Kyle van Oosterum: 'Future Selves, Paternalism, and our Rational Powers'
Many philosophers have argued for the view that paternalism is presumptively (or pro tanto) wrong. In this paper, I criticize one popular defense of this view developed by Michael Cholbi. He bases the wrongness of paternalism on the way in which someone intercedes in the ‘rational will’ of another person, even it is for their own good.
I point out a problem for Cholbi’s view that makes it struggle to commit to the mainstream view of paternalism’s wrongness. There may be cases where we are permitted to interfere with someone’s rational will to protect their future self. I base this off of the intuition some of our decisions affect our future selves in ways we would find wrong if they were done to other people (It could be permissible to prevent paternalizees from making choices that leave themselves so badly off in the future that they create a person who is barely the same as them).
I argue these concerns unsettle Cholbi’s account, I consider some responses, and then offer a fix of the view based on previous work of my own.
