I don't know what Balan would say, but our evolutionary history required parents to have instincts toward genuinely beneficial things for their children, not simply behavior that gives a fake altruism signal while hurting them.

Strictly speaking, this is just an instinct toward doing things that help your children spread their genes, but this largely coincides with what we would consider helpful, at least in the long term.

Robin, I don't see any disconnect here. I certainly did not mean to suggest that parents shouldn't be paternalistic towards their children. Of course they must be, though there is room for legitimate argument about how much paternalism is really necessary, and I think often less is better than more. The point of the post was simply to point out that people often disguise cruelty as justifiable paternalism, and that that's bad. Same idea with government paternalism. I think there is a real necessary role for it, but it is susceptible to abuse. As I argued in our debate, in times and places where the abuse was very severe, we would have been better off getting rid of it altogether. But in decently well-functioning societies, that's not the case. And if we got even better at limiting the abuses, I'd probably be in favor of even more paternalism.