This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 27th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown. Would John Stewart Mill support a ban on big sodas?

What if we gave him all the data on human cognitive biases?

Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org, argues that a recent defense of paternalism

in the pages of New York Times is little more than a call for barbarism.

This is from Sarah Connley, she's an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowden College.

She's the author of Against Autonomy Justifying Coercive Paternalism. and that the only justifiable reason for interfering in someone's freedom of action was to prevent harm to others.

According to Mills' harm principle, we should almost never stop people from behavior that affects only themselves

because people know best what they

themselves want. That almost though is important. It's fair to stop us

Mill argued when we are acting out of ignorance and doing something we'll pretty

definitely regret.

You can stop someone from crossing a bridge that is broken, he said, because you can be sure

that no one wants to plummet into the river.

Mill just didn't think it would happen very often.

So her argument here is she's extending that argument essentially to the idea of soda bans,

specifically the one that was implemented and supported by New York Mayor Michael

Blueburg.

What she's saying is that due to modern findings in psychology and behavioral economics, we all are burdened with these

cognitive biases that make it so that we aren't really quite sure what we want or

if we think we know what we want we're not very good at pursuing it.

And her argument is that had Mill known about those things when he was writing about his

...