There is an extensive ethical debate regarding the justifiability of doctors nudging towards healthy behaviour and better health-related choices. One line of argument in favour of nudging is based on empirical findings, according to which a healthy majority among the public support nudges. In this paper, we show, based on an experiment we conducted, that, in health-related choices, people’s ethical attitudes to nudging are strongly affected by the point of view from which the nudge is considered. Significant differences have (...) been found between doctors’ ethical attitude to clinical nudging and that of patients. We show how these differences weaken the argument for nudging from public support. Moreover, our findings raise concerns regarding doctors’ ability to nudge ethically according to their own standards, as they may underestimate the degree of harm medical nudges can cause to informed consent, doctor–patient trust and other important ethically relevant features of health-related choices. (shrink)

In his excellent essay, ‘Nudges in a post-truth world’, Neil Levy argues that ‘nudges to reason’, or nudges which aim to make us more receptive to evidence, are morally permissible. A strong argument against the moral permissibility of nudging is that nudges fail to respect the autonomy of the individuals affected by them. Levy argues that nudges to reason do respect individual autonomy, such that the standard autonomy objection fails against nudges to reason. In (...) this paper, I argue that Levy fails to show that nudges to reason respect individual autonomy. (shrink)

Traditional medical practices and relationships are changing given the widespread adoption of AI-driven technologies across the various domains of health and healthcare. In many cases, these new technologies are not specific to the field of healthcare. Still, they are existent, ubiquitous, and commercially available systems upskilled to integrate these novel care practices. Given the widespread adoption, coupled with the dramatic changes in practices, new ethical and social issues emerge due to how these systems nudge users into making decisions and changing (...) behaviours. This article discusses how these AI-driven systems pose particular ethical challenges with regards to nudging. To confront these issues, the value sensitive design approach is adopted as a principled methodology that designers can adopt to design these systems to avoid harming and contribute to the social good. The AI for Social Good factors are adopted as the norms constraining maleficence. In contrast, higher-order values specific to AI, such as those from the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, are adopted as the values to be promoted as much as possible in design. The use case of Amazon Alexa's Healthcare Skills is used to illustrate this design approach. It provides an exemplar of how designers and engineers can begin to orientate their design programs of these technologies towards the social good. (shrink)

In the article “Nudging and Informed Consent”, Cohen argues that the use of “nudging” by physicians in the clinical encounter may be ethically warranted because it results in an informed consent where obligations for beneficence and respect for autonomy are both met. However, the author's overenthusiastic support for nudging and his quick dismissal of shared decision-making leads him to assume that “soft” manipulation is un-problematic and that “wisdom” on the side of medical professionals will suffice to guard against abuse. Opposing (...) this view, we propose that: 1) patient preferences and values should not be boiled down to rational or irrational decisions based on cognitive reasoning alone, 2) potential threats to the physician-patient must be mitigated and could be minimized by employing alternative strategies that acknowledge the impact of cognitive heuristics in shaping decision-making but maintain transparency and trust, and 3) patient preferences and values can be legitimately influenced only under specific circumstances. The latter include: (1) exhaustion of other means; (2) evidence that nudging is effective in a specific context; (3) evidence of clear and active public misinformation (e.g., industry promoting smoking); (4) explicit pubic dialogue between various stakeholders including medical professional societies about nudging; (5) upholding shared decision-making as a preferred approach; and (6) a rich understanding of clinical reality beyond the simple dichotomy of beneficence-autonomy. (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...

A core idea underlying nudging is that it helps individuals to achieve their own goals, yet many nudges actually aim at collective goals or specifically target the benefit of others. An example is nudging healthcare workers to be vaccinated against influenza. I distinguish between self‐regarding nudges, which primarily benefit the nudgee, and other‐regarding nudges, which mainly benefit others, and argue that the default justificatory reason to legitimize self‐regarding nudges, namely the ‘as judged by themselves’ standard, does (...) not apply and that we need to look for other justifications. I examine several possible moral justifications to support strong other‐regarding nudges, namely beneficence, the harm principle and solidarity. (shrink)

Libertarian paternalism's notion of “nudging” refers to steering individual decision making so as to make choosers better off without breaching their free choice. If successful, this may offer an ideal synthesis between the duty to respect patient autonomy and that of beneficence, which at times favors paternalistic influence. A growing body of literature attempts to assess the merits of nudging in health care. However, this literature deals almost exclusively with health policy, while the question of the potential benefit of nudging (...) for the practice of informed consent has escaped systematic analysis. This article focuses on this question. While it concedes that nudging could amount to improper exploitation of cognitive weaknesses, it defends the practice of nudging in a wide range of other conditions. The conclusion is that, when ethically legitimate, nudging offers an important new paradigm for informed consent, with a special potential to overcome the classical dilemma between paternalistic beneficence and respect for autonomy. (shrink)

Nudge is a concept of policy intervention that originates in Thaler and Sunstein's (2008) popular eponymous book. Following their own hints, we distinguish three properties of nudge interventions: they redirect individual choices by only slightly altering choice conditions (here nudge 1), they use rationality failures instrumentally (here nudge 2), and they alleviate the unfavourable effects of these failures (here nudge 3). We explore each property in semantic detail and show that no entailment relation holds between them. This calls into question (...) the theoretical unity of nudge, as intended by Thaler and Sunstein and most followers. We eventually recommend pursuing each property separately, both in policy research and at the foundational level. We particularly emphasize the need of reconsidering the respective roles of decision theory and behavioural economics to delineate nudge 2 correctly. The paper differs from most of the literature in focusing on the definitional rather than the normative problems of nudge. (shrink)

Nudges are small changes in the presentation of options that make a predictable impact on people's decisions. Proponents of nudges often claim that they are justified as paternalistic interventions that respect autonomy: they lead people to make better choices, while still letting them choose for themselves. However, existing work on nudges ignores the possibility of “hard choices”: cases where a person prefers one option in some respects, and another in other respects, but has no all‐things‐considered preference between (...) the two. In this paper, I argue that many significant medical decisions are hard choices that provide patients with an opportunity to exercise a distinctive sort of “formative autonomy” by settling their preferences and committing themselves to weigh their values in a particular way. Since nudges risk infringing formative autonomy by depriving patients of this opportunity, their use in medical contexts should be sensitive to this risk. (shrink)

Andreas Schmidt and Neil Levy have recently defended nudging against the objection that nudges fail to treat nudgees as rational agents. Schmidt rejects two theses that have been taken to support the objection: that nudges harness irrational processes in the nudgee, and that they subvert the nudgee’s rationality. Levy rejects a third thesis that may support the objection: that nudges fail to give reasons. I argue that these defences can be extrapolated from nudges to some nonconsensual (...) neurointerventions; if Schmidt’s and Levy’s defences succeed, then some nonconsensual neurointerventions neither harness irrationality, nor subvert rationality, nor fail to give reasons. This, I claim, poses a challenge both to opponents of nonconsensual neurointerventions, and to defenders of nudging. (shrink)

In this article I argue that anti-perfectionist liberals can accept nudging in certain areas: in particular, they can accept nudges aimed at helping people to discharge their nonenforceable duties, and to secure personal autonomy. I claim that nudging is not disrespectful since it does not involve a comparative negative judgment on people’s ability to pursue their plans, and that the judgments that motivate nudging are compatible with treating citizens as free and equal. I also claim that despite being sometimes (...) manipulative, nudging is easy to resist and so it can be employed to pursue legitimate goals. (shrink)

Robots are becoming an increasingly pervasive feature of our personal lives. As a result, there is growing importance placed on examining what constitutes appropriate behavior when they interact with human beings. In this paper, we discuss whether companion robots should be permitted to “nudge” their human users in the direction of being “more ethical”. More specifically, we use Rawlsian principles of justice to illustrate how robots might nurture “socially just” tendencies in their human counterparts. Designing technological artifacts in such a (...) way to influence human behavior is already well-established but merely because the practice is commonplace does not necessarily resolve the ethical issues associated with its implementation. (shrink)

Nudging policies rely on behavioral science to improve people's decisions through small changes in the environments within which people make choices. This article first seeks to rebut a prominent objection to this approach: furnishing governments with the power to nudge leads to relations of alien control, that is, relations in which some people can impose their will on others—a concern which resonates with republican, Kantian, and Rousseauvian theories of freedom and relational theories of autonomy. I respond that alien control can (...) be avoided, if nudging is suitably transparent and democratically controlled. Moreover, such transparency and democratic control are institutionally feasible. Building on this response, I then provide a novel and surprising argument for more nudging: democratically controlled public policy nudging can often contain the power of private companies to nudge in uncontrolled and opaque ways. Therefore, reducing alien control often requires more rather than less nudging in public policy. (shrink)

This paper offers a theoretical framework that can be used to derive viable engineering strategies for the design and development of robots that can nudge people towards moral improvement. The framework relies on research in developmental psychology and insights from Stoic ethics. Stoicism recommends contemplative practices that over time help one develop dispositions to behave in ways that improve the functioning of mechanisms that are constitutive of moral cognition. Robots can nudge individuals towards these practices and can therefore help develop (...) the dispositions to, for example, extend concern to others, avoid parochialism, etc. (shrink)

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)

Is it possible to interfere with individual decision-making while preserving freedom of choice? The purpose of this article is to assess whether ‘libertarian paternalism’, a set of political and ethical principles derived from the observations of behavioural sciences, can form the basis of a viable framework for the ethical analysis of public health interventions. First, the article situates libertarian libertarianism within the broader context of the law and economics movement. The main tenets of the approach are then presented and particular (...) attention is given to its operationalization through the notion of a ‘nudge’. Essentially, a ‘nudge’ consists in an intervention, which aims to suggest one choice over another by gently steering individual choices in welfare-enhancing directions yet without imposing any significant limit on available choices. Finally, the article concludes that, while it fails as an overreaching framework of ethical analysis, libertarian paternalism nonetheless constitutes a valuable addition to the conceptual toolbox of public health ethics. (shrink)

I focus on “prima facie problematic” nudges to argue that libertarian paternalism often fails in its promise to track target agents’ own normative standards. I argue that PFP nudges are unjustified to significant numbers of people by virtue of autonomy-based defeaters—what I call “self-determination” and “discretion.” I then argue that in many cases, we face informational constraints on what a person’s good really is. In such cases, these nudges may not even benefit a significant number of agents (...) and so fail even to be paternalistic—where “paternalistic” is a success term—for those they fail to benefit. (shrink)

In “Nudging, Bullshitting, and the Meta-Nudge”, the author responds to William Simkulet’s claim that nudging is bullshitting (according to Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of bullshit and bullshitting), and therefore nudging during the process of informed consent renders consent invalid. The author argues that nudging is not necessarily bullshitting and then explains that although this issue is philosophically interesting, practically speaking, even if nudging is bullshitting, it does not follow that nudging necessarily renders informed consent invalid. This is obviously true in those (...) situations in which nudging during the process of informed consent is unavoidable. The author concludes with a discussion of the meta-nudge and suggests that physicians can use the meta-nudge to eliminate or decrease the power of inappropriate, problematic, or undesirable nudges. (shrink)

Zealous nudging can deteriorate into paternalistic bullshitting. To the extent that William Simkulet’s paper is a reminder against that danger, it does us good service.1 Simkulet, however, makes the far bolder claims that nudging just is bullshitting and that—since bullshitting deviates from truthfulness, and truthful disclosure is essential for valid consent—nudging invalidates informed consent. These bolder claims involve a set of errors. The problem starts with Simkulet’s formal definition of ‘bullshit’, which says that conveying x while intending one’s audience to (...) believe y is sufficient for bullshit. This, however, is not true since the bullshitter’s not caring whether x is true is constitutive of bullshitting, and hence a necessary condition. Why, we then ask, must such lack of care be the case with the doctor who nudges? It is at least prima facie easy and intuitive to think of scenarios in which the ethical doctor is staunchly committed to telling the truth while simultaneously acting on additional motives regarding the expected effects of what is said. If the doctor cares about saying only truths, he is not a bullshitter. Having communicative motivations that transcend the trivial motive of transmitting the truth of the literal content of what is said is normal and indeed normative in conversations of regular people.2 …. (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)

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)

In his article “Nudging and Informed Consent,” Shlomo Cohen (2013) argues, among other things, that 1) “to the extent that the nudge-influenced decision making is rational—in whatever sense,” there...

I distinguish between 'hard nudges' and 'soft nudges', arguing that it is possible to show that the latter can be compatible with informed consent - as Cohen has recently suggested; but that the real challenge is the compatibility of the former. Hard nudges are the more effective nudges because they work on less than conscious mechanisms such as those underlying our habits: whether those influences - which are often beyond the subject's awareness - can be reconciled (...) with informed consent in health care is the more challenging question. I suggest two directions for possible answers: on the one hand, looking at the growing empirical literature on mindless judgement and behaviour; and on the other hand considering a more diversified conception of consent, which I sketch. (shrink)

Exploring the use of nudges and informed consent in medical ethics.

T. M. Scanlon posits a universal moral relationship in response to the worry that his relational approach to blame cannot answer the question of how strangers can fittingly blame one another. However, commentators have noted that appealing to universal moral standards seems to explicitly deviate from a relational approach’s basis in actual relationship norms. This paper argues that Scanlon’s idea of a moral relationship can nevertheless provide a basis for response to the problem of strangers if we recognize that actual (...) and ideal moral relationships both play a role within the relational approach. An interesting consequence of this recognition is that it seems to undermine the moral relationship’s universality. However, a presumptive case for assuming the relationship exists even between strangers can be found in seeing our blaming practices as akin to public policy nudges, where blame operates like an opt-out choice architecture with respect to the moral relationship. On this understanding, though the moral relationship is escapable, individuals are naturally encouraged to participate through the expression of interpersonal attitudes that communicate relational norms and expectations. (shrink)

This article is featured in a special issue dedicated to theme, "the human being in the digital era: awareness, critical thinking and political space in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence." In this article, I consider the way that social-media companies nudge us to spend more time on their platforms, and I argue that, in principle, these nudges are morally permissible: they are not manipulative and do not violate any obvious moral rules. The moral problem, I argue, (...) is not with nudging in principle but is instead with the fact that users are being nudged towards something bad for them. In practice, this often involves being nudged to spend an unhealthy amount of time using a social-media app or being nudged towards content that is bad for us, such as by promoting eating-disorder content to young girls. Since nudging is morally permissible, it is open to these companies to use the same technologies to nudge us towards the good. (shrink)

Given that the concept of coercion remains a central concern for bioethics, Quigley's (Monash Bioethics Rev 32:141–158, 2014) recent article provides a helpful analysis of its frequent misapplication in debates over the use of ‘nudges’. In this commentary I present a generally sympathetic response to Quigley’s argument while also raising several issues that are important for the larger debates about nudges and coercion. I focus on several closely related topics, including the definition of coercion, the role of empirical (...) research, and the normative concerns at the core of these disputes. I suggest that while a degree of precision is certainly required when deploying the relevant concepts, perhaps informed by empirical data, we need to continue to push these debates towards more pressing normative considerations. (shrink)

Nudge is a popular public policy tool that harnesses well-known biases in human judgement to subtly guide people’s decisions, often to improve their choices or to achieve some socially desirable outcome. Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) methods new possibilities emerge of how and when our decisions can be nudged. On the one hand, algorithmically personalized nudges have the potential to vastly improve human daily lives. On the other hand, blindly outsourcing the development and implementation of (...) class='Hi'>nudges to “black box” AI systems means that the ultimate reasons for why such nudges work, that is, the underlying human cognitive processes that they harness, will often be unknown. In this paper, we unpack this concern by considering a series of examples and case studies that demonstrate how AI systems can learn to harness biases in human judgment to reach a specified goal. Drawing on an analogy in a philosophical debate concerning the methodology of economics, we call for the need of an interdisciplinary oversight of AI systems that are tasked and deployed to nudge human behaviours. (shrink)

My paper discusses large-scale nudging, i.e., the use of nudges that are highly individualized, highly prevalent, and highly effective. As I explain, digital environments are ideally suitable for large-scale nudging. I argue that large-scale digital nudging has the potential to compromise our freedom, by undermining our control over our actions. I end by sketching what could be done to avoid the development and the use of such nudges, to preserve our freedom. -/- .

Nudges can pose serious threats to citizens’ privacy. The essay discusses several examples of nudges that must appear problematic to anyone valuing privacy. The paper also re-draws a well established connection between privacy and autonomy and argues that insofar as nudges incur too great a loss of privacy, they are incompatible with the libertarianism that libertarian paternalism is committed to by virtue of its very name.

In this paper I argue that the use of social nudges, policy interventions to induce voluntary cooperation in social dilemma situations, can be defended against two ethical objections which I call objections from coherence and autonomy. Specifically I argue that the kind of preference change caused by social nudges is not a threat to agents’ coherent preference structure, and that there is a way in which social nudges influence behavior while respecting agents’ capacity to reason. I base (...) my arguments on two mechanistic explanations of social nudges; the expectation-based and frame-based accounts. As a concrete example of social nudges I choose the “Don’t Mess With Texas” anti-littering campaign and discuss in some detail how it worked. (shrink)

An effective method to increase the number of potential cadaveric organ donors is to make people donors by default with the option to opt out. This non-coercive public policy tool to influence people’s choices is often justified on the basis of the as-judged-by-themselves principle: people are nudged into choosing what they themselves truly want. We review three often hypothesized reasons for why defaults work and argue that the as-judged-by-themselves principle may hold only in two of these cases. We specify further (...) conditions for when the principle can hold in these cases and show that whether those conditions are met is often unclear. We recommend ways to expand nationwide surveys to identify the actual reasons for why defaults work and discuss mandated choice policy as a viable solution to many arising conundrums. (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)

Nudge and boost are two competing approaches to applying the psychology of reasoning and decision making to improve policy. Whereas nudges rely on manipulation of choice architecture to steer people towards better choices, the objective of boosts is to develop good decision-making competences. Proponents of both approaches claim capacity to enhance social welfare through better individual decisions. We suggest that such efforts should involve a more careful analysis of how individual and social welfare are related in the policy context. (...) First, individual rationality is not always sufficient or necessary for improving collective outcomes. Second, collective outcomes of complex social interactions among individuals are largely ignored by the focus of both nudge and boost on individual decisions. We suggest that the design of mechanisms and social norms can sometimes lead to better collective outcomes than nudge and boost, and present conditions under which the three approaches (nudge, boost, and design) can be expected to enhance social welfare. (shrink)

In recent years, ‘nudge’ theory has gained increasing attention for the design of population-wide health interventions. The concept of nudge puts a label on efficacious influences that preserve freedom of choice without engaging the influencees’ deliberative capacities. Given disagreements over what it takes genuinely to preserve freedom of choice, the question is whether health influences relying on automatic cognitive processes may preserve freedom of choice in a sufficiently robust sense to be serviceable for the moral evaluation of actions and policies. (...) In this article, I offer an argument to this effect, explicating preservation of freedom of choice in terms of choice-set preservation and noncontrol. I also briefly explore the healthcare contexts in which nudges may have priority over more controlling influences. (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)

This essay has three general themes. The first involves the claim that nudging threatens human agency. My basic response is that human agency is fully retained (because nudges do not compromise freedom of choice) and that agency is always exercised in the context of some kind of choice architecture. The second theme involves the importance of having a sufficiently capacious sense of the category of nudges, and a full appreciation of the differences among them. Some nudges either (...) enlist or combat behavioral biases but others do not, and even among those that do enlist or combat such biases, there are significant differences. The third general theme is the need to bring various concerns (including ethical ones) in close contact with particular examples. A legitimate point about default rules may not apply to warnings or reminders. An ethical objection to the use of social norms may not apply to information disclosure. Here as elsewhere, abstraction can be a trap. We continue to learn about the relevant ethical issues, about likely public reactions to nudging, and about differences across cultures and nations. Future progress will depend on a high level of concreteness, perhaps especially in dealing with the vexing problem of time-inconsistency. (shrink)

A sketch of some of the implications of nudges.

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)

I am to grateful to Geoff Keeling for his perceptive response1 to my paper.2 In this brief reply, I will argue that he does not succeed in his goal of showing that nudges to reason do not respect autonomy. At most, he establishes only that such nudges may threaten autonomy when used in certain ways and in certain circumstances. As I will show, this is not a conclusion that should give us grounds for particular concerns about nudges. (...) Before turning to this issue, let me correct some small issues of interpretation of my paper. Keeling takes me to be committed to three descriptive claims: that we have entered a post-truth era, that our problem with the rational assessment of evidence is explained by or stems from the backfire effect and that nudges to reason work by exploiting affective mechanisms. I am not committed to accepting any of these claims. …. (shrink)

An under-examined aspect of human–robot interaction that warrants further exploration is whether robots should be permitted to influence a user’s behavior for that person’s own good. Yet an even more controversial practice could be on the horizon, which is allowing a robot to “nudge” a user’s behavior for the good of society. In this article, we examine the feasibility of creating companion robots that would seek to nurture a user’s empathy toward other human beings. As more and more computing devices (...) subtly and overtly influence human behavior, it is important to draw attention to whether it would be ethically appropriate for roboticists to pursue this type of design pathway. Our primary focus is on whether a companion robot could encourage humans to perform charitable acts; this design possibility illustrates the range of socially just actions that a robot could potentially elicit from a user and what the associated ethical concerns may be. (shrink)

In discussions of nudging, transparency is often taken to be important; it is often suggested that a significant moral consideration to take into account when nudging is whether the nudge is transparent. Another consideration taken to be relevant is whether the nudge is easy to resist. Sometimes, these two considerations are taken to be importantly related: if we have reason to make nudges easy to resist, then we have reason to make them transparent, insofar as a nudge’s transparency is (...) relevant to whether the nudge is easy to resist. In this paper, we critically scrutinize this view. First, we draw out the purported connections between transparency and resistibility, combining them into what we call the Resistibility-to-Transparency Argument (RTA). Then, we do some conceptual groundwork elaborating on different forms of transparency mentioned in the debate. With this in place, we argue that in order to be plausible, the RTA must appeal to certain forms of transparency; those on which the transparency of a nudge depends on the nudgee’s ability to become aware of the relevant facts about the nudge. We then argue against the common assumption that in order for a nudge to be easy to resist for an individual, that individual needs to have the capacity to easily become aware of the relevant nudge facts. We conclude that the connection between the easy resistibility of a nudge and its transparency is, at best, a weak one. (shrink)

Critics frequently argue that nudges are more covert, less transparent, and more difficult to monitor than traditional regulatory tools. Edward Glaeser, for example, argues that “[p]ublic monitoring of soft paternalism is much more difficult than public monitoring of hard paternalism”. As one of the leading proponents of soft paternalism, Cass Sunstein, acknowledges, while “[m]andates and commands are highly visible”, soft paternalism, “and some nudges in particular[,] may be invisible”. In response to this challenge, proponents of nudging argue that (...) invisibility for any given individual in a particular choice environment is compatible with “careful public scrutiny” of the nudge. This paper offers the first of its kind experimental evidence that tests whether nudges are, in fact, compatible with “careful public scrutiny”. Using three sets of experiments, the paper argues that, even when entirely visible, nudges attract less scrutiny than their “hard law” counterparts. (shrink)

Nudges have been criticized for working ‘in the dark’, influencing people without their full awareness. To assess whether this property renders nudging an illegitimate policy tool in liberal democracies, we argue that in scrutinizing nudge transparency, we should adequately divide our focus between nudging techniques, the nudgers employing them, and the nudgees subjected to them. We develop an account of what it means for nudgees to be ‘watchful’, a disposition that enables them to resist and circumvent nudges. We (...) argue that such ‘watchfulness’ should be cultivated if we want to implement nudges in legitimate, accountable, and democratic ways. (shrink)

A core idea underlying nudging is that it helps individuals to achieve their own goals, yet many nudges actually aim at collective goals or specifically target the benefit of others. An example is nudging healthcare workers to be vaccinated against influenza. I distinguish between self‐regarding nudges, which primarily benefit the nudgee, and other‐regarding nudges, which mainly benefit others, and argue that the default justificatory reason to legitimize self‐regarding nudges, namely the ‘as judged by themselves’ standard, does (...) not apply and that we need to look for other justifications. I examine several possible moral justifications to support strong other‐regarding nudges, namely beneficence, the harm principle and solidarity. (shrink)

Nudging is a tool of libertarian paternalism. It involves making use of certain psychological tendencies in order to help people make better decisions without restricting their freedom. However, some have argued that nudging is objectionable because it interferes with, or undermines, the rational decision-making of the nudged agents. Opinions differ on why this is objectionable, but the underlying concerns appear to begin with nudging’s threat to rational decision-making. Those who discuss this issue do not make it clear to what this (...) threat to rationality amounts. In this paper I evaluate what effect nudging has on our decision-making and I argue that it does not typically interfere with our rationality in a problematic way. Perhaps nudging is objectionable for other reasons, but we should not argue that nudging is objectionable based on concerns about rational decision-making. (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)

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)