The nanny state is in the news. A lot of people have been outraged by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s effort to restrict soda sizes, recently overturned by a state court, and some people do not much like ...

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. Reading time 6 minutes As ...

Should government "nudge" citizens to do what is in their self-interest? In his latest column, David Brooks runs through the arguments for and against "libertarian paternalism," summing them up as ...

Part of the aim of these essays is to engage with topics that may be challenging, reflecting the importance of having difficult conversations that advance progress. If we find that nothing we say ...

In an op-ed in The New York Times titled "Three Cheers for the Nanny State," Sarah Conly, a philosophy professor at Bowdown College and author of Against Autonomy, dismisses principled concerns about ...

In an important new article, political philosophers Jason Brennan and Christopher Freiman explain why standard justifications for paternalistic restrictions on consumers also apply to voters. Over the ...

Recent works by longtime intellectual antagonists Cass Sunstein (author of "Too Much Information") and Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman (authors of "Escaping Paternalism") have a surprising amount of ...

Good intentions do not always make for good policy. That is particularly true for people with disabilities, who are often stripped of the most fundamental of human rights—the right to make choices ...