I know what is best for me

I was at Mano's philosopher's cafe in New Westminster Wednesday night where the discussion was about the autonomy and freedom to make one's own decisions.

Mano challenges the contemporary idea that we are the best judge of our situation and therefore the best person to decide on matters pertaining to own well being.  There is no one else who knows what goes on in our minds and our true aspirations and therefore no one else can take that into consideration.

We then look at the situations where this may not be the case.

One possibility is that we do not know enough information of the outside world to make the decision.  We need specialists like doctors and other professionals to advise us of things we don't know that can be crucial to deciding.

Another is that we may not have the capacity or may be impaired at the time of decision making.  Young children may be too susceptible to outside influence like advertising to properly judge what is good for them. So is the case with persons whose mental capacity are compromised either temporarily through intoxication or more permanently through other causes.

From here, the examples slid down to more questionable shades of grey.

Is it really a free choice by a smoker to smoke?

Or is he influenced by his addiction resulting from trying smoking at an impressionable age when advertising convinced him that smoking is "cool"?

Our mothers generally have the best of intentions for our well being when giving us advice.  Given that she is also more experienced in life than we do, should we always follow our mother's advice?

When should we be paternalistic and take away someone's "free" choice because we know what is best for them?

Mano offered the example of the Canadian Government giving returning wounded war veterans a choice of a lump sum payment instead of their life time health and rehabilitation benefits. 

Those advocating free choice will say that it is an opportunity for the entrepreneurial among the veterans to use this to start a business, have a new life, and otherwise become independent of the rules of government health benefits.

Others will say that the veterans in their compromised health condition, especially those suffering mental effects from war, are in no position to make this decision and the temptation to take the lump sum and waste it is too great.

The discussion also moved to free choice versus choosing under coercion. 

Just when does incentive becomes coercive?

Mano felt that an offer to someone to dance naked on the table top for a million dollars is coercive as it is something that one normally will not do without the payment.

If you do not think that is coercive,  what if the payment is $50 and you want to use that money to buy food as you have not eaten for a while?

The definition of coercion is very difficult but important as it is crucial to whether decisions are made with "free" choice.

By philosophically stating that free choice is one made without coercion, we have not made any progress if coercion is just as hard to define as "free".

In the final analysis, the "goodness" of a decision depends on the value yardstick we use to measure whether a certain outcome is good or not. 

This value yardstick differs from person to person even though there may be broad social norms that heavily influence our value systems.

Our value yardstick is also influenced by others and changes with time.

We are the only one to know our value yardstick to apply it at decision making time.

We are also the one to live with the results of our decisions whether flawed or correct and to learn lessons to be applied to future decisions.

It can be easily argued that others know better than we do but it is not so easy to determine who these others are in any one situation and whether they know well enough to override our individual value yardsticks.

Then there is also the potentially scary scenario of being forced into a mental institution because society in general considers that we have lost our ability to decide but we think otherwise. 

Or that we are thought to be in a "coma" but we can actually hear what is going on but cannot physically move to indicate our consciousness to others.

Or the difficult decision to take children away from parents who the state decides is not fit to parent.

Messy business, less than ideal outcomes.

We can argue about whether advertising and lobbying special interest groups are skewing our decision making abilities but we have to be ever vigilant about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we start thinking that we know what is best for others.