Let them eat eggs

From Roy Sutherland's Wiki Man column in the February 28th, 2009 edition of the Spectator. His article is in the context of a recent change on the part of the British health authorities in which they reversed their guidance of many years standing to the public to restrict the number of eggs eaten per week.

It is an example of the 'hair-shirt fallacy' - the unwritten rule which states that, when in doubt, you should recommend whatever course of action involves the most self-denial. Hair-shirtism is a safe bet: people are instinctively Manichaean and easily persuaded that physical pleasures are bad. Also, while experts are routinely sued for negligence, no one gets punished for excessive caution. The Millennium Bug computer scare is widely believed by many commentators to have been a glitch inflated by scaremongers to apocalyptic status; yet who was sued for failing to downplay the problem?

Adam Smith spotted this bias when he remarked that 'Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.'

I never really satisfactorily decoded Smith's comment in the past but with Sutherland's context it finally comes into focus.