Save Me From Myself

I recently went out for a bout of activist carousing with Ban the Ban, a group opposed to the District of Columbia's proposed ban on smoking in bars and restaurants. I had expected to see plenty of heated arguments about the merits of the ban between smokers and non-smokers, and I did. I had not expected to see non-smokers attacking the ban on principle locked in debate with smokers who, between languorous puffs and grey exhalations, welcomed it as a means of reducing their own smoking.

If the argument--one I heard more than once from D.C. barflies--sounds strange, it is not, at any rate, rare. When New York City was mulling its own smoking ban, one young "man on the street" interviewee told the Village Voice: "I'd actually be all for it, which is odd since I am a smoker myself. I think it might make me smoke less. The increase in the cost of a pack of cigarettes hasn't stopped me from smoking. I just have friends who come up to visit from Florida bring cartons for me."

If we ignore for a moment the morality of endorsing a public restriction as a means to a personal self-help project, this is in one sense a perfectly ordinary thought. We are all, sometimes, afflicted with akrasia, those attacks of weak will that lead us to satisfy fleeting desires at the expense of our own acknowledged long-term interests.

Like Ulysses lashed to the mast, we empty the pantry of sweets, hire pricey personal trainers, join rehab groups, or loudly announce an intention to start working on that novel, knowing how embarrassed we'll feel if there's no progress to report when a friend asks how it's coming. Markets duly respond to our demand for self-restraint: Virgin Mobile recently introduced an anti-drunk dialing feature that allows users embarking on a pub crawl to block themselves from calling up that ex until the following morning.

There may even be ways for government to help us combat akrasia without overly restricting our freedoms. In his recent book The Ethics of Identity, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah offers (as a thought experiment more than a serious policy proposal) the example of the "self management card." When we go shopping for smokes or fatty foods or alcohol or a dose of heroin, Appiah imagines, the store is required to swipe our cards to ensure we haven't gone over a self-imposed limit, set by logging on to a special website set up for that purpose. An actual card of that sort would, of course, be a privacy nightmare, but it shows that attempts to help people make sound decisions need not be paternalistic.

Normal and necessary as these akrasia-countering mechanisms may be, though, they may also be symptoms of what Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan has dubbed "parentalism." Buchanan's term is not to be confused with paternalism, the familiar idea that sometimes people--other people--need to be restrained for their own protection from making poor choices. (In some cases, as with children or the severely mentally handicapped, this may well be right.) Parentalism is in a sense more insidious: It emerges when we begin to suspect that we ourselves are not competent to make our own choices, to yearn for someone to relieve us of the burden of choice. As Buchanan puts it:

[Economists and political theorists] have assumed that, other things being equal, persons want to be at liberty to make their own choices, to be free from coercion by others, including indirect coercion through means of persuasion. They have failed to emphasize sufficiently, and to examine the implications of, the fact that liberty carries with it responsibility. And it seems evident that many persons do not want to shoulder the final responsibility for their own actions..[They] want to be told what to do and when to do it; they seek order rather than uncertainty, and order comes at an opportunity cost they seem willing to bear.

The thought is not novel to Buchanan. Jean-Paul Sartre described the "anguish" that comes with our realization that we are "condemned to be free." Marxist psychologist Erich Fromm diagnosed the totalitarian movements of the 20th century as symptoms of an urge to "escape from freedom," from the displacement of a feudal world in which identities were given--a place for everyone, and everyone in his place--with a capitalist order that made who we were and what we were to become seem dizzyingly contingent.