Autonomy Vs Soft Paternalism

Overriding a person’s expressed preferences intentionally by justifying one’s action with the goal of benefiting and preventing the person from harm is called paternalism. For example, a doctor decides to involuntarily hospitalize a patient with suicidal tendencies for their own benefit by supervising their behaviors in the hospital. The two known types of paternalism include soft and hard paternalism. Soft paternalism involves assuming that a patient lacks substantial autonomy and their preferences are overridden for their own benefit. This kind of paternalism does not conflict with respect for autonomy because it judges a patient is not substantially autonomous in making rational decisions. An example of soft paternalism would involve preventing

For instance, due to being addicted they are mentally incompetent of making such decisions of refraining from smoking. The tax serves as a precaution for smokers and tries to prevent more people from starting all in efforts to benefit their health. Dworkin argues that paternalistic interventions are justified if the benefit of preventing outweighs the effect of the activity of smoking on a person’s daily life. For example, when a smoker wants to quit but continues to smoke while discounting the dangers of smoking due to lack of willpower. (Dworkin, 11) This can be related back to using tax to reduce smoking as soft paternalism because such interventions argue that the smoker is not substantially autonomous since he lacks willpower. And this makes him unable to quit smoking even if he knows about the dangers. However, B&C think that there are problems with this kind of soft paternalism because it sometimes moves from the stigmatization of smoking to the stigmatization of people who smoke. And this leads to certain groups of people, especially people of low economic status being discriminated against in society. (B&C, 219) They also argue that these soft paternalistic interventions such as the tax on cigarettes might open more doors to harder paternalistic interventions where respect for autonomy is violated, even if the goal in each case is to ensure that beneficence is justified. Another problem with this type of paternalism is the inability to distinguish if the person in question actually lacks substantial autonomy because imposing a tax on cigarettes could also be hard paternalism since some smokers are autonomous in their decision to smoke. So what makes the tax on cigarettes soft paternalism is the assumption that those who smoke lack the