The Nanny at the Beach: When Safety Rules Become a Substitute for Freedom

The steady expansion of rules protecting people from themselves trades away the dignity of choice for the illusion of total safety

Published in partnership with Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, on the steady expansion of rules designed to protect people from themselves.

HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIFORNIA. A peculiar feature of the modern state is its growing insistence on protecting people not from each other but from themselves, the steady expansion of rules governing the personal choices of competent adults, the restrictions justified not by harm to others but by the risk a person poses to their own safety. This paternalism, however well-intentioned, trades away the dignity of choice for the illusion of total safety, and its expansion deserves a scrutiny it too rarely receives.

Protection From Ourselves

The legitimate purpose of the state, in the classical liberal understanding, is to protect people from harm by others, to secure the rights and safety of each against the aggression of all. The protection of people from their own choices is a different and more questionable enterprise, for it substitutes the judgment of the state for the judgment of the individual, treating competent adults as wards to be managed rather than free persons to be respected. Commentators at the Independent Institute have long examined this distinction and its erosion.

The expansion of paternalistic regulation proceeds through the same logic as other regulatory accumulation, each rule justified by a genuine risk, each defended by the harm it prevents, the cumulative effect a steady narrowing of the sphere of personal choice. The activity restricted, the risk regulated, the choice removed, each in the name of safety, until the competent adult finds an ever-larger range of personal decisions governed by the state rather than left to their own judgment.

The Dignity Of Choice

What the paternalistic state fails to value is the dignity of choice itself, the worth of allowing competent adults to make their own decisions, to weigh their own risks, to live their own lives according to their own judgment. The freedom to make choices, including risky ones, including foolish ones, is part of what it means to be a free and responsible person, and its steady erosion in the name of safety diminishes the person even as it protects them.

The argument is not against all safety regulation, for the state has a legitimate role in informing choices, in requiring disclosure, in protecting those who cannot protect themselves. The argument is against the substitution of the state judgment for the individual in matters that concern only the individual own safety, against the treatment of competent adults as wards, against the trading away of the dignity of choice for the illusion of a safety that no regulation can fully provide.

The nanny at the beach, the proliferation of rules protecting people from their own choices, represents a quiet erosion of personal freedom, the steady narrowing of the sphere in which competent adults may decide for themselves. The defence of that sphere, the insistence on the dignity of choice, the resistance to the paternalism that would manage every risk, is a defence of the basic freedom to live one own life according to one own judgment, a freedom worth more than the total safety it is traded for.

The distinction between protecting people from each other and protecting them from themselves is fundamental to the classical liberal understanding of the legitimate role of the state, the former a core function, the latter a questionable expansion. The erosion of this distinction, the steady drift toward a state that manages the personal choices of competent adults, represents a significant if often unremarked expansion of state power into the sphere of personal autonomy.

The paternalistic impulse is understandable and often well-meaning, the desire to prevent the harm that people do to themselves, to save them from their own poor choices, to reduce the suffering that risky behavior produces. The impulse is not malicious, but its expression in coercive regulation carries costs that the good intention obscures, the cost to autonomy, to dignity, to the freedom of competent adults to govern their own lives.

The slippery nature of the paternalistic justification is its danger, for once the principle is accepted that the state may regulate personal choices to protect people from themselves, there is no clear limit to its application, every risky activity a candidate for regulation, every poor choice a target for restriction, the sphere of personal autonomy steadily narrowing as the logic of protection expands without natural boundary.

The dignity of choice that paternalism overrides is not a trivial value but a central one, bound up with the very meaning of freedom and responsibility, the worth of allowing persons to govern their own lives, to make their own decisions, to bear the consequences of their own choices. To remove this is to diminish the person, to treat the competent adult as a child, to substitute the management of the state for the autonomy of the individual.

The legitimate alternatives to paternalistic coercion are available and preferable, the provision of information that allows people to make informed choices, the requirement of disclosure that ensures they understand the risks, the education that improves their judgment, all of which respect autonomy while addressing the genuine concern about uninformed or unwise choices. These approaches inform and empower rather than coerce and override.

Further reading: The Independent Institute.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/