Obesity, Wireheads, and the case for and Against Paternalism
Suppose we come up with really good pleasure drugs, drugs that give us lots of pleasure without negative side effects such as hangovers or cirhosis of the liver. If we accept the economist’s model of the rational actor, their invention is clearly a good thing. It expands our choice set, provides us one more and possibly better way of getting what we want.
To people skeptical of the rational model, that conclusion is less clear. To see the problem, consider an extreme version. Larry Niven, in some of his stories, describes wireheads, people who have had a wire inserted into the pleasure center of their brain and stimulate it with a mild electric current. The intense pleasure that results dominates all other concern, making it possible for a wirehead to die of hunger and thirst because getting food or drink is simply more trouble than it is worth.
For a more homely example, consider a pleasure drug that many of us have overdosed on: Chocolate bars. If you have more elevated tastes, substitute dinner at a four star restaurant in Paris. While it is true that food is useful to keep us alive, sufficient food for that purpose — lentils, powdered milk, vitamin pills, rice or potatoes — does not cost very much or taste very good. Most of what we spend on food buys pleasure. In modern societies, calories, even moderately tasty calories, are cheap. People like to eat. Voila: An obesity “epidemic.”
I might like to be thinner, have not always been very good at getting that way. Considering the situation as an economist, I conclude that if I cannot lose weight the benefit of lost weight must be less than the cost. Introspection provides a less complimentary picture of my role in the situation. It looks rather as though I am, like Niven’s wireheads, irrationally willing to sacrifice my long term welfare to my short term pleasures. A rational wirehead, after all, should be willing to take brief breaks from intense pleasure to eat and drink in order to to stay alive for more pleasure.
For a different angle on the issue, consider a question I raised in another post: Does consumer sovereignty, the principle of accepting individual actions as proof of what we value, apply if we have good reason to regard the actions as due to evolutionary mistakes, adaptations to a past environment very different from the one we now live in? In most past environments eating when you had the chance, eating enough to get fat if you could, was a sensible strategy since next month might be famine. From an evolutionary standpoint, current obesity is simply a case of humans being poorly adapted to their current environment.
Following out the logic of that argument, one would conclude that greater choice sometimes makes us worse off. If so, is that an adequate reason to abandon libertarian conclusions, to, for example, support government restrictions on fat in food and cheap junk food in restaurants and grocery stores? Is it a good argument, following out the line other economists have taken with regard to pollution or fossil fuels, to support high taxes on chocolate bars and other tasty foods to compensate not for externalities but for irrational tastes?
If we had a government run by benevolent philosopher kings, that might make sense. The problem with it in the world we live in is that although I may sometimes be a bad judge of my own welfare, sometimes even a bad judge in predictable ways, I have one large advantage over any one else for decisions about my own welfare. Unlike almost everyone else in the world, I can be trusted to put my own welfare very high in my priorities. Once we shift the decision to someone else, however rational, we can expect him to make decisions for me in his interest rather than mine.
Which brings us back to the old libertarian argument for certifying doctors instead of licensing them. Patients, however rational, are imperfectly informed about the competence of doctors. Why not solve that problem by having some competent authority decide who is allowed to practice as a physician?
That is the theory of medical licensing. The practice, as shown long ago, is that the medical profession uses licensing to hold down the number of physicians, sometimes in ways unrelated to their professional competence. It would be better to allow the competent authority to certify doctors and let the patients decide for themselves whether to accept the authority’s judgement.
If you do not find that description of licensing and that conclusion convincing, you might consider the wide range of other professions that also require licensing: yacht salesmen, egg graders, barbers, hair braiders and the like. How likely is it that medical licensing exists for an entirely different reason than all the others?
The Other Argument
So far I have assumed that the argument for restrictions on individual liberty is that constraints on me help me get what I want, with some ambiguity between short and long-run wants. That is why we describe such policies as paternalism, the state playing the role of a father guiding his children in their own interest. One alternative is to view the state as controlling my actions for your benefit and your actions for mine. That, the standard economist’s justification for state action, still assumes that the objective of state action is to give people what they want.
Suppose we reject that assumption, as many would, and assume instead that the proper objective of state action is not giving people what they want but what they should want. We might reject wireheading, ban the drugs that are its nearest real world equivalent, not on the grounds that it will fail to give users the life of pleasure that they expect but that a life of pleasure and nothing more is not the life proper to man. Views about what The Good is vary a great deal, but the view that it is not merely giving people what they want is widely held.
Many years ago I heard a talk by Friederich Hayek whose point was the difference between an organization and a self-generating order. An organization has a purpose, can be judged by how well it achieves it. A self-generating order is a way in which multiple individuals, each with his own purposes, can interact. It has no purpose of its own. A corporation or a football team is an organization. A market is a self generating order.
The political system is another. It has no vision of The Good. It is a way in which individuals interact. Perhaps, in a world where different people have different, sometimes incompatible, visions of The Good, letting each pursue his own vision is the best we can do.
Think of it as the liberal compromise. Old meaning of liberal.
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Thoughtful and thought provoking, as always. As you say, this is the addiction issue writ large.
I would add another consideration. Alcohol, cigarettes, and even opioids, to say nothing of Michelin starred food, can be enjoyed in moderation without leading to debilitation or death. Only some will be afflicted with a virulent strain of addiction. It would be no different for a happiness pill.
Politics and policy can tolerate or promote the development of institutions that channel the addiction into a less harmful direction. I'm thinking humanity has had a couple of thousand years to deal with alcohol. Some societies do it successfully. Outright bans on fun aren't one of the channels.
What do you think of the claim that power structures are always going to be driven by some vision of “the good?”
You can’t have a rules based social order without people, deciding what rules should exist and how they are to be enforced. People who have your attitude - which is one that I respect - are less likely to make the sacrifices to obtain power to influence and control others. I think the end result is something like, either you join some group explicitly trying to exert its sense of the good over the people around them, or you’ll be at the whims of some other group that is.
The idea of all of us being left alone to pursue our own private notions of the good strikes me as something like expecting to play prisoners dilemma with 1000 strangers once, and have nobody defect.