The pursuit of self-interest: self-interest bias in attitude judgment and persuasion

Self-interest affected the direction of attitudes in 4 studies exploring attitude judgment and persuasion. Experiment 1 showed that both self-interest and symbolic concerns predicted attitudes. The biasing role of self-interest in producing the well-known persuasion effects of personal relevance and argument strength was examined by disentangling the competing effects of personal costs and benefits. Experiment 2 used a standard personal relevance manipulation in the absence of supportive arguments and showed that perceptions of personal costs associated with the advocated policy partially mediated its negative effects on attitudes. Experiments 3 and 4 independently manipulated the onset of personal costs associated with an issue and the onset of issue-related benefits conveyed by supportive arguments. Postmessage attitudes were an additive function of personal costs and argument-specified benefits, and perceived costs and benefits biased information processing in a self-interested manner. A revised conception of personal relevance and argument strength is discussed.     

Professional Paternalism

This article points out how far-reaching the changes in our public life would actually have to be if we wanted to avoid paternalism altogether. For example, the widespread view that only a physician with training at a recognized institution should be allowed to perform surgery or that only an educated lawyer may provide legal council is clearly paternalistic. In fact, many professional regulations, not just in medicine and law, but also in engineering and many other areas of expertise, have a strongly paternalistic function. Moreover, this problem is located in a sphere that is neither clearly private, nor seems to be part of a state-legislated public sphere. Professional organizations are neither governments, nor necessarily democratic, but they are often state-certified and produce binding regulations for issues of public interest. The author bites the bullet and accepts professional paternalism, while insisting that special care should be placed on how to design an appropriate professional code of conduct.     

The norm of self-interest

The self-interest motive is singularly powerful according to many of the most influential theories of human behavior and the layperson alike. In the present article the author examines the role the assumption of self-interest plays in its own confirmation. It is proposed that a norm exists in Western cultures that specifies self-interest both is and ought to be a powerful determinant of behavior. This norm influences people's actions and opinions as well as the accounts they give for their actions and opinions. In particular, it leads people to act and speak as though they care more about their material self-interest than they do. Consequences of misinterpreting the "fact" of self-interest are discussed.     

Mandatory Disclosure and Medical Paternalism

Medical practitioners are duty-bound to tell their patients the truth about their medical conditions, along with the risks and benefits of proposed treatments. Some patients, however, would rather not receive medical information. A recent response to this tension has been to argue that that the disclosure of medical information is not optional. As such, patients do not have permission to refuse medical information. In this paper I argue that, depending on the context, the disclosure of medical information can undermine the patient’s ability to exercise her autonomy or have therapeutically detrimental effects. In the light of these insights I go on to develop a context-sensitive approach to medical disclosure. The advantage of this account is that it addresses concerns on both sides of the debate; whilst it acknowledges that patients do not have an exercisable ‘right not to know,’ it allows that in some cases medical information ought to be withheld.     

Regulating Compensatory Paternalism

Res Publica - Some recent arguments for paternalist government interventions have been based in empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics that would seem to show that adult human...     

Paternalism and the Criminal Law

ABSTRACT If it could be shown that law is, in some sense, a moral system the apparent contradiction between (moral) autonomy and (legal) heteronomy might be challenged. In order to prepare for such a challenge this paper questions the prevailing view that law is not in the business of enforcing morals. That is done primarily by using decisions of the criminal courts to show that the law does not always criminalise conduct merely to prevent harm to others. Paternalism is distinguished from the harm principle in order to show that the law (rightly or wrongly) sometimes seeks to secure that which is (thought to be) morally good, irrespective of the prevention of harm, at least overall harm.
If such an insight is well founded there are consequences for legal theory in that neither of the ruling paradigms (naturalism and positivism) seems able adequately to accommodate the view of law which emerges. Consequently, an attempt is made in the essay to develop a middle theory of law, between naturalism and positivism, which is referred to as 'normative positivism'. The theory presented has, in turn, consequences for political practice. If law can be seen as community morality rather than as merely the morality of officials, then everyone has a stake in the moral content of law and there may be good moral reasons for disobeying official laws. Civil disobedience is the citizen's ultimate resort against the official morality that has appropriated to itself the eulogistic name of 'law'. That law may be seen as community morality also calls into question some ruling paradigms as to the nature of morality but, if the claim can be sustained, then the legal system may be seen as applied moral philosophy in action.     

Paternalism and the Ill-Informed Agent

Most anti-paternalists claim that informed and competent self-regarding choices are protected by autonomy, while ill-informed or impaired self-regarding choices are not. Joel Feinberg, among many others, argues that we can in this way distinguish impermissible ??hard?? paternalism from permissible ??soft?? paternalism. I argue that this view confronts two related problems in its treatment of ill-informed decision-makers. First, it faces a dilemma when applied to decision-makers who are responsible for their ignorance: it either permits too much, or else too little, intervention to satisfy its proponents. Second, the most promising rationales in favor of the view ignore the distinction between an agent??s voluntarily bringing about some state of affairs, on the one hand, and an agent??s voluntarily assuming a risk, on the other. I conclude that a decision-maker??s ignorance is irrelevant to the permissibility of intervention on her behalf. If it is permissible to intervene in a given ill-informed choice, it would be permissible to intervene in an otherwise similar but informed choice, at least provided that intervention would produce similar benefits in both cases. This shows that we should sometimes accept straightforwardly paternalistic rationales.     

Genetic Ignorance and Reasonable Paternalism

The question concerning an individual's rightto remain in ignorance regarding her owngenetic makeup is central to debates aboutgenetic information. Whatever is decided onthis matter has a weighty bearing on all of therelated third-party issues, such as whetherfamily members or employers should be toldabout an individual's genetic makeup. Thosearguing that no right to genetic ignoranceexists tend to argue from a viewpoint I havecalled in this paper reasonablepaternalism. It is an appealing position whichrests on widely shared intuitions on reasonablechoices, but which, in the end, smugglespaternalism back to medical practice.     

Children and the Limits of Paternalism

Philosophers disagree about what precisely makes an act paternalistic, and about whether, when, and why paternalistic acts are morally objectionable. Despite these disagreements, it might seem uncontroversial to think that it is permissible to paternalize children. When paternalism seems morally objectionable, that is usually because an adult has been treated in a way that seems appropriate only for children. But, we might think, there can be nothing morally objectionable about treating children as children. In this paper, however, I argue that there are limits to how we may permissibly paternalize children. I begin in Section 1 by describing and endorsing Jonathan Quong’s account of paternalism, which defines paternalistic acts as those that involve particular kinds of judgments that the paternalizer makes about the capacities of the paternalizee. In Section 2, I identify a distinction between two kinds of paternalism: ‘compensatory’ paternalism, and ‘non-compensatory’ paternalism. In Section 3, I argue that compensatory paternalism is usually permissible in the case of children. In section 4, I argue that non-compensatory paternalism is much harder to justify than compensatory paternalism, and because of this, it is sometimes impermissible even when directed at children.     

In Defense of Paternalism

This paper argues that we have wrongly and not for the patient’s benefit made a form of stark autonomy our highest value which allows physicians to slip out from under their basic duty which has always been to pursue a particular patient’s good. In general – I shall argue – it is the patient’s right to select his or her own goals and the physician’s duty to inform the patient of the feasibility of that goal and of the means needed to attain it. If the goal is not one that is possible, the patient, with the physician and family, must select a feasible goal and then discuss the costs/benefits of various approaches. The physician should take a leading role in helping the patient select the goal. I argue that to simply present a laundry list of means and insist that patients choose for themselves is not only abandoning patients to their autonomy but is, in fact, a crass form of violating the patient’s autonomy. Freely choosing not to choose is a choice a patient with decisional capacity is entitled to make and one that needs to be respected.