Determinants of Food Choices as Justifications for Public Health Interventions

Abstract

This paper is about how we should and how we cannot employ the psychological, neurophysiological and socio-epidemiological evidence regarding food choices in the discussion about paternalism in public health. There are two ways of using this wealth of data to rebut anti-paternalism and they correspond to two very different versions of liberal anti-paternalism, which we could attribute, respectively, to John Stuart Mill (1859) and Joel Feinberg (1986): utilitarian anti-paternalism and liberty-based anti-paternalism. In this paper I argue that liberty-based anti-paternalism is not relevant in the case of public interferences against unhealthy lifestyles and that evidence on the determinants of food choices cannot be employed against liberty-based paternalism but can be employed against its utilitarian version. In brief, we may want to intervene in dietary choices not so much because food choices are beyond our control but because they are often bad. This argument will be developed at length in Sects. 16.4 and 16.5, which together form the theoretical core of the paper. While Sect. 16.4 collects arguments from the literature, Sect. 16.5 contains contributions that, as far as I know, are new for the debate. Section 16.2 explains why the topic is relevant with reference to the epidemics of nutrition-related diseases and the kind of policy responses that might be mounted by public authorities. Section 16.3 distinguishes the two versions of anti-paternalism and develops some conceptual tools that will be used afterward. Section 16.6 sums up the main results and anticipates further issues stemming from this approach.