MT24 Week 4 | Internal Work-in-Progress Seminar

Nudges, tweaks in choice environments that predictably steer behavior without restricting options, can be either self-regarding (benefiting the nudgee) or other-regarding (other aims such as organ donation, charity, tax compliance). Other-regarding nudges have recently been claimed to preserve moral worth (Engelen and Nys 2024) and participate in cultivating moral virtues (Niker 2018). However, worries remain that they cannot be constitutive of moral progress because they are incompatible with the kind of engagement with moral reasons associated with moral action (Markovits 2010), or the improvements of moral powers associated with moral progress (Buchanan and Powell 2018). Despite facilitating morally desirable outcomes, nudges are thought to diminish the control of agents over their deliberations (Hausman and Welch 2010), bypass their reasoning (Mills 2015), and impose values on them (White 2013). Even if these problems could be overcome, the behavioral effects of nudges could still be thought too unstable for genuine moral progress.

I propose a novel view that other-regarding nudges could be part of moral progress if they initiate or reinforce obviously desirable social norms. I reflect on how nudges are often proposed with reference to social norms (e.g., tax compliance nudges, green nudges), how they may positively affect their preservation on various understandings of social norms (Bicchieri 1990, Brennan et al 2013, Muldoon 2018), and how this may amount to moral progress.

I argue that the facilitation account about the moral progressiveness of other-regarding nudges has at least four advantages: i) It fits less stringent accounts of moral motivation (e.g., Raz 1999); ii) It is compatible with accounts of moral progress pointing to the insufficiency of moral reasoning (Tam 2020; Klenk and Sauer 2021); iii) It avoids stability concerns; iv) It successfully explains hard cases, which include the utilization of bad norms to promote desirable outcomes.

A hybrid event for Uehiro Oxford Institute Members and Associates (booking not required).