Governing [through] Autonomy. The Moral and Legal Limits of "Soft Paternalism"

Fateh-Moghadam Bijan, Gutmann Thomas

Zusammenfassung

Legal restrictions of the right to self-deter mination increasingly pretend to be compat- ible with the liberal concept of autonomy: they act upon a ‘ soft ’ or autonomy-orientated paternalistic rationale. Conventional liberal cr itique of paternalism turns out to be insensitive to the intricate normative problems following from ‘ soft ’ or ‘ libertarian ’ paternalism. In fact, these autonomy-oriented forms of paternalism cou ld actually be even more problematic and may infringe liberty rights even more intensely than ha rd paternalistic regulat ion. This paper contrib- utes to the systematic differentiation of soft and hard paternalism by discussing the (legal) concept of autonomy and elaborates the moral and legal limits of autonomy-orientated paternalism