Paternalistic interference in an older person’s choices or actions appears to relegate the needs, values, and interests of that person as less valuable than the judgement of others about what is in the older person’s interests. For relational egalitarians, concerned to promote a society in which people stand in democratic relations of equality, paternalism prima facie undermines relational equality. This chapter draws on exploration of the sources of older people’s vulnerability and dependence on others for care, to better understand when and why paternalistic interference is objectionable. Objectionable paternalistic interference, on my view, occurs where it is either an effect of social relations of domination and oppression that prevent people from having their needs met without autonomy-undermining interference or it creates the conditions under which domination, exploitation, and oppression flourish, generating pathogenic vulnerabilities, including the risk of the person being denied the services they require to meet their needs.

Chapter 4 further justifies the Universal Partial Defence (UPD) on a paradigmatic plane by exploring the second (political) deficit to which the Real Person Approach (RPA) responds. It deploys the principle of parsimony to explain how the weight afforded to the dominant rational agency account contributes to a form of conceptual punitiveness at culpability evaluation, which is reinforced by a broader culture of responsibilisation. Applying the RPA, the chapter conceptualises punitive excess at culpability evaluation as a form of pathogenic vulnerability, unearthing a discrete version of misrecognition at this site. In response, the recognitive justice feature of the RPA is engaged to consider how we might ameliorate this particular variant of social injustice. Drawing on recent scholarship promoting a more modest approach to criminal responsibility attribution, the principle of parsimony is reauthenticated as a core tenet of the criminal law, supporting the call for a UPD at the doctrinal level.