‘If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all.’ Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (1784)

When One Direction announced they were splitting up, child psychologists offered parents of grieving tweenies advice on how to console their offspring. In the same month, parents were also told by researchers how long they should read to their children each day. Business Secretary Sajid Javid has ordered university heads to establish a taskforce to take on sexist ‘lad culture’ and guide students to conduct their interpersonal relations in line with enlightened mores. Of course, not everyone follows expert advice on any of the above. Policy advisers and academic experts frequently complain about those who refuse to acknowledge their wisdom and carry on smoking, drinking sugary pop, being laddish. Cutting-edge techniques of behavioural psychology are being marshalled to deal with this problem. The UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, now a private company, has quadrupled in size since it was spun out of government in 2014. It is now working for the World Bank and the UN, while ‘nudge’ teams are being established in Australia, Singapore, Germany and the US.

The ubiquity of nudge heralds a new renaissance for unapologetic paternalism. But where does that leave the great Enlightenment breakthrough, the idea that individuals should be self-determining and capable of making their own choices? Kant’s description of ‘mankind’s exit from his self-incurred immaturity’ seems strangely at odds with today’s enthusiasm for paternalistic intervention. For Kant, the outcome of any particular choice was less important than the cultivation of moral autonomy. The Enlightenment idea was that we should stop ‘outsourcing’ decisions about how to live to external agencies, whether the church, the monarchy, or some natural order. Today, though, new forms of authority have taken their place, leaving us just as childlike in relation to the new experts.

Sceptics about the idea of autonomy suggest breakthroughs in neuroscience have revealed we are less rational than Enlightenment thinkers suggested. They argue it is wrong for strong-willed individuals to run rough-shod over vulnerable groups with less power. In a complex world of multiple choices, what is wrong with people seeking help to make informed decisions? Is autonomy really undermined if students themselves demand university authorities provide safe spaces, issue trigger warnings on course materials, make lessons in consent compulsory? If we are nudged into the good life, what harm is done? Should we grow up and accept new paternalism or does this mean sacrificing self-dominion and consigning ourselves to a life of permanent dependence? Is individual autonomy an outdated myth?