Two Sides of The Same Nudge - Part III

Hello everyone! Welcome back to our discussion on nudges. This one is pretty straightforward: we will go over two sections where the different perspectives from both sides of the 'nudge war' are presented. I have tried my best to summarize multiple philosophers' works as succinctly as possible without any bias. Make sure to also read Part I and Part II to get some additional context, although it is not required if you know the basic concepts of nudges well enough. Hope you all enjoy!

4.1. Against Nudging: 

The case against nudging extends towards a general disagreement with liberal paternalism itself since the main uncertainty with both surrounds autonomic ideals. Hausman and Welch argue that the fault of nudging lies in its leveraging of aspects separate from rational persuasion to steer individuals towards a decision [6]. These non-trivial indicators are far less quantifiable or in our active control compared to rational persuasion, yet they still affect choices: “Their freedom, in the sense of what alternatives can be chosen, is virtually unaffected, but when this “pushing” does not take the form of rational persuasion, their autonomy … is diminished.” [6] They carry this forward against liberal paternalism, claiming that nudge tactics are even worse than merely punishing nonpreferred behavior. Nudges make the individual’s control over their own choices more vulnerable – it is better, from a libertarian perspective, to be fined for not choosing to wear a seatbelt compared to being fined for wearing a seatbelt under the influence of a subliminal message. 

Kapsner and Sandfuchs highlight that nudges can pose a great threat to informational and decisional privacy, both of which constitute the preconditions for autonomy. [8] Informational 8 privacy supports autonomy by allowing the conception of creative ideas without third party judgement/theft considerations, and decisional privacy is, of course, self-explanatorily a requirement for autonomy. However, in pursuit of the perfect nudges, a liberal paternal government critically attacks both privacies, as imagined by Sunstein himself: 

“If enough information is available about someone’s past choices or personal situation, we could design, for that person, default rules with respect to health insurance, privacy, rental car agreements, computer settings, and everything else.” [emphasis added] [8] 

Utilizing such comprehensive information about an individual would lead to an optimized nudge, but the procurement of this data would be a massive breach of that individual’s privacy. Moreover, perhaps more interestingly, we would run into a paradox: “We [the government] finds out that someone does not want his or her privacy invaded by invading his or her privacy.” [8] 

Wilkinson [9] gives us a rather complex account of how nudging can, in fact, be manipulative. He uses Raz’s definition of manipulation: “Manipulation, unlike coercion, does not interfere with a person’s options. Instead, it perverts the way that person reaches decisions, forms preferences or adopts goals…” [10] and essentially outlines that even the ‘utopian’ nudge – one that manages to fully respect autonomy – is manipulative in some cases. We cannot declare that a nudge is nonmanipulative based on the achievement of autonomy, because it is indeed possible to have autonomy and still be influenced by other individuals. For instance, I maintain autonomy in my choice to cross an unsafe bridge, yet I am influenced by your advice to not cross it. [9] This sort of influence entails the perversion of decision making by an intentional actor, which is essentially the definition of manipulation, yet still passes as a nudge since it does not “block off any alternative 9 options for myself”, which is T&S’ only requirement to meet libertarian standards [4]. Therefore, nudges have an intrinsic manipulative feature that becomes apparent in some cases. 

Noggle argues that nudges which highlight the saliency of a fact that is irrelevant to the decision, yet influences the decision maker, can be classified as manipulative. [11] A physician advising her patient, who has an irrational fear of contamination, to stop smoking by highlighting the fact that tobacco plants may have bird droppings on them is an example manipulative nudging, since that fact is largely irrelevant to the effects of smoking. If this had instead been achieved by nudging by means of discussing the health hazards of smoking, then it would not have been manipulative. 

The overarching theme in nearly all of the contentions about nudging seems to be the difficulty of deciding which nudges are morally permissible under the filter of libertarian paternalism. The constraints that T&S are satisfied with in their literature is not water-tight enough to exclude all exploitation of autonomy – as we can see above, many of the examples that they may conclude as permissible would in fact be under-handedly coercive, invasive and manipulative. While nudges can be used paternalistically, it seems as if their potential to be used for illicit ends or social pressuring and invisible propaganda is too great to justify them holistically as a viable instrument in a liberty-driven government. However, proponents of nudging think that these fears are misplaced, that the pros outweigh the cons, or are unnecessarily targeted despite their prevalence in already acceptable social policies. 

4.2. For Nudging: 

Rescuing nudge theory from the concerns of pervasiveness would mean to tackle the hurdle of steering choices while defending that it is permissible to do so without making the target person explicitly aware. T&S lay out two ways in which our minds process situations: the first is uncontrolled, automatic and heuristic, while the other is slow, conscious and deliberate. Since nudges intrinsically function upon the former method according to T&S, one way of advocating nudging would be to justify that this bypassing of controlled cognitive processes still preserves a sense of freedom sufficient for libertarians.

This is precisely what Saghai [7] sets out to do in his paper “Salvaging the concept of nudge”, with his claim being that if these nudges trigger automatic processes that are ‘easily resistible’, then they still maintain chief operative power in the hands of the ‘nudgee’ instead of the ‘nudger’. His definition of ‘easy resistibility’ [7] expands the nudgee’s power to comprehend not only the decision but the circumstance on a meta level: the goal is to give the nudgee the capacity of rejecting influence as effortlessly as accepting it. By ensuring that the nudgee’s capacity to comprehend the nudger’s intentions as well as their own propensity to inhibit the nudge are not interfered with in any way, the nudgee stays in full control of what to ‘do’ with the nudge they are subjected to, thus ultimately preserving autonomy. 

In this vein, proponent Neil Levy takes a more radical approach: he argues that nudges do not bypass our deliberate cognition completely, as T&S suggest, and thus are not as subversively damaging as we think. He is an optimist in believing that “… well designed nudges present reasons to mechanisms designed to respond to reasons of just that kind.” [12] Recall that the motivations for nudging as set by T&S are grounded on the shortcomings of deliberate human rationale and therefore are designed to work on the automatic, inflexible layer; Levy contrarily believes that it 11 is possible to “…intelligently and directly self-govern despite the limitations of conscious deliberation. In fact, that is what we already do, though very imperfectly.” [12] He is unconvinced of T&S’ generalization that intuitive tendencies are unintelligent overall, and that only reflective (deliberate) process can count as being intelligent. 

Levy’s modus operandi is to provide evidence of unreflective (i.e., intuitive) intelligence – doing this would alleviate the worry that nudges exploit vulnerable (or unintelligent) parts of our psyche, since there is nothing convincingly unintelligent to exploit in the first place. He argues that since we tend to attribute intelligence conventionally to formal reasoning and rule-based fields such as mathematics and science, where work is purely reflective, we find difficulty in placing uncontrolled and unconscious cognitive processes in the same category of intelligence, even though they are. Classic examples of nudges emphasize that its efficacy lies in its usage of tactics beyond rational persuasion: “… our behavior is caused by facts not constituting reason.” [12] In arguing against this, he ultimately establishes that nudges do, in fact, invoke reasoning mechanisms, thus making the unintuitive processing layer – the one that receives these nudges – capable of utilizing reason, i.e., intelligent.

Engelen and Nys choose to defend nudges by pointing out that the concern of nudging undermining autonomy is (falsely) caused by a misunderstanding of autonomy itself. They make the critical distinction between “autonomy” and “autocracy”: “Our distinction between autonomy – the ability to set your own goals – and autocracy – the ability to realize your own goals – clearly reveals the crucial point of critics here.” [13] Essentially, they argue that nudges are typically designed from an ‘ends paternalism’ perspective, i.e., to influence the realization of choices via decision-making, and thus it is difficult to see how autonomy is being subverted here. This is especially true in cases where the nudgee admittedly has no preferences or goals already mentally set before being 12 subjected to a nudge – there is no worry of a nudge undermining autonomy because there is no reflective work involving a preference to be respected in the first place. Assessing autocracy would be trickier, but even autocracy can be argued to be preserved under the same pretense, because these nudges “do not interfere with you satisfying whatever preference such nudges help form.” [13] 

All in all, the proponents of nudging are able to reason in various ways to portray a promising moral ground to utilize them. It is important here to remind ourselves that nudging is not coextensive with liberal paternalism, but the nudges that do pass this filter would speculatively be subject to all the high-level probing about the questions of autonomic perseverance, which have arguably been given reasonable answers as we have seen above. One thing is for sure – the definition originally given by T&S is highly problematic and requires a massive amount of patchwork and alternative understanding, as the past two sections have discussed. To ultimately come to a decisive conclusion of what to do with this highly powerful and controversial social tool called “nudging”, we must revisit its definition.

REFERENCES:

[4] Sunstein, C. R., & Thaler, R. H. (2003). Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron. The University of Chicago Law Review, 70(4), 1159–1202. https://doi.org/10.2307/1600573 

[6] Hausman, Daniel & Welch, Brynn. (2009). Debate: To Nudge or Not to Nudge*. Journal of Political Philosophy. 18. 123 - 136. 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2009.00351.x. 

[7] Saghai, Y (2013). Salvaging the concept of nudge. Journal of Medical Ethics. 39:487-493. 

[8] Kapsner, A., Sandfuchs, B. Nudging as a Threat to Privacy. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 455–468 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0261-4 

[9] Wilkinson, T.M. (2013), Nudging and Manipulation. Political Studies, 61: 341-355. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00974.x 

[10] Raz, J. (1986) The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press 

[11] Noggle, R. Manipulation, salience, and nudges. Bioethics. 2018; 32: 164– 170. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12421 

[12] Levy, N. (2019). Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink: Nudging is Giving Reasons. In Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy (Vol. 6, Issue 20201214). University of Michigan Library. https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0006.010 

[13] Engelen, B., Nys, T. Nudging and Autonomy: Analyzing and Alleviating the Worries. Rev.Phil.Psych. 11, 137–156 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00450-z