When the social norms consider it well within your rights to do so, when should you trust people to make their own decisions for the sake of their own interests vs. when should you “paternalistically” extrapolate their desires and make decisions such as what you think they would want if they were smarter/wiser/disciplined comes about instead” is one that happens to me a surprisingly large number of times.
This often but doesn’t necessarily imply positions of authority. If your good buddy who isn’t very financially savvy is willing to freely give you large sums of money with no obligations attached, do you accept? A strict Mormon who just arrived at college feels peer pressure and impulsively asks you for a drink, and while you do not think it’s immoral you know they’ll feel guilt later-do you give it to them?
More succinctly: My respect for autonomy and my consequentialism conflict in all cases where I think I know what someone wants better than they do and have any measure of power over what happens. Paternalistic attitudes are also very lonely, there are some analogues to “heroic responsibility” here.
My current position is that consequentialism wins, and what feels like moral uncertainty is actually more a “but what if the other person really does know better?” risk which must be calculated. Respect for autonomy is not usually a fundamental value (except for sometimes, we might intrinsically value the choice) but in practice it is a heuristic which usually leads to the best consequences because people are usually best at knowing what they want.
When the social norms consider it well within your rights to do so, when should you trust people to make their own decisions for the sake of their own interests vs. when should you “paternalistically” extrapolate their desires and make decisions such as what you think they would want if they were smarter/wiser/disciplined comes about instead” is one that happens to me a surprisingly large number of times.
This often but doesn’t necessarily imply positions of authority. If your good buddy who isn’t very financially savvy is willing to freely give you large sums of money with no obligations attached, do you accept? A strict Mormon who just arrived at college feels peer pressure and impulsively asks you for a drink, and while you do not think it’s immoral you know they’ll feel guilt later-do you give it to them?
More succinctly: My respect for autonomy and my consequentialism conflict in all cases where I think I know what someone wants better than they do and have any measure of power over what happens. Paternalistic attitudes are also very lonely, there are some analogues to “heroic responsibility” here.
My current position is that consequentialism wins, and what feels like moral uncertainty is actually more a “but what if the other person really does know better?” risk which must be calculated. Respect for autonomy is not usually a fundamental value (except for sometimes, we might intrinsically value the choice) but in practice it is a heuristic which usually leads to the best consequences because people are usually best at knowing what they want.