Three Comments on Paternalism in Public Health

This Article offers three critical observations concerning the debates surrounding paternalism in public health. First, the assessment of paternalistic health-promoting policies stops at efficacy considerations and fails to consider the possibility that such policies may infringe basic rights. Second, discussions on health and paternalism are not sufficiently context-specific, as they tend to classify policies according to their degree of paternalism rather than according to the often unique characteristics of each risky behavior. And third, debates on public health and paternalism fail to address background structural conditions that may change our understanding of whether paternalistic means are at all needed.