Among Joel Feinberg's almost innumerable achievements are his development and defense of the sovereign-right conception of autonomy and its corresponding rejection of hard legal paternalism. According to Feinberg, a competent individual's voluntary, self-regarding conduct falls within the protected realm of sovereign self-rule and is therefore immune from coercive, paternalistic interference by the state. It does not matter whether the self-harm the state wants to prevent is big or the coercion needed to prevent it is small. The coercive interference would be illegitimate because “sovereignty is an all or nothing concept; one is entitled to absolute control of whatever is within one's domain however trivial it may be.”