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The Beneficent Nudge Program and Epistemic Injustice

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Abstract

Is implementing the beneficent nudge program morally permissible in worlds like ours? I argue that there is reason for serious doubt. I acknowledge that beneficent nudging is highly various, that nudges are in some circumstances morally permissible and even called for, and that nudges may exhibit respect for genuine autonomy. Nonetheless, given the risk of epistemic injustice that nudges typically pose, neither the moral permissibility of beneficent nudging in the abstract, nor its case-by-case vindication, appears sufficient to justify implementing a nudge program in worlds like ours. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice, I argue that the cogent defense of any nudge program, relative to worlds like ours, stands in need of serious attention to its potential for fostering or sustaining epistemic injustice. A more specific point hinges on recognizing a form of epistemic injustice not enough attended to in the literature to date, which I call reflective incapacitational injustice. This includes relative disadvantages in the attaining of (or opportunity to exercise) the capacity to engage in critical reason, such as the capacity to go in for potentially critical reasoned deliberation and discursive exchange concerning ends. Since Cass Sunstein’s First Law of behaviorally informed regulation would be taken, in worlds like ours, to justify indeterminately many nudges leading to such epistemic injustice we have general grounds for doubting the moral permissibility of this nudge program. We should hence oppose the implementation of any such program until it is shown not to violate the demands of epistemic justice.

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Notes

  1. This is a selection from what is a very large and still growing interdisciplinary literature. The nudges about which there is particularly lively philosophical controversy are those intended to be welfare promoting for the nudgee(s).

  2. For the purposes of this paper I assume (with T&S) that at least some forms of paternalism are acceptable.

  3. To appreciate the social power and worldly reach of nudge theory and practice (beyond the initial effects of Nudge’s having been very widely read and discussed) recall that Sunstein served directly in the Obama administration as head of the White House Office for Information and Regulatory Affairs. Thaler has advised David Cameron, who went on to form ‘the nudge unit’ within the Prime Minister’s Office in the UK. And the approach has rapidly proliferated—for instance, the OECD has embraced it. For a further sense of the scale of its reach see the webpages for The European Nudging Network.

  4. The extension of the category of social worlds like ours includes our world and all those near possible worlds beset by similar characteristic challenges to respecting social justice and realizing human well-being. See section 6.

  5. There is a very brief discussion and endorsement of a publicity principle in Nudge (T&S 2008:247–249). There is some discussion of JS Mill’s epistemic argument in Why Nudge but that discussion focuses on justifying paternalism. In neither book is there any mention of epistemic injustice and justice, let alone careful discussion of the issues.

  6. ‘Choice architecture’ is a term of art for those aspects of the circumstances having some salience for an agent or chooser.

  7. Some incentivizing can be nudging though dramatic shifts in the relevant incentives count as shoves not nudges, since they are less easy to resist.

  8. Any shifting of elements of the choice architecture will take some possibilities of action, using an extremely fine-grained analysis of action types, off the table. If I take the salient choice to be between obtaining a very large serving of soda by using this particular easily available cup and any other option, any shift that makes getting that cup less easily available will count as a restriction of my previous salient liberty. But adopting such a fine-grained analysis is tendentious.

  9. I discuss what makes for full beneficence in the relevant contexts below (5).

  10. Mine is a non-moralized and quite broad conception of manipulation—its extension includes some traditional economic incentives. This does not make those necessarily unjust (epistemically or otherwise).

  11. Sunstein seems not to fully appreciate this important point. He claims that since some nudges foster conscious deliberation at least these accordingly avoid “any semblance of manipulation” (Sunstein 2014: 149). This is mistaken since one can be manipulated into conscious deliberation.

  12. Some argue that the provision of relevant information is per se a typical form of nudging (Cohen 2013). This is misleading. For surely some provision of relevant information is intended to directly engage a person’s fully deliberative potentially critical faculties and reflects the recognition of an epistemic peer by making available relevant reasons—it thereby constitutes a non-nudge.

  13. T&S discuss this in the terms of dual-process theories of human psychology. But their basic argument does not depend upon commitment to any precise theory of the mind.

  14. ‘Default setting’ can function as plain description of a piece of programmed software that an agent confronts. It can also function at a higher order of abstraction wherein it describes the cognitive architecture of the agent-in-situ. Notice that a change of the first kind of thing could result in a change with respect to the second kind of thing.

  15. These examples are all found in Nudge and elsewhere. See Thaler and Sunstein op. cit. Thaler and Sunstein 2009, pp. 1–3, 105–119, and 68–9 respectively.

  16. Not everyone in the know accepts this. Some economists argue that the improved empirical adequacy of behavioral economics (relative to the neo-classical model of rationality) is more aspirational than actual (Berg and Gigerenzer 2010).

  17. Admittedly, I do not find these compelling reasons to favor the nudge program.

  18. I argue for this below (5).

  19. This tracks human nature as typically that of a potential and actual knower, and so as one who is inference prone (a giver of and asker after reasons).

  20. As this last feature implies, injustices are socially realized.

  21. For instance, consider a state trooper concluding that an African American driver is probably not the owner of the expensive vehicle he is driving, contrary to what he truthfully claims, and where the mistake is due to the presence of a potent racial stereotype informing the trooper’s thinking (Fricker 2013: 1319).

  22. Consider a person undergoing gender dysphoria where the social and conceptual surroundings make it quite difficult for the person to be recognized by others or indeed to self-recognize in those terms.

  23. José Medina uses the notion of an epistemic hero in his The Epistemology of Resitance (Medina 2013).

  24. Duwayne Brooks, who directly witnessed the murder of his friend Stephen Lawrence, was sidelined and ignored in the initial investigation. For the disturbing details concerning institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police Service see The Macpherson Report (Macpherson 1999).

  25. They are pretty clearly welfarists in their general approach. See Matthew Adler’s magisterial Well-Being and Fair Distribution for a very thorough articulation of this approach (Adler 2012).

  26. This is controversial. A person who had many other constituents or markers of success in life would yet not be flourishing were he or she unable to exercise critical reason. I am signaling this commitment rather than arguing for it.

  27. ‘Reflective incapacitational injustice’ refers broadly. Its extension includes relative disadvantages both in the attaining of the capacity to engage in critical reason (e.g., the capacity to go in for sustained potentially critical reasoned deliberation and discursive exchange about ends, singly or socially) and in that capacity’s exercise.

  28. Again I accept with T&S that at least some forms of paternalism are morally permissible.

  29. Sunstein identifies autonomy with freedom of choice. (Sunstein 2014:127 and following).

  30. Presumably, T&S would have us rely on expert opinion in the social sciences generally. This is unsatisfactory however, in part (only in part) since expert opinion in the social sciences is quite far from a unified body of settled knowledge.

  31. This is not to deny the importance of the various other ends of good social policy.

  32. Again, I do not deny that nudging can serve us. It is the BNP, which regards nudging as the optimal tool of enlightened social policy that concerns me.

  33. This is one place in which behavioral economics clearly departs from the assumptions of mainstream economics.

  34. Recall that epistemic injustice (reflective incapacitational injustice) arises whenever an action or failure to act has made it more difficult to exercise our capacities for critical reasoning or blocked the exercise of these. (See the final paragraph of section 4 above.) It is presumably more blameworthy when foreseen.

  35. The rationality of this plan is partly relative to the student’s own actual and potential abilities, skills, prospects and interests, and with an eye to the social and economic milieu he or she is expected to enter upon completing the course.

  36. Recall the standard in 5 above: the agent needs good reason to expect the course of conduct to benefit the patient and further, a grasp of this reasoning must constitute primary grounds upon which the action is undertaken.

  37. I am not defending a precise and general theory of good critical reasoning, but it surely involves an ability to make one’s ends the object of theoretical and practical reflection. The tendency to conformity relied on and reinforced in this nudge runs directly counter to this.

  38. I do not deny that unthinking conformism might be, in some circumstances, an effective if inexplicit strategy for some human agents. I do not accept that this fact makes such cognition count as an excellence of human reasoning.

  39. See sections 4 and 5 above.

  40. A particularly thoughtful sophisticated variant is the reason-based explanatory framework developed by Dietrich and List (2016).

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Acknowledgements

The author here acknowledges and sincerely thanks two anonymous reviewers for their judicious critical comments and helpful suggestions.

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Riley, E. The Beneficent Nudge Program and Epistemic Injustice. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 597–616 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9805-2

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