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Reluctant Panopticians: Reply to Sunstein

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Abstract

In this note, we would like to respond to some remarks with which Cass Sunstein has, in turn, responded to our paper 'Nudges as a Threat to Privacy' in this journal. First, we address his contention that nudges are among the less problematic government practices as regards to privacy issues. Second, as he has clarified in his response that he doesn't think an all too well-informed government would be a good idea, we point out that this leaves a gaping hole in his justification of libertarian paternalism. Third, we point out a new problem with gathering information about the preferences of citizens, namely that observation tends to distort behavior and hence leads to misguided inferences about goals and ends.

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Notes

  1. Sunstein (2015).

  2. Kapsner and Sandfuchs (2015).

  3. See, e.g., Sunstein (2013), p. 1855.

  4. In the paper, we argued against the idea that a nudging unit would do no harm if it simply analyzed the data that other agencies have harvested, and we will not repeat that line of thought here.

  5. More speculatively, in our paper we pointed out that it is conceivable that we might soon be able to customize nudges with the aid of genetic information. We tried (and failed) to nudge Sunstein to draw a red line here.

  6. On the practical problems involved in weighing up privacy against other values, as well as a start in addressing these problems, see our original paper.

  7. Sunstein (2013), p. 1857.

  8. Karen Yeung calls such nudges “hypernudges” in her recent Yeung (2016), one of the very few detailed discussions of the connection between nudging and big data.

  9. Kapsner and Sandfuchs (2015), p. 464.

  10. Sunstein (2015), p. 527.

  11. See FDR Group (2013); Marthews and Tucker (2014) and Rainie and Madden (2015); on pre-Snowden effects on the behavior of Muslim-Americans, see Sidhu (2007).

  12. Foucault (1977).

  13. Or is it? Maybe future regulators would like to think about things like constant fMRI monitoring across the whole population. This, of course, will only make the problems worse in so many ways. The one most pertinent here might be that the citizens will try to adjust their thoughts to prevalent social norms. Whether they succeed in this or not, it will not be a future that is worth exploring for its ethical merits, at least that is our impression.

  14. Thaler and Sunstein (2008), p. 5, emphasis in the original.

References

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Acknowledgments

The research of the first author was funded by the German Research Foundation (Project PI 1082/1-1 0228 885 2134). This note has greatly benefitted from the comments of an anonymous referee and the editor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Munich, Germany

    Andreas Kapsner

  2. Research Training Group “Privacy”, University Passau, Passau, Germany

    Barbara Sandfuchs

Authors
  1. Andreas Kapsner
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  2. Barbara Sandfuchs
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Correspondence to Andreas Kapsner.

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Kapsner, A., Sandfuchs, B. Reluctant Panopticians: Reply to Sunstein. Rev.Phil.Psych. 8, 709–715 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0319-y

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