2. Incomplete Arguments for Tobacco Control

Over 8 million people die from tobacco smoking each year – no other behavioural risk factor causes more disability, ill-health and death (WHO 2023: 34). Given the magnitude of these harms, it is not hard to see why public health advocates have pressed governments to take the strongest possible measures to combat tobacco use, including measures that seemingly involve overriding or changing people’s preferences. But can such measures be reconciled with a liberal commitment to respecting people’s own ideas of the good? This section surveys some of the main argumentative strategies in the literature on paternalism. Although they all contain important truths, I suggest that they do not provide a fully adequate answer to the question at hand.

Consider first the argument that smokers are not the only victims of smoking. Indeed, smoking can have significant externalities such as second-hand smoke, environmental pollution or increased public healthcare spending. This suggests that smoking is a preference that governments are permitted to discourage due to its undesirable social costs. Just as we think that it is legitimate for government to cultivate environmentally friendly habits to curb the harms of climate change, smoking may be discouraged on account of the costs it imposes on others. The popularity of this argument no doubt derives from its ability to place demanding, liberty-restricting public health interventions under the auspices of a broadly Millean form of antipaternalism, according to which ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others’ (Mill 2003 [Reference Mill1859]: 80). So, does the harm principle provide a justification for shaping preferences?

It is not clear that it does. For one thing, the third-party harms associated with a given activity can often be minimized without eliminating the preference for engaging in it. For example, one can ban smoking in public places without adopting more demanding tobacco control policies that discourage the preference for smoking altogether, much in the same way that drink driving laws need not aim at banning or denormalizing alcohol consumption in general. Moreover, unavoidable externalities are often less sizable than the argument assumes. It is a debated empirical question whether smoking in fact imposes costs, is neutral, or even has positive effects on public finances.Footnote ⁴ And even if costs were substantial, these could be internalized, for instance through higher insurance premiums paid by smokers. Granted, it is not always possible to minimize or internalize all costs. Yet we often accept some level of harm to protect individual spheres of agency: we tolerate a certain degree of noise pollution, for example, because discouraging all noisy activities would eliminate freedoms that we value. Strictly and consistently applied, the harm argument would therefore likely make many more preferences targets of government intervention than a liberal society would be ready to accept (see also Heath Reference Heath2020: 319–321).

A second set of arguments deny the premise that behaviour change interventions in the field of tobacco control in fact attempt to change people’s preferences. Instead, denormalization and endgame approaches could be simply helping people realize their own goals, thus falling under the remit of means (and not ends) paternalism. Even Mill (2003 [Reference Mill1859]: 158) thought that we would be justified in forcibly preventing an unsuspecting passer-by from crossing a broken bridge, ‘for liberty consists in doing what one desires, and he does not desire to fall into the river’. One way to make this argument in the case of smoking is to invoke the idea of latent preferences: despite their revealed preferences – that is, the preferences that can be inferred from their behaviour – smokers may have a ‘higher-order’ desire to stop smoking (Goodin Reference Goodin1991). This argument can be bolstered by pointing to surveys and other empirical research that shows that most smokers wish they could quit, and regret having started in the first place (for discussion of this evidence, see Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2021). If smokers truly prefer not to smoke, then tobacco control efforts would not be attempting to change individual preferences; rather, they would be assisting in their satisfaction.

It is hard to disagree with the proposition that revealed and latent preferences can sometimes conflict, but what follows from it is far from obvious. In fact, smokers’ preferences may be inconsistent in more ways than one. The wish to stop smoking may coexist with a preference that government should not discourage or ban smoking; by helping realize the former, government may be frustrating the latter (Grill and Voigt Reference Grill and Voigt2016: 298). Moreover, when a desire to stop smoking conflicts with a desire to continue, it is not clear that government should take the former to be more authoritative or ‘higher-order’. While it is tempting to treat survey answers as considered judgements, these answers may often simply reflect what respondents perceive to be socially acceptable, rather than their true or deeper preferences (Whitman and Rizzo Reference Whitman and Rizzo2015: 421). What is more, even when latent preferences to stop smoking are genuine, the formation of these preferences may be partly explained by public health efforts that reduce the appeal of smoking, such as taxation and stigmatization. Presumably some people would not express regret about smoking if smoking were still as cheap and publicly acceptable as it was only a few decades ago. Hence, governments might be justifying paternalistic policies by appealing to preferences they have helped shape in the first place, and it would seem to bend the meaning of the term to consider this a form of means paternalism.

A third argument goes further: because people typically form their preference for smoking under conditions that do not guarantee autonomy or voluntariness, government is justified in overriding these preferences. Consider the fact that most smokers pick up the habit as children or teenagers, when informed consent can hardly be assumed. And if we assumed it, the highly addictive nature of tobacco would still cast doubt on the voluntariness of the choice to continue smoking. Even among adults, well-known cognitive errors and biases – the tendency to engage in wishful thinking, the propensity to discount future risks, etc. – suggest a degree of irrationality in the formation of smokers’ preferences (Goodin Reference Goodin1989; Thaler and Sunstein Reference Thaler and Sunstein2008; Conly Reference Conly2012). These observations can be taken to support the view that government should help satisfy ‘reconstructed’ preferences, that is, the preferences that people would hold if they were perfectly rational, fully informed, entirely autonomous and so on. Under these circumstances, smoking would not be valued more highly than health, longevity and other important goals. This argument goes further than the last because in this case, paternalistic interference is based on what we could call hypothetical latent preferences.

Again, the question is whether this is still a form of means paternalism. In Mill’s famous bridge scenario, intervention is justified to correct a simple case of misinformation: once the passer-by is informed about the danger of the broken bridge, he immediately acknowledges that being prevented from crossing it advanced his own goals. By contrast, the argument we are considering here goes much further because the gap between expressed and assumed preferences is significantly larger. When that gap it is too large, paternalistic subjects may simply not recognize the reconstructed preferences ascribed to them as their own (see Brännmark Reference Brännmark2023: 50, citing Rosati Reference Rosati1995). Indeed, we often take preferences that are less than fully informed and rational – say, our choice of career or romantic partners – to be central to our idea of the good, and we would reject any attempt by government to ‘correct’ the errors in their formation. Granted, preferences to smoke will rarely be as central to a person’s life plan. But it seems equally hard to argue that by appealing to highly idealized, reconstructed preferences we are promoting a person’s good by their own lights, as opposed to by some external or less subjective standard.

What if, after initial resistance, smokers do eventually come to see tobacco control measures as promoting their own ends? This brings us to a fourth argument to place these measures under the banner of means paternalism. Interventions may be justified on the basis of ex post preferences, that is, the preferences that people come to hold as a result of the intervention. Like the passer-by in Mill’s broken bridge scenario, smokers may retrospectively welcome the intervention – perhaps not immediately, but after some period of adaptation. Studies indeed suggest that a large majority of former smokers are happy they stopped (Shahab and West Reference Shahab and West2009). Hence, tobacco control measures could be seen as a form of paternalism that respects people’s preferences, albeit those they are yet to endorse.

However, there are several issues with the argument. First, it is not clear that the empirical evidence supports the premise that ex-smokers are happier when they have been made to stop, as opposed to when they have stopped of their own accord. But even leaving such practical worries aside, what is missing is an explanation for why people’s later preferences should be more authoritative than their present ones. Surely the justifiability of a preference-shaping intervention cannot derive solely from its success. If that were the case, government could force or nudge people to adopt the official religion, say, and claim that satisfaction with the change at some later point in time justified the policy. At the very least, then, the argument would need to explain why appealing to future preferences is permissible in some cases, even when it seems off-bounds in so many others.

All the argumentative strategies I have sketched contain valuable insights, and my aim is not to dismiss them entirely. Instead, I want to suggest that while some of these arguments may be compelling in their own right, they do not effectively show that tobacco control measures either do not involve shaping preferences, or that they do so in ways that are consistent with the idea of means paternalism.

3. Preferences and Neutrality

Given the difficulties of placing tobacco control measures under the umbrella of means paternalism, one might conclude that they run afoul of neutralist liberal commitments. I want to resist this conclusion. The focus on means paternalism, I will suggest, is misleading because it relies on an incomplete account of what it means for government to respect people’s preferences, and a simplistic understanding of preferences themselves. Once we begin to unpick these ideas, it becomes clear that it is not generally impermissible for liberal states to shape people’s preferences; indeed, they are even required to take an active interest in the development of people’s desires, values and goals. The rationale for tobacco control policies is best understood in this light, or so I will argue.

The literature on paternalism is full of examples where goals and values are imposed on people against their will: an adult’s innocuous drug habit is criminalized, a woman seeking an abortion is forced to undergo assessments designed to dissuade her, a terminal cancer patient is denied assisted suicide. In cases like these, we assume that individuals have clearly defined and settled preferences which are subsequently frustrated, overridden or substituted. As the previous discussion indicates, it is not always easy to identify an individual’s true preferences. The same individual may hold different preferences at different points in time, or she may have goals and desires at different levels of generality and specificity (that is to say, some ends are means to further ends). Yet despite these complications, there persists a presumption that it is possible to identify preferences that can serve as the basis for means paternalistic interventions. And the crucial criterion is that these preferences are genuinely those of the individual herself, as opposed to preferences imposed externally. Only when they are authentic can a liberal government claim to respect people’s own ideas of how to live their lives.

This picture assumes that it is straightforward to ascertain the authenticity of preferences. It simply takes for granted that a clear line can be drawn between our own ideas about how to lead our lives, and those of others. This assumption is almost axiomatic in much of the field of economics. Neoclassical economists assume that people act rationally to satisfy their preferences, where preferences in turn are understood as stable and independent ‘primitives’ whose origin is not scrutinized (Stigler and Becker Reference Stigler and Becker1977; on preferences as primitives, see Angner Reference Angner2018). Behavioural economists have chipped away at assumptions of rationality, but the underlying notion of preference remains much the same.Footnote ⁵ Put simply, ‘most economists have not asked how we come to want and value the things we do’ (Bowles Reference Bowles1998: 75). In truth, of course, preferences are not formed in a vacuum. Individuals form their own views of what matters in life against a complex background of social relations, norms, institutions and arrangements. This is not a controversial observation in most social sciences. As Barry (Reference Barry1965: 75) once remarked, ‘the dependence of wants on the social environment is a commonplace of sociology, which could almost be defined as the intellectual consequence of taking it seriously’.

Paying attention to the formation of preferences sheds light on what the liberal commitment to neutrality can and cannot require. It is tempting to oppose any official influence on people’s ideas of the good, but closer reflection shows that this is an impossible standard. If preferences are influenced by the social environment and the social environment in turn is influenced by politics, then preferences cannot be exogenous to politics. Consider some of the ways in which preference-shaping is unavoidable. At the most fundamental level, governments shape preferences by setting the legal, political and economic frameworks within which people pursue their aims. The permissions and prohibitions defined by these frameworks create expectations of entitlements, and with them, views about what is worth pursuing. ‘Whether people have a preference for a commodity, a right or anything else’, Sunstein (Reference Sunstein1991: 8) observes, ‘is in part a function of whether the government has allocated it to them in the first instance’. Various psychological mechanisms are at play here, such as the ‘exposure effect’ that leads us to like what we know, or the ‘endowment effect’ that leads us to attach higher value to what we already have (see Lichtenstein and Slovic Reference Lichtenstein and Slovic2006). Existing institutions and arrangements also influence preference-formation by setting social norms, harnessing the human desire to conform to them. Norms affect individual motivations by creating incentives and disincentives, effectively acting as taxes on preferences that diverge from social expectations (Lessig Reference Lessig1995; Sunstein Reference Sunstein1996). These mechanisms together influence broader cultural learning processes, by transmitting values, desires and goals across generations through processes of socialization (Wildavsky Reference Wildavsky1987; Bowles Reference Bowles1998).

Consider, for example, the legalization of same-sex marriages. Recent changes in various jurisdictions have affected public opinions, with decreased homophobic attitudes being partly explained by the way policies, laws and institutions legitimate and naturalize same-sex partnerships (Flores and Barclay Reference Flores and Barclay2016; Tankard and Paluck Reference Tankard and Paluck2017). In other words, whether someone holds preferences to associate or dissociate with gay and lesbian people is partly a result of the existing legal framework. Governments influence preferences on a wide range of issues that can be regulated in more ways than one, ranging from genetically modified foods (GMOs) to gun ownership. The broader point is that rules must be set one way or another: buying GMO foods and carrying guns are either made easy or difficult for consumers by the chosen legal and regulatory frameworks. These rules have an expressive dimension that shapes social norms, and these norms end up influencing what people come to view as their own preferences. This is the sense in which preference-shaping is unavoidable: if ‘ought implies can’, neutrality of effect seems a hopeless ideal. But, of course, this does not absolve government from seeking neutrality in its aims and justifications (Rawls Reference Rawls1996: 191–195; Quong Reference Quong2011: 18).

At this point, a critic might object that there is an important difference between a government that acknowledges the passive effect of the social environment on human development, and one that actively attempts to inculcate and instil certain preferences. Indeed, the significance of the social environment might be taken as precisely the reason to insist on minimal official intervention into said environment. On this view, government should limit itself to establishing a minimal institutional and legal framework that defines basic entitlements and rights, leaving the rest to the organic interplay of individuals in the family, civil society and – perhaps most importantly in advanced economies – the market. Having established that framework, government retreats from the business of shaping people’s preferences and lets the chips fall where they may. People turn out the way they turn out, and government may at most help them attain what they already want. Call this the laissez-faire view.

It is worth emphasizing that this view does not amount to the rejection of preference-shaping as much as the choice for it to occur in one particular way. There are important differences between a highly interventionist government and one that takes a laissez-faire approach, but the latter must be justified just like the former. Any choice of institutional design has consequences for preference-formation: there is no natural default. The market, in particular, is not simply a neutral mechanism to discover and satisfy pre-social preferences. As Rawls (Reference Rawls1971: 259) notes when discussing the design of the basic structure of society:

The choice of a laissez-faire framework needs to be justified just like any other form of preference-shaping. But closer reflection reveals several problems, which the case of tobacco exemplifies. For one thing, the laissez-faire approach can leave people vulnerable to the preference-shaping efforts of other, more powerful parties. It is well-known that large corporations expend considerable resources to exploit the informational and cognitive shortcomings of consumers, thereby manipulating preferences for private gain (e.g. Akerlof and Shiller Reference Akerlof and Shiller2015; on ‘market nudges’ see Ivanković and Engelen Reference Ivanković and Engelen2024). The tobacco industry is a case in point, having invented much of modern marketing, from colour billboards to product placement in films and television (Proctor Reference Proctor2011: 59). These marketing efforts encourage the formation of life-long habits by appealing to the emotional and psychological needs of different consumer groups, for example associating smoking with daredevilry among boys and young men, or empowerment among girls and young women. Liberals may be suspicious of the idea that government take an active role in shaping preferences because they value a sense of authenticity or independence in the way people choose and pursue their life plans (e.g. Dworkin Reference Dworkin2011: 211). But it is precisely this value that we jeopardize when we allow powerful market actors to shape people’s preferences for their own ends.

What is more, preferences that are formed through market interactions can lead to harmful outcomes, both collectively and individually. Few deny that government should help solve collective action problems and market failures. In the face of environmental harms, for example, governments attempt to inculcate norms against littering and wastefulness, and to promote preferences for environmentally conscious forms of consumption. Similar considerations regarding collective harms and externalities may justify interventions in markets for tobacco products, including marketing restrictions or smoking bans in public places. It is also plausible that government should sometimes intervene in the process of preference-formation for the sake of individuals themselves. Consider the problem of ‘adaptive preferences’, where people form their preferences against an unjustly constrained set of options (Elster Reference Elster1983; Sen Reference Sen1987; Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum2001). Classic examples include people who reject the value of education because they have never had the opportunity to experience it, or women who adapt their expectations to what is feasible in a patriarchal society. These preferences, which undermine the attainment of important goods, are formed under conditions that do not guarantee voluntariness or autonomy. The same is true in the case of many smokers: smoking has been identified as a mechanism to deal with stress among socially disadvantaged groups, it is highly addictive, and many smokers underestimate its risks in an attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance (Goodin Reference Goodin1989: 582). Even if one disagrees with attempts to override or frustrate these kinds of preferences, it is hard to deny the desirability of reforming social and economic institutions so that people do not develop these preferences in the future.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of problems with the laissez-faire view. But it suffices to show that removing government entirely from the process of preference-formation is unlikely to be a desirable solution, even if it were possible. To be sure, none of this is to suggest that government should always take a highly interventionist role in the process of individual preference-formation. It may well be that leaving markets, families and civil society to their own devices is, for the most part, the most justifiable course of action. My point is that a requirement to justify the role of government remains whether it is active or passive actor in this process. Because it is responsible for setting the institutional framework through which the social environment shapes preferences, it must also assume responsibility for the outcomes. Hence the question is not whether it should avoid shaping people’s preferences, but rather how it can do so in a way that is consistent with liberal principles.

4. Liberal Preference-shaping

When and how should a liberal government intervene in the process of preference-formation? It is not disputed that intervention can be warranted to discourage preferences detrimental to the justice and stability of a democratic society (say, desires to harm others). What is controversial is the idea of shaping people’s preferences to advance the good. Those sympathetic to this idea are often associated with perfectionism, the view that government should create the conditions for human flourishing by promoting some objective account of value. Liberal perfectionists champion freedom – in particular the ideal of an autonomous life – and argue that individuals should be helped to lead worthwhile lives in line with this ideal. Neutralists, on the other hand, insist that government should not take a stance on what makes one way to live more worthwhile than another. Hence, it should justify its actions without appealing to any contested conception of the good. I will not delve into this debate (for an overview, see Quong Reference Quong2011: Ch. 1). Instead, I want to show that even if we confine ourselves to neutralist premises, government must be in the business of shaping preferences.

A government committed to neutrality should not promote any particular conception of the good, but it cannot avoid questions regarding the good altogether. One reason for this is the need to compare individuals and social groups to assess claims of distributive justice. Who is relatively disadvantaged in society? What do they lack that others have? And why does it matter? It is difficult to answer these questions without presupposing the value of certain goods and conditions. It is possible, however, to create a public standard of value that people with divergent views of the good life can agree on. Rawls’ theory of justice solves the problem by proposing a ‘thin’ theory of the good endorsed by contract parties behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that obscures their own identities. This enables the construction of an index of primary goods, understood as ‘various social conditions and all-purpose means that are generally necessary to enable citizens adequately to … pursue their determinate conceptions of the good’ (Rawls Reference Rawls2001: 57). Primary goods include liberties, opportunities, wealth, health and intelligence. Another option, first proposed by Sen (Reference Sen and McMurrin1980), is to appeal to capabilities, understood as real freedoms to be or do things such as being well-nourished, receiving an adequate education, enjoying good health and so on. If these capabilities are not conceptualized as elements of human flourishing but as political demands, they similarly serve to identify goods that allow each individual to pursue their own views of what matters in life, without taking a position on the merit of these views.

These generic goods, as I will call them, serve not only to assess claims of distributive justice that citizens make on one another; they also provide the yardstick for liberal preference-shaping. Given that government inevitably influences preferences through the design of fundamental social arrangements, it must ensure the protection of generic goods and conditions essential for any reasonable life plan. This involves intervening in the process of preference-formation whenever these goods are under threat. For instance, if the free market allows corporations to manipulate consumers into favouring unhealthy foods, these preferences may be checked through education campaigns, regulation or taxes. If existing infrastructure overly promotes sedentary lifestyles, ‘active travel’ policies may encourage preferences for healthier forms of transport. These measures need not assume the superiority of certain preferences or conceptions of the good. Nor do they require imbuing health (or any other generic good) with intrinsic value, encouraging people to think of it as a goal to be pursued for its own sake. Instead, they can be justified as interventions into the process of preference-formation to safeguard holdings of generic goods that people have reason to value for any specific life plan.Footnote ⁶

This argument for preference-shaping has an intergenerational dimension. Social arrangements persist over time, so they must be justifiable not only to currently existing people, but also to the people who come to be. Much of the literature on intergenerational justice has focused on questions of distributive justice among generations, for instance the just rate of saving and the availability of resources across time. Sometimes neglected is the fact that our choices in the present also influence the kinds of people who will exist in the future – their desires, values and goals. The two questions are intertwined. For example, neglecting investments in education today may limit opportunities for future generations. But by the same token, it would be unfair to encourage future generations to form preferences the satisfaction of which would require more resources than justice would allow them. Preferences that overly prioritize material consumption, for example, may not be environmentally sustainable within the constraints of a fair social system. Hence, to ensure each person has a fair opportunity to pursue their individual conception of the good, government must help shape preferences in a way that secures the all-purpose means that enable this pursuit. Consider some historic examples of health-limiting social practices: footbinding, using arsenic as a skincare treatment, drinking methanol-based spirits. Governments sought to discourage these practices not only for the good of the individuals who engaged in them, but, perhaps more importantly, for those who would have otherwise formed preferences for them. The denormalization of these practices thus removed significant health risks that undermined the pursuits of future people. The same reasoning plausibly underlies contemporary behaviour change efforts in the field of public health.

Of course, none of this guarantees that preference-shaping interventions will be uncontroversial. Few people reject freedom, wealth, health or leisure in the abstract, but in practice they may weigh their relative importance differently. It follows that any given intervention aimed at inculcating preferences for a healthy lifestyle may invite the charge of ‘healthism’ despite protecting a generic good. I address this concern in more depth in the following section. The point I wish to emphasize here, however, is that worries concerning ends paternalism or perfectionism would not be among the reasons to reject the intervention. Liberal neutralists often object to efforts to interfere with how individuals form, prioritize and pursue their ends because such interventions may imply a lack of confidence in individuals’ capacity to make these decisions competently (Quong Reference Quong2011: 100–101). But preference-shaping interventions need not express a judgement of any given individual’s ends, let alone their ability to choose the right ends (in the case of future people, there aren’t even formed ends that could be the object of such a judgement). Instead, they simply reflect an account of the goods and conditions that individuals tend to require in a fair society. Compare: interventions aimed at discouraging unfair gender norms need not involve a judgement of any individual woman’s choice to exercise a traditional family role; instead, they may simply follow from a requirement of justice to ensure that social arrangements uphold a conception of citizens as free and equal. Similarly, discouraging preferences that undermine the realization of generic goods need not constitute an official statement of what is worth pursuing in life.Footnote ⁷

Granted, like paternalistic interventions, these preference-shaping efforts can affect people’s ability to form their life plans independently and autonomously. However, it is not controversial that such interferences can be justified in some circumstances. In the case of children, even ends paternalism is commonly thought unobjectionable because parents are said to have wide-ranging prerogatives to instil preferences – for example, religious commitments – that they judge will make their children’s lives go well. It is also widely held that society at large must play a role in the ethical development of children in ways that may restrict parental rights. For example, governments are justified in intervening when the inculcation of religious commitments severely undermine children’s lifetime expectations for generic goods such as health. In the case of adults, autonomous agency raises thornier questions, and several factors will affect the justifiability of shaping preferences. For one thing, it matters how important the targeted preferences are likely to be within the overall structure of people’s conceptions of the good. For example, religious commitments tend to reflect much deeper values than consumer preferences, and a health-promoting intervention that influences the former faces a higher justificatory bar than one that targets the latter. The means by which preference are shaped also matter. Interventions can be coercive (e.g. bans, taxes) or persuasive (e.g. incentives, nudges), and they can appeal to reason (e.g. information, education), or attempt to bypass rational agency (e.g. subliminal messaging, manipulation) (for a related discussion, see MacKay Reference MacKay2019: 444–445). I do not aim to fully resolve the question of where to draw the line between permissible and impermissible interventions. But other things being equal, showing respect towards autonomous agents clearly requires the least intrusive and most transparent means.

5. Shaping Preferences Through Tobacco Control

I argued that we can construct a neutral, non-perfectionist argument for preference-shaping built around the idea of generic goods. Tobacco control policies aimed at discouraging unhealthy preferences are plausible examples of this form of preference-shaping. But as I mentioned before, the fact they protect a generic good cannot be sufficient to demonstrate their permissibility. People have interests in health, but also in all sorts of other generic goods, such as liberties and freedoms, material prosperity, social status and so on. Hence it is not enough to base specific policies on a neutral footing. It also needs to be shown that the balance between the different competing interests is justifiable, and that no other moral constraints are violated in the pursuit of the good in question. After all, the ‘healthism’ worry is not just that the state promotes health, but that it elevates it above all other concerns.

What is required, then, is a judgment on whether the proposed intervention strikes a reasonable balance among competing goods. Various considerations need to be reflected in this judgement, including how much the intervention advances or undermines various types of goods; how central the affected preferences are likely to be within the overall structure of people’s conceptions of the good, the nature of the means to bring about the intervention, and various pragmatic considerations surrounding the effectiveness of the intervention and the risk of unintended outcomes. In practical terms, a plausible way to proceed is to examine the preference-shaping policies in question and consider them from the point of view of all affected parties. By examining how the adoption of these policies would affect the interests of social groups impacted by them, we assess the strength of potential complaints against the policy, and thus its overall justifiability. Now, abstract normative reasoning may not always provide a definitive answer as to whether a given intervention is justified. The relevant considerations may be indeterminate, and different societies may reasonably attach different weights to them in their specific local contexts. Such hard cases require democratic consultation on collective priorities (Kniess Reference Kniess2019: 419–420). Even here, however, a general normative analysis can reveal the merits of the relevant considerations and help define the range of justifiable policies. Although a comprehensive analysis for the case of denormalization and endgame proposals is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth sketching the relevant considerations as they apply to the three primarily affected groups: non-smokers, future people and existing smokers.Footnote ⁸