ABSTRACT
Many people believe that for us to flourish we need to be in charge of certain significant aspects of our own lives: we need, as it is put, to have our autonomy respected. This is a popular view in the political world: Tea Partiers in the USA object to the requirement to buy health insurance as the end of humanity as we know it, but even rational people worry about the increasing numbers of regulations to which we must comply and about the breakdown between public and private. Philosophers and political theorists, too, have argued that interference in personal decisions by social or state action is a danger to the individual, and that even if such interference succeeds in making people happier, it will have made a desert and called it peace: those who are happier will not really be persons. Philosophers with outlooks as distinct as Immanuel Kant (1785) and John Stuart Mill (1859, 1861) have agreed that subjective contentment is not sufficient for wellbeing, at least when it comes to humans: the main objection to being controlled by others is not just that they don’t do that to our advantage, but that they do it at all.
