Title: Nudge, nudge | The Economist
Headings: Nudge, nudge
Paternalism and the English language
Nudge, nudge
Content: It’s hard to feel that a cafeteria is insulting my liberty if it puts the healthy fruit in a prominent place and the unhealthy junk food in some faraway corner... The concrete benefits of these programs, which are empirically verifiable, should trump abstract theoretical objections. But there aren't any "anti-paternalist" objections to making organ donation the default or featuring healthy food in cafeterias, because these ideas have nothing to do with paternalism. I mean, what could organ donation possibly have to do with paternalism? How can the disposition of one's organs after one dies possibly redound to the welfare of one's corpse? This whole discussion is rife with this sort of conceptual and linguistic muddle. In "Nudge", the 2008 book by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler that brought the Orwellian terminology of "libertarian paternalism" to a popular audience, "libertarian" was used, sensibly enough, to mean "choice-preserving" and "paternalism" was used with such flagrant disregard of conventional meaning that it was made to include everything that might help anyone ever make a good decision. For example, in the "Nudge" scheme, signs on men's and women's restrooms would count as paternalistic "choice architecture" simply because they structure choices in a way that helps us do what's best by our own lights—in this case, not mortifying ourselves barging into the wrong restroom. But that's just muddle-headed. Helping others make good decisions by pointing them in the direction they want to go is called "being helpful", and has nothing to do with paternalism. Paternalism has to do with making people go in a direction they don't want to go.