Balancing public health against individual liberty: The ethics of smoking regulations

Eleven years ago, philosopher Robert E. Goodin published No Smoking: The Et hical Issues. Goodin argued that the liberty of smokers can be justifiably limited for two reasons: to prevent harm to third persons and to prevent ha rm to smokers themselves under circumstances which make their decision to s moke substantially non-autonomous. In this article Thaddeus Pope reexamines the harm principle and the soft paternalism principle in light of more rec ent legal developments, gives them additional content, and carefully demarc ates the justificatory scope of each. Pope also defines and defends a third liberty-limiting principle, hard paternalism, arguing that the liberty of smokers might be justifiably limited even when their decision to smoke is s ubstantially autonomous.