Obesity, Liberty, and Public Health Emergencies.

There have been a raft of proposals to combat the challenge of obesity, including restrictions on the nature of food advertising, the content of prepared meals, and the size of sodas; taxes on saturated fat and on calories; and mandated "healthy-options" on the menus of even privately run restaurants. These interventions have had varying degrees of success, but many seem to have a greater impact on rates of obesity than simply providing information about health risks and healthier lifestyles. The more interventionist policy options have, however, been implemented only slowly, in large part because of criticisms that they are unjustified infringements on the liberty of consumers. Food industry groups, free-market think tanks, and the popular press regard measures that incentivize or penalize particular food and lifestyle choices as unjustifiable state regulation of purely self-regarding behavior. Some even deny that obesity should be viewed as a public health problem at all. To counteract the liberty-oriented position, those who favor a more interventionist role for the state have recently argued for labeling obesity as a public health emergency. Policy-makers could then override concerns about individual liberty in order to pursue more interventionist policies designed to guide consumer choices toward healthier lifestyles. In this paper, we argue that, contrary to initial appearances, obesity possesses some of the morally relevant features of public health emergencies, though we do not argue that it actually constitutes one.