Save More Tomorrow. Employees are asked to commit now to having a portion of their salary increase in subsequent years put directly into their pension plan. People are loss averse, and thus more willing to forgo a raise in take-home income than they are to actively re-direct the additional funds they have already received to their retirement accounts each year.
Size of Plates. Using smaller plates in a cafeteria cuts down on the amount of food consumed. Painting Traffic Lanes.
In order to get drivers to slow down on a sharp turn the lane lines are painted closer together than usual. This creates the illusion for the drivers that they are driving faster than they actually are and they slow down as a result. The initial examples above served as the focus of much of the early literature.
The early critics attempted to distinguish interventions such as Cafeteria from interventions such as merely providing information. It is clear from more recent writings that the category of nudges is intended to be quite broad. According to Sunstein all the following are nudges: reminders, warnings, a GPS, disclosure of the interest rate of a bank card, any information about what people like you do, simplification of government forms, default rules, subliminal messages urging people to eat healthy food.
Why is the view labeled by its introducers as Libertarian Paternalism? Examples include the number of choices, whether the choice is opt-in or opt-out, the way in which alternatives are described or presented, the incentives attached to the choices, etc. Their view is Libertarian because it preserves freedom of choice. No choice is eliminated or made more difficult. Nobody is coerced. The choice set remains the same. No significant costs or incentives are attached to the choices the agent faces.
Their view is Paternalistic because it seeks to promote the good of the agent being nudged. And it is the good as viewed by the agent herself. We are not nudging towards ends she does not hold. Nudging is about means not ends. Their definition of Paternalism is very weak in the sense that it allows many more acts to count as paternalistic than would be under almost all traditional definitions of paternalism.
In terms of the analysis of Paternalism given in this entry is Nudging paternalistic? The first condition in the definition is: the action or its omission interferes with the liberty or autonomy of Y. Nothing corresponds to this in the definition above. Putting a warning label on a cigarette pack does not interfere with the liberty of autonomy of any cigarette smoker.
Basically, the definition of paternalism in Libertarian Paternalism is focused solely on the fact that nudges are being used to make the agents being nudged better off. Whether this expansion of the definition of paternalism is warranted or not is a matter of what issues are being explored and whether such an expansion makes things clearer or more confused. There are nudges which are not paternalistic on their definition because the aim is to promote the general good—even if the chooser is not benefitted.
Nudging building managers to put in elevators with braille buttons, influencing people to contribute to Oxfam by putting up pictures of starving infants, are examples where the good to be promoted is the welfare of people other than those being influenced.
However one comes out on the issue of whether the definition of paternalism is useful or not we turn to the more important issues about whether, and in what circumstances, nudges are justifiable ways of influencing persons to make certain choices.
Given that nudges are not coercive, that they are intended to promote the good of individuals as they themselves perceive that good, that they have been shown to often be effective, are there any plausible normative objections to their use? As with any policy intervention, either by the state or by private organizations, there are possible misuses to worry about.
Perhaps there are slippery-slopes to be avoided. Perhaps proponents of nudging over-estimate the amount and seriousness of faulty reasoning by agents; mistakes that nudgers wish to harness to promote the agents welfare. Perhaps they are mistaken about what agents really value when they claim people prefer health to more sugary beverages. But these objections are not objections to nudging but to the misuse of this type of behavioral intervention. Are there objections to the very nature of nudging itself?
There is one feature of many nudges that must be considered which, although not intrinsic to the concept of a nudge, is often present in the background as a crucial feature. One author actually links these background conditions to the definition of Libertarian Paternalism. Libertarian Paternalism is the set of interventions aimed at overcoming the unavoidable cognitive biases and decisional inadequacies of an individual by exploiting them in such a way as to influence her decisions in an easily reversible manner towards the choices she herself would make under idealised conditions.
Rebanato 6. An example of this use of cognitive biases is changing opt-in to opt-out. It is because of cognitive bias to doing nothing to change the status quo that there are relatively fewer opt-outs than might be expected. Given this background, there are at least three objections that have objected to features intrinsic to some—by no means all—nudges. The first is that nudging often occurs without the nudged being aware they are being nudged. The second is that nudging often works by harnessing defects in the thinking of those being nudged.
The third is that some nudges besides those subject to the first two objections are forms of objectionable manipulation. One issue with many nudges is what the person being nudged knows about the nudge. In the Cafeteria example the students are aware that food has been placed at different levels of eyesight. In that sense the nudge is transparent to them. It is not like subliminal messaging in which they are not aware of messages directed to them.
Let us call nudges which are transparent in this sense narrow nudges. This did increase the rate of payment. Most workers questioned about the painting either had not noticed it at all or made no connection with the issue of payment. In the cafeteria example while aware that the food is on different levels the students are not aware that the placing of the food has been done in order to promote a certain end—eating more healthy foods.
The placement of the food is not random, nor motivated by aesthetic considerations. It is deliberate and motivated by a particular set of considerations. Some nudges are more transparent in the sense that it is obvious they have been deliberately introduced and their motivation is also clear. Call these broad nudges. There is some evidence that making nudges broad does not interfere with their efficacy.
A recent study in the context of end-of-life care showed the effect of a default is not weakened when people are told that a default was chosen because it is usually effective Lowenstein et al. Note that there could be an even more transparent feature of nudges—call them very broad nudges. This would be when the mechanism by which the nudge influences is made public as well. Suppose we presented an opt-out set up and said 1 we are doing this to increase participation in the retirement program, and 2 if this is effective it is because people have a tendency to stick with the status-quo.
Nudges which are neither narrow nor broad—such as subliminal messages to movie-goers to buy fruit instead of popcorn—might be an effective way of encouraging consumption of healthier food. But they seem to have a morally dubious character. Even if the facts are that such messages have rather weak efficacy we object to their by-passing any possibility to avoid or resist them. Choice architecture should be transparent and subject to public scrutiny, certainly if public officials are responsible for it.
At a minimum, this proposition means that when such officials institute some kind of reform, they should not hide it from the public…If officials alter a default rule so as to promote clean energy or conservation, they should disclose what they are doing. This formulation leaves open a number of issues. The government could announce in advance that they are going to use subliminal messages on television programs to promote health.
Sunstein believes that this would satisfy his transparency condition but that it might be objectionable on grounds of manipulation. It remains open for discussion how to formulate a norm which is closer to the intuitive idea of transparency, to distinguish various sense of transparency—such as narrow and broad—and to debate whether such transparency is a necessary component of legitimate nudges.
Must, for example, the public utility which hopes to encourage energy conservation preface its informational message about the average consumption of your neighbors with the fact that they are sending this information because they think it will encourage conservation? Does it have to disclose they believe it may do so because people have a tendency to conform to what their neighbors are doing? Why is transparency required?
One possible objection to non-transparency is that it interferes with the autonomy of those influenced. Another issue concerning autonomy is whether it is affected by both intentional and unintentional nudges. Are the choices more autonomous in this case than in a case in which the food is placed in exactly the same way but deliberately in order to affect the choices?
The second objection to nudges has to do with a specific mechanism through which the end of nudging—promotion of agent ends—is sometimes accomplished. Consider the cafeteria example. The reason we place the healthy foods at eye level is because there is a tendency to choose what is at eye level over options that are not. The thought is that nudgers can harness this tendency by putting healthy foods at that level.
Since the positioning of foods is not a rational ground for choosing nudgers use this non-rational tendency so that healthy foods are chosen. Note in this case we get both a lack of transparency and the harnessing of non-rational tendencies. Some argue that taking advantage of our non-rational tendencies, even for good ends, is objectionable.
Consider the opt-out nudge. It relies upon, and works in virtue of, the fact that we tend to go with the given even if there are better options easily available. It is because we irrationally choose the worse option that we present the better option for the agent to choose irrationally. Framing effects: It is one of the most confirmed findings of empirical decision theory that subjects decisions are affected by different ways of presenting information.
This is exactly the same information but those told A are more likely to choose the operation than those given B. It is irrational to make the decision differently depending on how it is worded. This harnessing of the irrational for our own good is not paradoxical but it strikes some as problematic in the same way getting children to read by offering them financial incentives is problematic.
We are getting them to read for the wrong reasons. At least in these cases there is the idea that once reading they will come to appreciate the pleasures and importance of reading for its own sake.
But do people who stick with opt-in out of a tendency to stick with the given learn to change their faulty heuristic? If anything, it is reinforced because their faulty heuristic has a good consequence. If we think of cases of rational persuasion, then in the ideal case, we would find that the agent chooses because she believes she has been given reasons, these reasons support her choice, and she acts because of those reasons.
In the case of harnessing non-rational tendencies for nudges these conditions are not satisfied. It is a good thing that, usually, we act not simply in accordance with the reasons there are to act, but also out of, in recognition, of those reasons.
It is clear that while many nudges as defined harness bad reasoning, most do not. Some do not harness reasoning at all, e. Since nudges are defined to exclude coercion, and they usually are not cases of outright deception as opposed to a lack of transparency the concept that is often used to criticize nudges is that of manipulation. The charge of manipulation is raised often against the acts of others even when, like nudging, they are benevolently motivated.
We think of manipulation, like other forms of paternalism as failing to respect us as rational and capable choosers. After all, if we were capable choosers why not just present us with the reasons which favor our acting in particular way?
Nudging uses the clever tricks of modern psychology and economics to manipulate people. Wilkinson, see Other Internet Resources. The problem is that manipulation seems a very amorphous and ill-understood concept. There is widespread disagreement about what kinds of influence are manipulative and the conditions under which they are wrong. There seems to be only general agreement on the idea that in some way or other manipulation interferes, or perverts, or takes advantage of factors that people would not want to influence, the decision making of agents.
Whether manipulation must be intentional, whether it must be hidden, whether the motive of the manipulator matters, whether there has to be a gap between the way in which the influence causes behavior and the reasons which justify it , whether there has to be a manipulator if one is manipulated, all are contested in the literature see papers in Coons and Weber Condition one is the trickiest to capture. Clear cases include threatening bodily compulsion, lying, withholding information that the person has a right to have, or imposing requirements or conditions.
But what about the following case? A father, skeptical about the financial acumen of a child, instead of bequeathing the money directly, gives it to another child with instructions to use it in the best interests of the first child. The first child has no legal claim on the inheritance. There does not seem to be an interference with the child's liberty nor on most conceptions the child's autonomy.
Or consider the case of a wife who hides her sleeping pills so that her potentially suicidal husband cannot use them. Her act may satisfy the second and third conditions but what about the first?
Does her action limit the liberty or autonomy of her husband? The second condition is supposed to be read as distinct from acting against the consent of an agent. The agent may neither consent nor not consent. He may, for example, be unaware of what is being done to him. There is also the distinct issue of whether one acts not knowing about the consent of the person in question.
Suppose the person in fact consents but this is not known to the paternaliser. The third condition also can be complicated. There may be more than one reason for interfering with Y.
In addition to concern for the welfare of Y there may be concern for how Y's actions may affect third-parties. Or what about the case where a legislature passes a legal rule for paternalistic reasons but there are sufficient non-paternalistic reasons to justify passage of the rule? If, in order to decide on any of the above issues, one must decide a normative issue, e.
Ultimately the question of how to refine the conditions, and what conditions to use, is a matter for philosophical judgment. One should decide upon an analysis based on a hypothesis of what will be most useful for thinking about a particular range of problems. One might adopt one analysis in the context of doctors and patients and another in the context of whether the state should ban unhealthy foods.
Given some particular analysis of paternalism there will be various normative views about when paternalism is justified. The following terminology is useful. Soft paternalism is the view that the only conditions under which state paternalism is justified is when it is necessary to determine whether the person being interfered with is acting voluntarily and knowledgeably. To use Mill's famous example of the person about to walk across a damaged bridge, if we could not communicate the danger he speaks only Japanese a soft paternalist would justify forcibly preventing him from crossing the bridge in order to determine whether he knows about its condition.
If he knows, and wants to, say, commit suicide he must be allowed to proceed. A hard paternalist says that, at least sometimes, it may be permissible to prevent him from crossing the bridge even if he knows of its condition. We are entitled to prevent voluntary suicide. A narrow paternalist is only concerned with the question of state coercion, i.
A broad paternalist is concerned with any paternalistic action: state, institutional hospital policy , or individual. A weak paternalist believes that it is legitimate to interfere with the means that agents choose to achieve their ends, if those means are likely to defeat those ends.
So if a person really prefers safety to convenience then it is legitimate to force them to wear seatbelts. A strong paternalist believes that people may be mistaken or confused about their ends and it is legitimate to interfere to prevent them from achieving those ends.
If a person really prefers the wind rustling through their hair to increased safety it is legitimate to make them wear helmets while motorcycling because their ends are irrational or mistaken. Another way of putting this: we may interfere with mistakes about the facts but not mistakes about values.
So if a person tries to jump out of a window believing he will float gently to the ground we may restrain him. If he jumps because he believes that it is important to be spontaneous we may not. Suppose we prevent persons from manufacturing cigarettes because we believe they are harmful to consumers. The group we are trying to protect is the group of consumers not manufacturers who may not be smokers at all.
Our reason for interfering with the manufacturer is that he is causing harm to others. Nevertheless the basic justification is paternalist because the consumer consents assuming the relevant information is available to him to the harm. It is not like the case where we prevent manufacturers from polluting the air. In pure paternalism the class being protected is identical with the class being interfered with, e. In the case of impure paternalism the class of persons interfered with is larger than the class being protected.
The usual justification for paternalism refers to the interests of the person being interfered with. These interests are defined in terms of the things that make a person's life go better; in particular their physical and psychological condition. It is things like death or misery or painful emotional states which are in question.
Download options PhilArchive copy. Configure custom resolver. Kalle Grill - - Moral Philosophy and Politics 7 2 A Response to Joel Feinberg. Thaddeus Mason Pope - manuscript. Governing [Through] Autonomy. Libertarian Paternalism is Hard Paternalism. Shane Ryan - - Analysis 78 1 Paternalism and the Ill-Informed Agent. Jason Hanna - - The Journal of Ethics 16 4 Paternalism, Disagreements, and The Moral Difference.
Daniel Groll - - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 1 Erik Malmqvist - - Bioethics 28 3 A Reexamination of Hard Paternalism. Adam Hill - - Science and Engineering Ethics 24 4 Joel Feinberg and the Justification of Hard Paternalism.
Richard J. Arneson - - Legal Theory 11 3
0コメント