In 2008, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein’s best-selling book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness set the standard for the philosophy and psychology of political influence. Reference Thaler and Sunstein1 Sunstein’s works since then — Why Nudge: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (2014), Reference Sunstein2 The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science (2016), Reference Sunstein3 and Human Agency and Behavioral Economics: Nudging Fast and Slow (2017) Reference Sunstein4 — expand and expound on (what we shall call) “nudge science.” The following collection of essays will explore this body of work from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, with a special emphasis on explaining and predicting how each discipline might address the ethics of influence in a democratic society. The intent of the following articles is not to critique “nudge science” but to focus on current U.S. public debates — obesity policy (psychology), retirement savings policy (economics), breast cancer screening policy (medicine), and climate change policy (philosophy) — and, ultimately, to speculate on the immediate future of libertarian paternalism in the United States.
Note
Earlier drafts of these five essays were presented in a research session at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, held at DePaul University, Chicago, April 5, 2017.