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For the past decade, a new form of paternalism has been emerging on the policy stage. Unlike ‘traditional paternalism’, which sought to make people conform to religious or moralistic notions of goodness, this form of ‘new-paternalism’ seeks to make people better off by their own judgement. For the better part of fifty years, behavioural sciences have been challenging assumptions of human behaviour and rationality. As such, the neo-paternalists seem to use behavioural economics and psychology’s insights to justify and legitimize their paternalistic interventions.
Behavioural Law and Economics are now involved in the process of policymaking, contributing to the relatively new field of Behavioural Public Policy. Libertarian Paternalism has become one of the most famous forms of this so called ‘new-paternalism’. Its advocates claim their proposal of soft paternalism is libertarian, in the sense that it does not restrict freedom of choice and action, it does not coerce nor force, but rather it “nudges” citizens on their subjectively preferred path. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse these claims by assessing the ‘new’ paternalistic assumptions, by studying some of their proposed initiatives and the possible implications that those might have on political liberty and decisional autonomy focussing on some liberal ideas from John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin.