Why Choice Matters So Much—and What Can Be Done to Preserve It

Abstract

When you dig beneath the surface of the previous chapters in this book, everything comes down to autonomy: determining your own interests and making choices in pursuit of them. Not only do libertarian paternalism and nudges manipulate our choices, but more importantly, they claim to do so in our interests while furthering others. We've also seen that this disregard for people's true interests is a natural legacy of the way that both mainstream and behavioral economists think about decision-making: a deliberative process, however complex, guided by an overly simplistic goal. These simplistic goals allow economists to build complicated models of decision-making, but economists neglect to question whether the goals and interests assumed in their models correspond to what real people value. They focus on the process more than the goal, and they end up missing the forest for the trees. In the end, they presume to know what people's interests are and to act to promote those interests-which is the most distressing problem with libertarian paternalism and nudges.In this final chapter we will explore why autonomy is so important, drawing on a range of philosophical traditions, and why libertarian paternalism is a particular threat to it, even more so than traditional paternalism. Then we'll suggest ways to achieve the goals libertarian paternalists claim pursue- improving decision-making in people's own interests-without engaging in the value substitution and manipulation that we've criticized in this book. After all, people do make bad choices according to their own judgment, and it is worthwhile to think of ways to help them make better ones-without crossing the line and making people's choices for them.