A War on Individual Autonomy

Democrats are still making an argument for the Nanny State.

I was doing a little intellectual archeology tonight, digging through some old drafts of post ideas, and ran across some notes I took from a NYT article in 2013 titled “Three Cheers for the Nanny State” by Sarah Conly (article is now behind the paywall), who is a professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College. She was plugging her own book titled Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism. I noted in the margins that if the article was representative of the book, it was likely the dumbest collection of words printed on paper to date.

Normally, something written a decade ago would be dated and passe after the passage of time, but not only are the Democrats now running a presidential campaign that argues against individual autonomy, they are openly treating voters as stupid cattle that must be herded to the pasture and then to the milking barn.

In her article and book, Professor Conly argued against John Stuart Mill’s seminal work On Liberty.

In 1859, Mill wrote that the only justifiable reason for interfering in someone’s freedom of action was to prevent harm to others. According to Mill’s “harm principle,” we should almost never stop people from behavior that affects only themselves, because people know best what they themselves want.

That “almost,” though, is important. It’s fair to stop us, Mill argued, when we are acting out of ignorance and doing something we’ll most likely regret. You can stop someone from crossing a bridge that is broken, he said, because you can be sure no one wants to plummet into the river.

Mill just didn’t think this would need to happen very often. He never counted on people doing dumb shit to go viral on TikTok, for example. Life has proven that many times we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a terrible idea of how to get there. It’s well established by now that we often don’t think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We make errors. This has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few decades, and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations.

What I understood from On Liberty was that an individual’s right to decide for themselves was inviolable. Mill never presupposes that individuals will always make the correct decision; he just states that nothing should interfere with his ability to make that decision, right or wrong.

Of course, the individual does make voluntary trade-offs when integrating into society by voluntarily subjugating decisions that would maximize their own benefit to those decisions that better their entire community.

In her book, Professor Conly rejected the idea of autonomy as inviolable.

Conly asks that we accept three aspects of her “paternalism” as true for her thesis to have merit. For her version of paternalism to be workable, we must:

• Accept that the world is simply too complex for us to understand and,

• People are too stupid to act in their own best interests and make the “right” decisions,

• There is a human authority above the individual that can understand this complexity and can never make the wrong decision.

This line of “reasoning” is remarkable as it mostly comes from academics and political elites who simultaneously argue that while you, the weak-minded plebian can’t be expected to make proper decisions for yourself, somehow a collection of individual elites can make that decision for you.

Well, we all know how good our government is at getting it right. From whether eggs or coffee are good/bad for you to going to war, there are examples that Conly is wrong in anything except a theoretical sense.

But again, this is not the way America is structured or is designed to work. I’ve long held the opinion that our troubles are not because somehow our Constitution has failed us; we have failed it by trying to operate a collectivist system in the framework designed for a representative republic. America is not now, and never has been, a “top down” culture; rather it is “bottom up.” We simply have never done command and control; we are a nation born of rebels.

About Comrade Conly’s book, Nick Gillespie at Reason wrote:

“Her dismissal of John Stuart Mill smacks of building a straw man as well. Mill’s “harm principle” – the idea that as long as your actions don’t directly hurt others, you should be free to wreck your own life – doesn’t depend on any notion of “ourselves as completely rational…”

Perhaps more important in this sort of argument, Conly is – consciously or not – smuggling in a highly tendentious sense of role of government – it’s supposed to “help us get where we want to go.” That’s as peculiar an interpretation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as you’ll ever read, and it’s certainly one that stands opposed to the safeguards put in place to limit government and maintain the rights of minorities. Who’s we, kemo sabe?”

What Conly, Kamala and authoritarians like them really want is the “right” people making decisions for the rank and file based on their idea of “right.” Happiness is efficiency through subservience to authority. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. How 1984 of her…

There is that pesky question again that no collectivist seems willing or able to answer.

It is good old Vlad Lenin’s question of “Who, Whom?”