IN DEFENCE of Michael Bloomberg's controversial proposal to ban large servings of sugary drinks, Timothy Noah of the New Republic cuts to the chase and plumps for paternalism:

The truth is that there's nothing inherently wrong with paternalistic government or, in the harsher, feminized shorthand of its detractors, the “nanny state.” Parents and nannies can be good or bad. No adult likes to be told how to live his life, but most of us benefit from baby authoritarianism far more than we'd like to admit.

Mr Noah's argument seems to be that there's nothing wrong with paternalistic measures as long as they actually benefit us. Philosophers sometimes call the form of paternalism Mr Noah has in mind, concerned with bodily health and mental well-being, "welfare paternalism". Of course, ideas about the human good routinely incorporate moral and theological suppositions, which can take paternalism well beyond concern for physical health and psychological welfare. For example, Torquemada, the infamous Spanish inquisitor, acted paternalistically in torturing individuals to confess their sins insofar as he did so intending to save them from damnation to eternal hellfire, which he believed to be infinitely worse than the pain of the rack. For Torquemada, the true nature of the interests of individuals had been revealed by religious texts and religious authorities, which he no doubt took to be at least as reliable as we take the Journal of the American Medical Association to be. I wonder if Mr Noah would agree that Torquemada did nothing inherently wrong by torturing heretics on the rack in order to elicit confessions and save their eternal souls from infinite suffering. As a matter of fact, the inquisitor's conception of welfare is false, and so he caused a monstrous quantity of pointless suffering. But what if his facts about our moral and spiritual welfare had been right and that he succeeded in saving many souls? No problem? Perhaps not, as Mr Noah does not demur when it comes to endorsing forms of paternalism aimed at the health of the soul:

What about when the nanny state instructs us to behave in accordance with its views of morality? I disagree with conservative aspirations to install the nanny state in my bedroom, but I wouldn't necessarily begrudge the state its power to play moral cop elsewhere. I approve of the government prohibition against the selling of organs, and I would never want the government to stop discouraging illicit drug use and prostitution (though I might quibble with its methods). These prohibitions all constitute the government helping to define the nation's collective values, which is entirely legitimate.

I take it that Mr Noah disagrees with conservative moral paternalism not because it is paternalistic, but because it is based on a false picture of moral welfare, and is therefore unlikely actually to do us good. Having noted this disagreement, Mr Noah should have paused. If there is widespread disagreement about the human good, about what counts as a benefit or a harm, then paternalistic policies, even when they work as intended, inevitably restrict the liberty of some citizens in the service of conceptions of the good they reject. How is a paternalistic measure justified to us if we reasonably reject the idea of welfare on which it is based? If Mr Noah wants to say, "Well, that's okay, because it does make you better off according to the true theory of the good", we'll want to know by what authority his conception of the good, and not ours, is established as the public standard for justified coercion. "Because I'm right and you're wrong" is a vacuous, universal reply. It is, in so many words, what Torquemada might have said.

Problems of moral diversity aside, Mr Noah's idea that paternalism is fine as long as it works sets a remarkably low bar for the justification of state coercion. Yet there's little indication he cares all that much about whether the paternalistic policies he supports actually get over it. Matt Welch of Reason thus takes Mr Noah to task:

The organ-sales prohibition that Noah actively endorses contributes to around 18 deaths per day of people waiting for a kidney transplant. The government's discouragement of illicit drugs that Noah supports has eviscerated a Fourth Amendment that liberals at least used to pretend caring about, while stuffing America's prisons to shameful, world-historical levels. Prostitutes working in black markets suffer more violence and have more unprotected sex (with cops!) than in the few places where it's legal.

And there's little reason to believe Mr Bloomberg's ill-considered initiative would work. Michael Kinsley gets it basically right:

With so many loopholes, a law like this is no real threat to our liberty to guzzle flavored sugar water. Nevertheless, it sends a powerful message of social disapproval. So that's good. On the other hand, it's not a very persuasive argument to defend a restriction of liberty on the grounds that it won't really work. So that's bad.

I've often suspected that paternalists like Mr Noah generally cares more about sending "a powerful message of social disapproval" than about the actual effects of paternalistic policy on welfare. It's worth remembering that liberalism is, at its roots, a philosophy of mutual disarmament in the face of intractable disagreement, and that its most fundamental principle is the presumption of liberty. According to J.S. Mill, "the burden of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition... The a priori assumption is in favour of freedom..." I'm afraid Mr Noah's casual embrace of "baby authoritarianism" illustrates just how thoroughly the technocratic paternalism of American progressivism extinguished the liberal instincts of the left. To this lamentable development, allow me to address a powerful message of social disapproval, courtesy of Immanuel Kant: