Michael Bloomberg's three terms in New York City's mayoral office are coming to a close. His model of governance for public health influenced cities and governments around the world. What should we make of that model? This essay introduces a symposium in which ethicists Sarah Conly, Roger Brownsword and Alex Rajczi discuss that legacy.

Policy makers are understandably interested—for both political and moral reasons—in following Thaler and Sunstein's recommendation to use ‘choice architecture’ , or other ‘nudges’, to promote desirable behaviour in ways that are allegedly compatible with personal freedom.1 Yashar Saghai's intricate analysis shows that simply maintaining the target's choice-set is insufficient to preserve the target's freedom when the nudge bypasses the target's deliberative capacities—as it is specifically designed to do.2 In his friendly amendment to Thaler and Sunstein's project, Saghai advances a more (...) robust account of nudges in which fewer policies would count as nudges, but those that do count as nudges would be less troublesome. In this commentary, I briefly discuss several issues raised by Saghai's project, some of which go beyond the topic of nudges. How important is definitional salvaging? If a ‘substantially controlling’ influence were more efficacious in promoting healthy behaviours, we would have a trade-off between the efficacy of a policy and its compatibility with freedom. Saghai states that an influence can be morally permissible even if it is ‘substantially controlling’ and, therefore, does not qualify as a nudge. So even on Saghai's definitional project it is not clear how much work it does in distinguishing the morally permissible from the morally impermissible. The …. (shrink)

Although Saghai primarily focuses on distinguishing nudges from other forms of influence, ‘Salvaging the Concept of Nudge’ offers a definition of nudges that could blunt much of the moral criticism of nudging and clarify debates about specific policies.1 The definition he offers, however, restricts the class of nudges to include only those influences that counter an individual's preferences; thus, contrary to what Thaler and Sunstein say, nudges cannot be instances of libertarian paternalism.1 ,2According to Saghai, ‘A nudges B when A (...) makes it more likely that B will ϕ, primarily by triggering B's shallow cognitive processes, while A's influence preserves B's choice-set and is substantially non-controlling ’. Because the second condition—the substantial non-control condition—is supposed to ensure that nudges preserve freedom in a robust sense, this condition warrants careful attention.According to Saghai, A's influence is substantially non-controlling ‘when B could easily not ϕ if she did not want to ϕ’. To determine whether a particular influence constitutes a nudge, we must ask whether from B's perspective that influence is easily resistible. …. (shrink)

In the world of Austrian neonatal intensive care units, the role of ethics is recognized only partially. The normatively tense cases that are at the backdrop of this essay concern the situations around the limit of viability, which is the point in the development of an extremely preterm infant at which there are chances of extra-uterine survival. This essay first outlines the key explicit ethical challenges that are mainly concerned with notions of uncertainty and best interest. Then, it attempts to (...) elucidate the less explicit ethical challenges related to the notion of nudging in the neonatal practice and argue that the role of ethics needs to be recognized more—with the focus on the role of virtue ethics—in order to improve the practice of neonatal medicine. (shrink)

Libertarian paternalism describes the idea of nudging—that is, steering individual decision-making while preserving freedom of choice. In medicine, libertarian paternalism has gained widespread attention, specifically with respect to interventions designed to promote healthy behaviours. Some scholars argue that nudges appropriately balance autonomy and paternalistic beneficence, while others argue that nudges inherently exploit cognitive weaknesses. This paper further explores the ethics of libertarian paternalism in public health. The use of nudges may infringe on an individual’s voluntary choice, autonomy and informed consent, (...) but they are ethically justified when there is a clear public health benefit to the manipulation of choice. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued that during the process of obtaining informed consent, physicians should try to nudge their patients towards consenting to the option the physician believes best, where a nudge is any influence that is expected to predictably alter a person’s behaviour without restricting her options. Some proponents of nudging even argue that it is a necessary and unavoidable part of securing informed consent. Here I argue that nudging is incompatible with obtaining informed consent. I assume informed consent requires (...) that a physician tells her patient the truth about her options and argue that nudging is incompatible with truth-telling. Instead, nudging satisfies Harry Frankfurt’s account of bullshit. (shrink)

Is it a stronger interference with people's freedom to withdraw options they currently have than to withhold similar options they do not have? Drawing on recent theorizing about sociopolitical freedom, this article identifies considerations that often make this the case for public policy. However, when applied to tobacco control, these considerations are shown to give us at best only very weak freedom-based reason to prioritize the status quo. This supports a popular argument for so-called “endgame” tobacco control measures: If we (...) believe that cigarettes would and should be withheld from entering markets in hypothetical scenarios in which they do not yet exist, then we also have reason to seek their abolition in situations, such as ours, in which cigarettes do exist—if necessary by banning their sale. The same considerations are then used to disarm objections that have recently been raised to using nudges in public policy. (shrink)

So‐called nudge policies utilize insights from behavioral science to achieve policy outcomes. Nudge policies try to improve people's decisions by changing the ways options are presented to them, rather than changing the options themselves or incentivizing or coercing people. Nudging has been met with great enthusiasm but also fierce criticism. This paper provides an overview of the debate on the ethics of nudging to date. After outlining arguments in favor of nudging, we first discuss different objections that all revolve around (...) the worry that nudging vitiates personal autonomy. We split up this worry into different dimensions of autonomy, such as freedom of choice, volitional autonomy, rational agency, and freedom as nondomination. We next discuss worries that nudging is manipulative, violates human dignity, and prevents more important structural reform. Throughout, we will present responses that proponents of nudging can muster. On the whole, we conclude that the objections fail to establish that the nudge program as a whole should be rejected. At the same time, they give us important guidance when moving towards an ethical assessment of nudges on a case‐by‐case basis. Towards the end, we provide some possible ways forward in debates around the ethics of nudging. (shrink)

In “Nudging and Informed Consent,” ShlomoCohen (2013) attempts to address the common objection against nudges that they are autonomy-thwarting because they foster irrationality. He explicitly focuses on informed consent, which he contrasts with the policy context in which health nudges are usually discussed. I think Cohen’s rich article is a significant contribution to the nudge literature. However, I have some concerns with the way he frames and motivates his inquiry...

Organisations increasingly use digital nudges to influence their workforces’ behaviour without coercion or incentives. This can expose employees to arbitrary domination by infringing on their autonomy through manipulation and indoctrination. Nudges might furthermore give rise to the phenomenon of “organised immaturity.” Adopting a balanced approach between overly optimistic and dystopian standpoints, I propose a framework for determining the moral permissibility of digital nudging in the workplace. In this regard, I argue that not only should organisations provide pre-discursive justification of nudges (...) but they should also ensure that employees can challenge their implementation whenever necessary through legitimation procedures. Building on Rainer Forst’s concept of the right to justification, this article offers a way to combine contract- and deliberation-based theories for addressing questions in business ethics. I further introduce the concept of meta-autonomy as a capacity that employees can acquire to counter threats of arbitrary domination and to mitigate organised immaturity. (shrink)

A central reason to worry that managers should not use nudges to influence employees is that doing so fails to treat employees as _rational_ and/or _autonomous_ (RA). Recent nudge defenders have marshaled a powerful line of response against this worry: in general, nudges treat us as the kind of RA agents we are, because nudges are apt to enhance our limited capacities for RA agency by improving our decision-making environments. Applied to managerial nudges, this would mean that when managers nudge (...) their employees, they generally bolster their employees’ limited RA agency and, thus, treat employees as the kinds of RA agents they are. My aim is to vindicate a qualified version of the initial worry from the nudge-defender response and, as a result, provide a clearer, more plausible framework for evaluating managerial nudges than what nudge critics have previously given. I do this, first, by showing how nudge defenders rely on equivocation between two different senses of “treating someone as RA.” The _value-preserving_ notion that supports the nudge-defender prescription to protect and enhance RA capacities is different from the _authority-recognizing_ notion that underwrites the initial worry about nudging. Second, I argue that the authority-recognizing notion of treating someone as RA implies that managerial nudges treat employees as RA just when the nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals. Third, I explain how, to determine when managerial nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals, we need to consider how employees surrender aspects of their equal, agency-grounded authority to managers. (shrink)

Is implementing the beneficent nudge program morally permissible in worlds like ours? I argue that there is reason for serious doubt. I acknowledge that beneficent nudging is highly various, that nudges are in some circumstances morally permissible and even called for, and that nudges may exhibit respect for genuine autonomy. Nonetheless, given the risk of epistemic injustice that nudges typically pose, neither the moral permissibility of beneficent nudging in the abstract, nor its case-by-case vindication, appears sufficient to justify implementing a (...) nudge program in worlds like ours. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice, I argue that the cogent defense of any nudge program, relative to worlds like ours, stands in need of serious attention to its potential for fostering or sustaining epistemic injustice. A more specific point hinges on recognizing a form of epistemic injustice not enough attended to in the literature to date, which I call reflective incapacitational injustice. This includes relative disadvantages in the attaining of the capacity to engage in critical reason, such as the capacity to go in for potentially critical reasoned deliberation and discursive exchange concerning ends. Since Cass Sunstein’s First Law of behaviorally informed regulation would be taken, in worlds like ours, to justify indeterminately many nudges leading to such epistemic injustice we have general grounds for doubting the moral permissibility of this nudge program. We should hence oppose the implementation of any such program until it is shown not to violate the demands of epistemic justice. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that sight—the capacity to see or to have visual experiences—has the power to give us knowledge about things in the environment and some of their properties in a distinctive way. Seeing the goose on the lake puts me in a position to know that it is there and that it has certain properties. And it does this by, when all goes well, presenting us with these features of the goose. One might even think that it is (...) part of what it is to be a perceptual capacity that it has this kind of epistemological power, such that a capacity that lacked this power could not be perceptual. My focus in this essay is the sense of taste—the capacity to taste things or to have taste experiences. It has sometimes been suggested that taste lacks sight-like epistemological power. I argue that taste has epistemological power of the same kind as does sight, but that as a matter of contingent fact, that power often goes unexercised in our contemporary environment. We can know about things by tasting them in the same kind of way as we can know about things by seeing them, but we often do not. I then consider the significance of this conclusion. I suggest that in one way, it matters little, because our primary interest in taste is not epistemic but aesthetic. But, I end by suggesting, it can matter ethically. (shrink)

Interventions designed to promote perspective taking are increasingly prevalent in educational settings, and are also being considered for applications in other domains. Thus far, these perspective-taking interventions (PTIs) have largely escaped philosophical attention, however they are sometimes prima facie morally problematic in at least two respects: they are neither transparent nor easy to resist. Nontransparent or hard-to-resist PTIs call for a moral defense and our primary aim in this paper is to provide such a defense. We offer two arguments for (...) the view that an exemplar PTI is morally permissible even though it is plausibly neither transparent nor easy to resist. The first argument appeals to an analogy between PTIs and permissible deceptive research practices. The second appeals to the way in which PTIs draw participants’ attention to their reasons for action. We also respond to the objection that, by imposing a particular conception of the good, PTIs violate liberal neutrality. (shrink)

Governments and policy-makers have of late displayed renewed attention to behavioural research in an attempt to achieve a range of policy goals, including health promotion. In particular, approaches which could be labelled as ‘nudges’ have gained traction with policy-makers. A range of objections to nudging have been raised in the literature. These include claims that nudges undermine autonomy and liberty, may lead to a decrease in responsibility in decision-making, lack transparency, involve deception, and involve manipulation, potentially occasioning coercion. In this (...) article I focus on claims of coercion, examining nudges within two of the main approaches to coercion—the pressure approach and the more recent enforcement approach. I argue that coercion entails an element of control over the behaviour of agents which is not plausibly displayed by the kinds of serious examples of nudges posited in the literature. (shrink)

The idea that it is acceptable to ‘nudge’ people to opt for the ‘healthy choice’ is gaining currency in health care policy circles. This article investigates whether researchers evaluating Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Screening Programmes (AAASP) attempt to influence decision makers in ways that are similar to popular ‘nudging’ techniques. Comparing two papers on the health economics of AAASP both published in the BMJ within the last 3 years, it is shown that the values chosen for the health economics modelling are (...) not representative of the literature and consistently favour the conclusions of the articles. It is argued (1) that this and other features of these articles may be justified within a Libertarian Paternalist framework as ‘nudging’ like ways of influencing decision makers, but also (2) that these ways of influencing decision makers raise significant ethical issues in the context of democratic decision making. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 64-66.

In an analysis of recent work on nudging we distinguish three positions on the relationship between nudging founded in libertarian paternalism and the protection of personal autonomy through informed consent. We argue that all three positions fail to provide adequate protection of personal autonomy in the clinical context. Acknowledging that nudging may be beneficial, we suggest a fourth position according to which nudging and informed consent are valuable in different domains of interaction.

Nudging works through dispositions to decide with specific heuristics, and has three component parts. A nudge is a feature of an environment that enables such a disposition; a person is nudged when such a disposition is triggered; and a person performs a nudged action when such a disposition manifests in action. This analysis clarifies an autonomy-based worry about nudging as used in public policy or for private profit: that a person’s ability to reason well is undermined when she is nudged. (...) Reasoning well is a component of self-guidance, which is an aspect of autonomy and so something there is reason to promote, preserve, or respect. However, a person can reason well when she is nudged: Many of these heuristics are good rules to reason with, and she can be flexible with respect to them when she takes there to be a better way to reason. Along the way, this paper uncovers several design specifications for responsible nudging, and discusses open empirical questions. However, nudging’s being compatible with reasoning well crystallizes a distinct worry about manipulation: that nudge designers can rely on nudged people guiding themselves toward the designers’ own ends. Manipulation of this sort exploits one aspect of autonomy (namely, self-guidance) to undermine autonomy in other respects. (shrink)

It is a common experience among care professionals that persons with dementia often say ‘no’ to conventional caring measures such as taking medication, eating or having a shower. This tendency to say ‘no’ may also concern the use of assistive technologies such as fall detectors, mobile safety alarms, Internet for social contact and robots. This paper provides practical recommendations for care professionals in home health care and social care about how to respond to such resistiveness towards assistive technologies. Apart from (...) the option of accepting the ‘no’, it discusses a number of methods for influencing persons with dementia in order to overcome the ‘no’. These methods range from various non-coercive measures—including nudging—to coercion. It is argued that while conventional caring measures like those mentioned are essential for survival, health or hygiene, assistive technologies are commonly merely potentially beneficial supplements. With this in mind, it is concluded that care professionals should be more restrictive in using methods of influence involving some degree of pressure regarding assistive technologies than regarding conventional caring measures. (shrink)

Nudging is a concept in behavioural science, political theory and economics that proposes indirect suggestions to try to achieve non-forced compliance and to influence the decision making and behaviour of groups and individuals. Researchers in medical ethics are currently discussing whether nudging is ethically permissible in healthcare. In this article, we examine current knowledge about how different decisions are made and how this decision-making process pertains to patients. We view this knowledge in light of the nursing project and the ongoing (...) debate regarding the ethical legitimacy of nudging in healthcare. We argue that it is insufficient to discuss nudging in nursing and healthcare in light of free will and patient autonomy alone. Sometimes, nurses must take charge and exhibit leadership in the nurse–patient relationship. From the perspective of nursing as leadership, nudging becomes a useful tool for directing and guiding patients towards the shared goals of health, recovery and independence and away from suffering. The use of nudging in nursing to influence patients’ decisions and actions must be in alignment with the nursing project and in accordance with patients’ own values and goals. (shrink)

The realm of non-rational influence, which includes nudging, is home to many other morally interesting phenomena. In this paper, I introduce the term bumping, to discuss the category of unintentional non-rational influence. Bumping happens constantly, wherever people make choices in environments where they are affected by other people. For instance, doctors will often bump their patients as patients make choices about what treatments to pursue. In some cases, these bumps will systematically tend to make patients’ decisions worse. Put another way: (...) doctors will sometimes harm their patients by bumping them in systematic ways. I use the case of medical overuse, the provision of medical services where the likely harm outweighs the likely benefit to the patient, as a touchstone for arguing that doctors who systematically bump their patients towards harm can be blameworthy for their unwitting influence. (shrink)

Critics have long dismissed paternalistic choice architecture as conceptually muddled at best and oxymoronic at worst. In this article, I argue that this criticism remains true despite recent replies to the contrary. Further, I suggest that a similar conceptual criticism also applies to non-paternalistic choice architecture. This is due to a three-way tension between the effectiveness, avoidability, and distinctiveness of each nudge. To illustrate this tension, I provide a novel explanation of the mechanics of nudging and a taxonomy of these (...) interventions. I then argue that choice architects who defend the distinctiveness of nudging according to how it guides our behaviour via our unreflective intuitive reasoning encounter a trilemma because the distinctiveness of nudging hinges on interventions being both avoidable and effective. Choice architects cannot achieve this aim without harnessing both our automatic and reflective systems of thought in tandem. However, this diminishes the distinctive character of nudging by bringing it closer to other traditional policy interventions. This establishes the choice architect’s trilemma: a nudge is likely to be either ineffective, effective via some morally unacceptable means, or effective in a manner that is conceptually indistinct from other evidence-based policy interventions. (shrink)

The majority of research on how learning a second language (L2) has focused on the personal benefits of being bilingual or multilingual. In this paper, we focus on the potential positive effect of actively thinking in L2. Our approach is inspired by recent experimental research suggesting that actively thinking in an L2 leads to improved reasoning and decision-making, which is known as the foreign-language effect (FLE). We examine the possibility that one could selectively engage in L2 thinking in order to (...) reap these potential benefits. Integrating this research with research in positive psychology, we explain how doing so might be understood as a type of “nudge,” or intervention that one could use to increase their chances of making autonomous decisions reflecting their own best interest. Nudges have been associated with improved outcomes with respect to many aspects of our lives - for instance sticking to goals, saving money, exercising more frequently, maintaining a healthy diet. It may be that bilinguals can assume an active role in increasing their happiness or well-being by making better decisions through strategic implementation of L2 in decision-making contexts. We also discuss the ethics of using the FLE as a nudge when it has beneficial consequences, as there are instances when doing so could be beneficial with respect to public policy as well. For instance, it has been shown that people are less averse to sustainable farming and eating practices (e.g. eating insects) when actively thinking in an L2. After reviewing the current research on the FLE, we suggest that further research needs to be done because actively thinking in L2 seems to function beneficially in some circumstances but may pose cognitive disadvantages in others. (shrink)

Proposals for regulating or nudging healthy choices are controversial. Opponents often argue that individuals should take responsibility for their own health, rather than be paternalistically manipulated for their own good. In this paper, I argue that people can take responsibility for their own health only if they satisfy certain epistemic conditions, but we live in an epistemic environment in which these conditions are not satisfied. Satisfying the epistemic conditions for taking responsibility, I argue, requires regulation of this environment. I describe (...) some proposals for such regulation and show that we cannot reject all regulation in the name of individual responsibility. We must either regulate individuals’ healthy choices or regulate the epistemic environment. (shrink)

Seasonal influenza kills many hundreds of thousands of people every year. We argue that the current pandemic has lessons we should learn concerning how we should respond to it. Our response to the COVID-19 not only provides us with tools for confronting influenza; it also changes our sense of what is possible. The recognition of how dramatic policy responses to COVID-19 were and how widespread their general acceptance has been allowed us to imagine new and more sweeping responses to influenza. (...) In fact, we not only can grasp how we can reduce its toll; this new knowledge entails new responsibilities to do so. We outline a range of potential interventions to alter social norms and to change structures to reduce influenza transmission, and consider ethical objections to our proposals. (shrink)

In this article we argue that a widespread adoption of nudging can alter legal and political institutions. Debates on nudges thus far have largely revolved around a set of philosophical theories that we call individualistic approaches. Our analysis concerns the ways in which adherents of nudging make use of the newest findings in the behavioral sciences for the purposes of policy-making. We emphasize the fact that most nudges proposed so far are not a part of the legal system and are (...) also non-normative. We propose two ideal types: “law-as-normative” and “law-as-instrumental”, that allow us to understand and evaluate the relation of nudges and the law. We stress the importance of law as a safeguard for the possible negative consequences of nudges and conclude with proposals that could complement nudging policies. (shrink)

Public health policies typically assume that there are characteristics and constraints over health that an individual cannot control and that there are choices that an individual could change if he is nudged or provided with incentives. We consider that health is determined by a range of personal, social, economic and environmental factors and we discuss to what extent an individual can control these factors. In particular, we assume that the observed health status of an individual is a result of factors (...) within the individual’s control and constraints the individual faces. We suggest three different constraints: budget, time and psychological constraints and position various determinants of health according to increasing levels of constraint and increasing degrees of individual control. We finally discuss public health policies such as nudging, intervening and rewarding within this new framework and show that the level of constraints and the degree of individual control on health status are essential dimensions to consider when designing and implementing public health policies. (shrink)

Can Artificial Intelligence be more effective than human instruction for the moral enhancement of people? The author argues that it only would be if the use of this technology were aimed at increasing the individual's capacity to reflectively decide for themselves, rather than at directly influencing behaviour. To support this, it is shown how a disregard for personal autonomy, in particular, invalidates the main proposals for applying new technologies, both biomedical and AI-based, to moral enhancement. As an alternative to these (...) proposals, this article proposes a virtual assistant that, through dialogue, neutrality and virtual reality technologies, can teach users to make better moral decisions on their own. The author concludes that, as long as certain precautions are taken in its design, such an assistant could do this better than a human instructor adopting the same educational methodology. (shrink)

Many of our daily activities are now made more convenient and efficient by virtual assistants, and the day when they can be designed to instruct us in certain skills, such as those needed to make moral judgements, is not far off. In this paper we ask to what extent it would be ethically acceptable for these so-called virtual assistants for moral enhancement to use subtle strategies, known as “nudges”, to influence our decisions. To achieve our goal, we will first characterise (...) nudges in their standard use and discuss the debate they have generated around their possible manipulative character, establishing three conditions of manipulation. Secondly, we ask whether nudges can occur in moral virtual assistants that are not manipulative. After critically analysing some proposed virtual assistants, we argue in favour of one of them, given that by pursuing an open and neutral moral enhancement, it promotes and respects the autonomy of the person as much as possible. Thirdly, we analyse how nudges could enhance the functioning of such an assistant, and evaluate them in terms of their degree of threat to the subject’s autonomy and their level of transparency. Finally, we consider the possibility of using motivational nudges, which not only help us in the formation of moral judgements but also in our moral behaviour. (shrink)

Dark patterns have received significant attention in literature as interface design practices which undermine users’ autonomy by coercing, misleading or manipulating their decision making and behavior. Individual autonomy has been argued to be one of the normative lenses for the evaluation of dark patterns. However, theoretical perspectives on autonomy have not been sufficiently adapted in literature to identify the ethical concerns raised by dark patterns. The aim of this paper is to conceptualize user autonomy within the context of dark patterns. (...) In this paper, we systematically review 151 dark patterns from 16 taxonomies to understand how dark patterns threaten users’ autonomy. We demonstrate through this analysis that implications for autonomy arise along four dimensions, because autonomy itself can be understood as subsuming several distinguishable concepts. These are agency, freedom of choice, control and independence. We argue that an assessment of whether a design pattern qualifies as ‘dark’ should account for the sense in which autonomy is threatened, as individuals’ rights and expectations of autonomy vary in various contexts and depend upon the interpretation of autonomy. This paper aims to contribute to the development of the normative lens of individual autonomy for the evaluation of dark patterns, as well as for persuasive design more broadly. (shrink)

The permissibility of nudging in public policy is often assessed in terms of the conditions of transparency, rationality, and easy resistibility. This debate has produced important resources for any ethical inquiry into nudging, but it has also failed to focus sufficiently on a different yet very important question, namely: when do nudges undermine a patient’s voluntary consent to a medical procedure? In this paper, I take on this further question and, more precisely, I ask to which extent the three conditions (...) of transparency, rationality, and easy resistibility can be applied to the assessment of voluntary consent too. After presenting two examples, designed to put pressure on these three conditions, I show that, suitably modified, the three conditions can remain significant in the assessment of voluntary consent as well. However, the needed modifications are very substantial and result in a rather complicated view. To propose a tidier solution, I argue that nudging undermines voluntary consent if and only if it cannot be ‘interpersonally justified’ to the patient. I use the three modified conditions to motivate the idea of interpersonal justification and also to further specify the principles it involves. My resulting view is especially attractive because it builds on already existing insights from the debate on nudging, updates those insights with an eye to medical consent, and finally unites them in an elegant and simple framework. (shrink)

Behavioural techniques or ‘nudges’ can be used for various purposes. In this paper, we shift the focus from government nudges to nudges used by for-profit market agents. We argue that potential worries about nudges circumventing the deliberative capacities or diminishing the control of targeted agents are greater when it comes to market nudges, given that these (1) are not constrained by the principles that regulate government nudges (mildness, sensitivity to people’s interests and public justifiability) and (2) are often ‘stacked’ – (...) they come in great numbers that overwhelm agents. In addition, we respond to possible objections and derive several policy suggestions. (shrink)

This paper provides a methodological analysis of Libertarian Paternalism, as put forward in the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (Yale University Press, 2008). Libertarian Paternalism aims to use the accumulated findings of behavioural economics in order to assist decision-makers to make better choices. The philosophical debate about this proposal has focused on normative issues with regards to this proposal. This paper analyses Libertarian Paternalism descriptively and points out four methodological conditions for successful Nudges. On that basis, a (...) methodological critique of Libertarian Paternalism is mounted: the success conditions suggest that Nudges might be even harder to implement and to justify than commonly assumed in the philosophical debate. (shrink)

Typically, nudging is a technique for steering the choices of people without giving reasons or using enforcement. In benevolent cases, it is used when people are insufficiently responsive to reason. The nudger triggers automatic cognitive mechanisms – sometimes even biases – in smart ways in order to push irrational people in the right direction. Interestingly, this technique can also be applied to doxastic attitudes. Someone who is doxastically unresponsive to evidence can be nudged into forming true beliefs or doxastic attitudes (...) that are propositionally justified. When doxastic nudging uses non-rational mechanisms, the worry is that nudging cannot result in justified beliefs or knowledge, as the resulting doxastic attitudes lack the right kind of basis. In this paper, I will argue that given the right background views about knowledge, justified beliefs and the relevant processes, epistemic nudging is possible even in these cases. That is, all kinds of nudging can – in appropriate circumstances – produce justified beliefs or knowledge in the nudgee. (shrink)

If citizens’ behavior threatens to harm others or seems not to be in their own interest, it is not uncommon for governments to attempt to change that behavior. Governmental policy makers can apply established tools from the governmental toolbox to this end. Alternatively, they can employ new tools that capitalize on the wealth of knowledge about human behavior and behavior change that has been accumulated in the behavioral sciences. Two contrasting approaches to behavior change are nudge policies and boost policies. (...) These policies rest on fundamentally different research programs on bounded rationality, namely, the heuristics and biases program and the simple heuristics program, respectively. This article examines the policy–theory coherence of each approach. To this end, it identifies the necessary assumptions underlying each policy and analyzes to what extent these assumptions are implied by the theoretical commitments of the respective research program. Two key results of this analysis are that the two policy approaches rest on diverging assumptions and that both suffer from disconnects with the respective theoretical program, but to different degrees: Nudging appears to be more adversely affected than boosting does. The article concludes with a discussion of the limits of the chosen evaluative dimension, policy–theory coherence, and reviews some other benchmarks on which policy programs can be assessed. (shrink)

Health incentive schemes aim to produce healthier behaviors in target populations. They may do so both by making incentivized options more salient and by making them less costly. Changes in costs only result in healthier behavior if the individual rationally assesses the cost change and acts accordingly. Not all people do this well. Those that fail to respond rationally to incentives will typically include those who are least able to make prudent choices more generally. This group will typically include the (...) least advantaged more generally, since disadvantage inhibits one's effective ability to choose well and since poor choices tend to cause or aggravate disadvantage. Therefore, within the target population, health benefits to the better off may come at the cost of aggravated inequity. This is one instance of a problem I name the Able Chooser Problem, previously emphasized by Richard Arneson in relation to coercive paternalism. I describe and discuss this problem by distinguishing between policy options and their effects on the choice situation of individuals. Both positive and negative incentives, as well as mandates that are less than perfectly effective, require some sort of rational deliberation and action and so face the Able Chooser Problem. In contrast, effective restriction of what options are physically available, as well as choice context design that makes some options more salient or appealing, do not demand rational agency. These considerations provide an equity-based argument for preferring smart design of our choice and living environment to incentives and mandates. (shrink)

Many parents are hesitant about, or face motivational barriers to, vaccinating their children. In this paper, we propose a type of vaccination policy that could be implemented either in addition to coercive vaccination or as an alternative to it in order to increase paediatric vaccination uptake in a non-coercive way. We propose the use of vaccination nudges that exploit the very same decision biases that often undermine vaccination uptake. In particular, we propose a policy under which children would be vaccinated (...) at school or day-care by default, without requiring parental authorization, but with parents retaining the right to opt their children out of vaccination. We show that such a policy is likely to be effective, at least in cases in which non-vaccination is due to practical obstacles, rather than to strong beliefs about vaccines, ethically acceptable and less controversial than some alternatives because it is not coercive and affects individual autonomy only in a morally unproblematic way, and likely to receive support from the UK public, on the basis of original empirical research we have conducted on the lay public. (shrink)

Toleration is one of the fundamental principles that inform the design of a democratic and liberal society. Unfortunately, its adoption seems inconsistent with the adoption of paternalistically benevolent policies, which represent a valuable mechanism to improve individuals’ well-being. In this paper, I refer to this tension as the dilemma of toleration. The dilemma is not new. It arises when an agent A would like to be tolerant and respectful towards another agent B’s choices but, at the same time, A is (...) altruistically concerned that a particular course of action would harm, or at least not improve, B’s well-being, so A would also like to be helpful and seeks to ensure that B does not pursue such course of action, for B’s sake and even against B’s consent. In the article, I clarify the specific nature of the dilemma and show that several forms of paternalism, including those based on ethics by design and structural nudging, may not be suitable to resolve it. I then argue that one form of paternalism, based on pro-ethical design, can be compatible with toleration and hence with the respect for B’s choices, by operating only at the informational and not at the structural level of a choice architecture. This provides a successful resolution of the dilemma, showing that tolerant paternalism is not an oxymoron but a viable approach to the design of a democratic and liberal society. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page W9-W13.

One of the most pervasive criticisms of nudges has been the claim that they violate, undermine or decrease people’s autonomy. This claim, however, is seldom backed up by an explicit and detailed conception of autonomy. In this paper, we aim to do three things. First, we want to clear up some conceptual confusion by distinguishing the different conceptions used by Cass Sunstein and his critics in order to get clear on how they conceive of autonomy. Second, we want to add (...) to the existing discussion by distinguishing between ‘autonomy’ as the ability to set your own ends and ‘autocracy’ as the ability to actually realize those ends. This will allow for a more careful ethical evaluation of specific nudge interventions. Third, we will introduce the idea of ‘perimeters of autonomy’ in an attempt to provide a realistic account of personal autonomy and we will argue that it can alleviate most of the worries about nudging being autonomy-undermining. (shrink)

Health-promoting nudges have been put into practice by different agents, in different contexts and with different aims. This article formulates a set of criteria that enables a thorough ethical evaluation of such nudges. As such, it bridges the gap between the abstract, theoretical debates among academics and the actual behavioral interventions being implemented in practice. The criteria are derived from arguments against nudges, which allegedly disrespect nudgees, as these would impose values on nudgees and/or violate their rationality and autonomy. Instead (...) of interpreting these objections as knock-down arguments, I take them as expressing legitimate worries that can often be addressed. I analyze six prototypical nudge cases, such as Google’s rearrangement of fridges and the use of defaults in organ donation registration. I show how the ethical criteria listed are satisfied by most—but not all—nudges in most—but not all—circumstances. (shrink)