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NUDGE VERSUS BOOST: A DISTINCTION WITHOUT A NORMATIVE DIFFERENCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2018

Andrew Sims  and
Thomas Michael Müller
Andrew Sims
Affiliation:
Institut supérieur de philosophie, Place Cardinal Mercier 14, Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve 1348, Belgium. Email: andrew.sims@uclouvain.be. URL: https://uclouvain.academia.edu/AndrewSims.
Thomas Michael Müller
Affiliation:
Laboratoire d’Économie Dionysien (LED), Rue de la Liberté 2, 93526 Saint-Denis, France. Email: thomas.muller@univ-paris8.fr. URL: https://sites.google.com/site/up8led/members/internal-members/hpe/mueller-thomas.
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Abstract:

Behavioural public policy (BPP) has come under fire by critics who claim that it is illiberal. Some authors recently suggest that there is a type of BPP – boosting – that is not as vulnerable to this normative critique. Our paper challenges this claim: there's no non-circular way to draw the distinction between nudge and boost that would make the normative difference required to infer the permissibility of a policy intervention from its type-membership. We consider two strategies: paradigmatic examples and causal mechanisms. We conclude by sketching some suggestions about the right way to approach the normative issues.

Keywords

behavioural public policyautonomylibertarian paternalismnudgebounded rationality

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Type
Article
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , July 2019 , pp. 195 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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