Licensure
TLDR: Utopia is paternalistic, but only through guardianship and licenses.
Prerequisites: Personhood
There’s a tension in policy between the natural goal of freedom and the awareness of how bad most people are at making decisions, and how easily they can be manipulated or preyed upon. People overweight immediate pleasure compared to long-term wellbeing. People fall into traps of self-neglect, can take permanent damage from “just trying it one time,” and are in general terrible judges of who genuinely cares about them. This is understandable; the modern world is very unlike the one that evolution shaped people for.
So what is a society to do? One solution is to be laissez-faire, and eat the costs of giving people the freedom to live their lives according to their own choices. If people predictably get hurt, that’s their fault and hopefully they learn from the mistakes. Another solution is to be paternalistic, either directly in the form of laws, or indirectly in the form of social norms and community pressure. If people feel oppressed and unable to choose what makes them happy, this is either because they’re wrong or because they’re in an acceptable minority of people compared to those that are protected.
Libertarians might point out that paternalism also runs a risk of being erroneous, and that intervening in the lives of others isn’t guaranteed to help. Indeed, there are a host of failure modes that come from trying to fix other people, and we should all notice that there are biases to how this manifests as well.
But just because there is a Scylla AND a Charybdis doesn’t mean that wisdom lies in denying the costs of liberty, or refusing to occasionally step in and help someone else make better choices (sometimes by force). The world is a difficult place to live, especially for people on the lower-end of mental capacities, such as children and animals, and it would be extremely neglectful to not guide them at all. On some level the question here comes down to a tradeoff of values. To what degree to do you think freedom is important, compared to reducing harm?
Threading the Needle
But once a position on the liberty/care axis is found, there is an art to expressing that balance well. For instance, I claim it is good to be fair and even-handed in how much freedom people are granted, while also recognizing that some people are wiser than others.
Nobody is typical in all respects. The benefit of freedom is that each person can then choose the life that matches their needs, rather than being forced to conform to the hypothetical median. It is a bad policy, then, that has a one-size-fits-all approach. And yet, equal protection under the law is vital. How should we balance these concerns?
I think the right move, regardless of how paternalistic a society decides to be, is to default to treating people as generally incompetent, but let people emancipate themselves. After all, everyone is completely helpless at the start of their lives, and only with time do they (potentially) grow into wisdom.
This is the idea behind guardianship, discussed in the previous essay on personhood. But the idea can be extended further. Just because someone is legally responsible for their choices does not mean that they have the wisdom to make the right choices in all circumstances. For instance, in most countries it is illegal to do hard drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine even as an adult. And only the staunchest libertarians would argue that prohibiting drinking and driving is a bad policy.
But sometimes a drug that is harmful to most people is good for a specific person. For instance, methamphetamine can be prescribed at reasonable levels to treat ADHD or obesity. Or imagine a person who has a mutation that makes their motor skills immune from the effect of alcohol, and can drive just fine while drunk. In both of these cases I claim that the best policy is one that prohibits an activity by default, but allows an exception for any person who can prove that they should be trusted with the power to do that activity.
We already have a name for this kind of legal setup: a license. But I think licenses are typically conceptualized backwards from how they should be. For instance, we demand licenses to practice medicine, because we want consumers of medicine to trust that the care they are getting meets society’s standards. Likewise, we license driving to protect those who might be harmed by an unskilled driver. In general, license requirements are usually placed on those who might do harm.
But I think that in general, licenses should be required for those who might be harmed. Instead of licensing doctors, we should require a license in order to freely choose a medical provider. This has a similar effect, in that doctors will have to prove themselves to the state in order to qualify as a designated doctor for those without a license, but by reversing the licensing setup we open a space for informed patients to receive medical care from arbitrary healers. If a healer makes a mistake that harms the patient, well, that’s the cost that the patient signed up for!
In general, turning paternalistic legislation into a license opens room for informed consent by those who can demonstrate that they fall outside of the demographic that the paternalism is set up to protect.
Utopian Licensure
In Utopia, all people have the same rights, regardless of species, age, nationality, or criminal status. “Rights,” are understood to be actions that are defined and protected by the government, rather than a description of a natural entity. One might just as well call them “privileges” except that they cannot be lost or surrendered by any means.
Among these rights are the capacities to:
emigrate
file a lawsuit
collect basic income1
file a public complaint
attempt emancipation
This last right is what is invoked by people who wish to gain self-determination and get out from the restriction/protection of having a guardian, but it’s also the right to attempt to gain one of many licenses.
Anything that would be restricted on the basis of age, all victimless crimes, and anything that is typically, but not universally bad for other people, is allowed by license in Utopia. An exception is made for a few areas where the uniformity of people is good in itself, or where having asymmetric power in the population has major costs. For instance, there is no license to drive cars arbitrarily fast, despite this being a thing that some people are plausibly capable of doing safely, because it’s better for everyone on the road to have a standard vehicle speed that isn’t randomly violated.
All addictive drugs are legal if you have the right licenses, for example. Those seeking to acquire a license usually must prove a combination of knowledge, skill, and wisdom through direct testing and social evaluation. A test for nicotine, for instance, might involve passing a written exam on the effects and dangers of the drug, having at least twelve people vouch that the subject is wise enough to take nicotine and bet at better than 1:1 odds that the subject can successfully pass a test where they wear a nicotine patch for a week and then successfully avoid wearing it for a month, as well as having the test-taker successfully pass that test.
Driving, flying a plane, air travel as a passenger, betting, accessing arbitrary internet/book/art, working for an employer, having sex, having sex outside of an age/species window, being a sex-worker, getting married, having a child, signing contracts, taking drugs (including alcohol and caffeine), eating arbitrary/unhealthy food, consenting to physical harm, going into debt, playing contact sports, brawling, choosing arbitrary doctors, choosing arbitrary restaurants, choosing arbitrary investments, representing one’s self in court, and committing suicide are all examples of activities that require a license.
It is generally illegal (in Utopia) to assist someone in doing one of those activities without checking that they’re licensed. Selling alcohol to someone without checking an alcohol license, for example, is still illegal. License details are provided through identity credentials, making it fairly straightforward in most contexts.
Libertarians might object to such a long list of things that are by-default illegal, but on the flip side, these licenses can be acquired once as a teenager and then that list could be seen as a collection of things that are all legal.
Test procedures are carefully crafted to maximize social flourishing, with different regions taking different approaches to testing so that, over time, data can be collected as to what standards are good for society.
In some cases a person with a family that grew faster than society wanted may have a temporarily reduced basic income compared to others, but they are still entitled to that income as a basic right.
People with guardians don’t collect their basic income directly. Instead, guardians collect 75% of the basic income of their ward, with the remaining 25% being invested for when the ward becomes emancipated. The money given to the guardian is supposed to be used to care for their ward, though few specific restrictions are put in place (instead relying on more wholistic checks that the ward has a good life).