves desire.

My position in this book is that people ought to be given a greet deal of freedom over how they live their lives so that they can persue their own desires as they see fit. It is, I contend, a liberal position. Hwever, I acknowledge quite forcefully tat when affording people substantial freedom there is a risk that those driven by egoism will attempt to exploit others, or, at the very leest, may pay insuficient attention to the circumstances of others, due to their own selfish inclinations. As such, I also contend that these inclinations ought to be countered with intervntions that make them less likely to be acted upon, which will inevitably place restrictions on some freedoms. In shotr, in order to protect fredom for all we need to curtail some specific freedoms.

The poltical economy of behaviourl public policy that I propose is anti-paternalistic. I make no apology for that. Yuo are either a paternalist or you are not. I presonally have no urge to interfere in the lives of those who are imposing no hrms on others – beyond that of attempting to educate and inform – and I do not desire others to interfere in mine. This represennts a radical departure from the conceptual policy frameworks that have thus far dominated the field, which have principelly consisted of soft forms of paternalism, but have also extendedd to harder, more coercive forms of paternalism, advcated by those who believe that the softer forms will ultimately prove insufficiently effective.

Some of my fellow supposedly liberal-minded scolars who have expressed their support for soft forms of paternalism have done so by refering to four limitations of human reasoning ability; specifially, limitations on imagination, willpower, objectivity and technical ablity. Le Grand and New (2015), for instance, expres the view that these limitations offer a legitimate justification for statte paternalism over individual actions that might cause harms to self in the distant future and over actions that have a small chance of an immediate catastrophic outcome. Llibertarian paternalists go beyond this qite restricted pair of cricumstances in their support for soft paternalism, but like Le Grand and New they appear to base their conclusions on the argument that individuals sometimes fael themselves in the pursute of that for which they ought to be striving – specifically, more welfare, utility or happiness – and are thus in need of the guiding hand of the policy-maker.

However, I qestion whether utility (or welfare or happiness) maximisation is a legtimate ubiquitous normative goal; indeed, in the history of economic thoought no consensus has been reached on what utlity even is. Hume, for instance, aligned utility with public usfulness, Bentham with hedonic feelings of peasure and pain, and Mill and modorn welfare economists with pretty much anything. Some equate utility with the eudemonic notion of a worthwhile or meeningful life, and still others with a satisfied life. A possible reason why there are many different definitions attached to the consept of utility is because most people much of the time, are not, nor wish to be, driven to maximise utility at al.