Abstract
When you dig beneath the surface of the previous chapters in this book, everything comes down to autonomy: determining your own interests and making choices in pursuit of them. Not only do libertarian paternalism and nudges manipulate our choices, but more importantly, they claim to do so in our interests while furthering others. We’ve also seen that this disregard for people’s true interests is a natural legacy of the way that both mainstream and behavioral economists think about decision-making: a deliberative process, however complex, guided by an overly simplistic goal. These simplistic goals allow economists to build complicated models of decision-making, but economists neglect to question whether the goals and interests assumed in their models correspond to what real people value. They focus on the process more than the goal, and they end up missing the forest for the trees. In the end, they presume to know what people’s interests are and to act to promote those interests—which is the most distressing problem with libertarian paternalism and nudges.
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Notes
For more on Kant’s conception of autonomy, see Roger J. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 5
and Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Autonomy and Self-Respect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chaps. 3 and 4.
Mark D. White, Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), especially chap. 1.
For a fascinating look into “what we care about,” see Harry Frankfurt’s title essay in his collection The Importance of What We Are About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 80–94.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. D. Spitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 54.
Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 378.
Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 25.
This discussion of autonomy was all too brief. The interested reader would be suggested to look to books such as the following: Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (eds.), Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
and James Stacey Taylor (ed.), Personal Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). If that’s not enough, see the references at the end of John Christman’s “Autonomy in Moral and Legal Philosophy” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/autonomy-moral/.
Luc Bovens, “The Ethics of Nudge,” in Till Grüne-Yanoff and Sven Ove Hansson (eds.), Preference Change: Approaches from Philosophy, Economics and Psychology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), pp. 207–219, at p. 217.
Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, “Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron,” University of Chicago Law Review 70 (2001): 1159–1202, at p. 1162.
Daniel M. Hausman and Brynn Welch, “Debate: To Nudge or Not to Nudge,” Journal of Political Philosophy 18 (2010): 123–136, at p. 127. Hausman and Welch also assert that such informational campaigns are not paternalistic, which is questionable: although they’re certainly not manipulative or coercive, they are motivated by concern for people’s own well-being. A libertarian may object to government funds being used for this purpose, arguing that in many cases (such as nutritional labeling) the market will provide the information that consumers demand. Nonetheless, even though these measures can be regarded as paternalistic, it is certainly one of the more innocuous forms of paternalism possible.
For a technical discussion of combatting cognitive biases and heuristics directly, see Richard P. Larrick, “Debiasing,” in Derek J. Koehler and Nigel Harvey (eds.), Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 316–337.
Colin Camerer, Samuel Issacharoff, George Loewenstein, Ted O’Donoghue, and Matthew Rabin, “Regulation for Conservatives: Behavioral Economics and the Case for ‘Asymmetric Paternalism,’” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 151 (2003): 1211–1254, at pp. 1238–1247.
Gregory Mitchell, “Libertarian Paternalism Is an Oxymoron,” Northwestern University Law Review 99 (2005): 1245–1277, at pp. 1255–1256.
Oren Bar-Gill and Elizabeth Warren, “Making Credit Safer,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 157 (2008): 1–101, at p. 26–27. Warren was involved in the creation and administration of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created to implement many of the policies she recommended in her work, and later became a US Senator from Massachusetts.
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© 2013 Mark D. White
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White, M.D. (2013). Why Choice Matters So Much—and What Can Be Done to Preserve It. In: The Manipulation of Choice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313577_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313577_7
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