According to a standard account liberalism is committed to the rejection of legal paternalism.But the fact is that paternalistic policies are common currency in most liberal democracies, and liberal governments claim or at least assume that those policies are not inimical to liberal principles.My argument in this chapter is, first, that paternalistic interventions do infringe the right to direct one’s life, and that, therefore, the scope of this right cannot be redefined to conceal the conflict.However, the fact that there is an unavoidable conflict between individual sovereignty and paternalism does not mean that paternalism is necessarily unjustifiable.Second, since the right to direct one’s life is not absolute, it can be outweighed by considerations related to an individual’s positive freedom.I will argue that the protection of an agent’s positive freedom is a permissible moral goal, and, sometimes, this goal can offset the right to direct one’s life. I acknowledge that paternalistic actions set back individuals’ autonomous choices, but I nonetheless claim that such interferences are justified because, on some occasions, positive freedom considerations outweigh the right to sovereign individual choice.