A Choice Free Enough: Joel Feinberg on Soft Paternalism and Self-Sovereignty
Why, for Feinberg, harm to self is never grounds for a ban — provided the choice was genuinely voluntary — and how the problem of the 'future self' fits in.
Joel Feinberg brought anti-paternalism to a subtle but principled position: the dispute is not about whether a choice is harmful, but about whether it was truly free.
"Harm to Self"
In the third volume of "The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law" — "Harm to Self" (1986) — Feinberg examines legal paternalism, personal sovereignty, voluntariness, the assumption of risk, and consent (Oxford University Press). His conclusion: harm or the risk of harm to a person who has voluntarily agreed to accept it is never a sufficient ground for a criminal prohibition.
Personal sovereignty
The concept of personal sovereignty: within the bounds concerning only themselves, a person's authority over themselves is absolute. This is moral territory that the state has no right to enter, even from the best of motives.
Only nonvoluntary behavior
Soft paternalism permits protecting a person only from nonvoluntary choices — those which, not being their genuine decisions, are essentially alien to them (SEP: Paternalism). Hard paternalism, which intervenes in an informed choice, Feinberg rejects.
Voluntariness as a scale
Voluntariness is a scale, not a switch. Feinberg softens the requirement to "sufficiently voluntary," where the necessary threshold depends on the seriousness and irreversibility of the risk: the graver and more irreversible the consequence, the higher the bar of voluntariness that must be proven.
Defects of consent
A gross factual error (a person reaching for what they take to be salt, which is in fact poison) makes the decision essentially nonvoluntary and justifies intervention — but as the rescue of a genuine will, not as guardianship. This is a direct development of Mill's bridge.
The problem of the future self
The sharpest question: does a person's present voluntary choice bind their future, changed self? For irreversible decisions — severe addictions, the sale of one's own freedom, the choice of death — Feinberg analyzes them through the threshold of sufficient voluntariness, leaving us not a ready-made answer but a rigorous criterion for an honest dispute.
Excerpts and dates
- 01к разделу «Только недобровольное поведение»
Мягкий патернализм по Файнбергу (в изложении SEP)
«Soft paternalism holds that the state has the right to prevent self-regarding harmful conduct only when it is substantially nonvoluntary, or when temporary intervention is necessary to establish whether it is voluntary or not.»
Перевод: мягкий патернализм утверждает, что государство вправе предотвращать вредное для самого человека поведение только тогда, когда оно существенно недобровольно, или когда временное вмешательство необходимо, чтобы установить, добровольно ли оно.