Topics Ethics

Question How far do we have a duty to protect others from themselves? Does it extend from, say, removing alcohol an alcoholic has hidden away to telling a relative's children to eat their food politely, when the relative herself is indifferent to such matters? Are we are brother's keepers? To what degree?

Accepted:
August 29, 2008

Comments

As a parent, an ever-older member of an extended family, and as a citizen of a somewhat democratic nation with a remarkably imprudent population, I struggle with this issue a lot. One way I think about this matter is first to make a distinction between (a) forcibly protecting people from themselves, (b) simply attempting to do so through persuasion, and © not acting at all. One general principle to use is that (1) competent and (2) independent people ought to be allowed maximal liberty, even to harm themselves, especially where significant pleasures are at stake. This helps us with clear cases.

So, for example, one has a duty to intervene forcibly to protect one's young children from themselves--say by pulling their fingers away from an electrical socket. One's young children are neither competent nor independent.

There are, however, people who are competent but not independent. One arguably has a duty to protect one's grown children, when those children remain bound up with a parent-child relationship emotionally or financially. In such cases, however, so long as grown children remain competent, the duty becomes only one to attempt to persuade. Forcibly intervening with grown children is only a duty when the children have ceased to be competent--for example, through addiction, injury, or mental illness. And of course, in all cases, one arguably has no duty even to protect one's dependents if doing so places one's own well being in serious risk.

In cases where someone is incompetent but independent, one has an individual duty only when one is immediately presented with that person's attempt to harm himself or herself and where the nature of the harm is extremely serious. So, for example, one does not have an individual duty to stop a stranger's child from smoking or an adult alcoholic from drinking. But one does have an obligation to stop a stranger's child from ingesting poison--so long, again, as doing so doesn't put oneself at risk. And one does have a duty to call the police if a drunk gets behind the wheel and tears off onto a crowded highway.

When people are competent and independent, one has no individual duty to protect them from themselves. But here things get trick. As members of a shared society and as finite human beings, none of us are fully competent nor fully independent. Limitations on knowledge, the coercive nature of various deprivations, etc., warrant a certain level of paternalism. So, the regulation of food and drugs is a social but not an individual duty. The obligation to prevent various forms of exploitation, to ensure safe workplaces, to require minimum wages, to protect our environment from ourselves, and to make education, public safety, firefighting, and health care available, are social duties.