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I would like to thank Mark Budolfson, Luc Bovens, Cameron Langford, Alecia McGregor, and four referees for helpful comments and discussions.
INTRODUCTION
Nudging has recently proven popular with governments around the world. Its idea is simple yet powerful. Relying on insights from behavioral science, nudging seeks to improve people's decisions by changing the way options are presented to them. It does not change the options themselves nor the costs and benefits associated with these options. As we now learn more about how people actually make decisions, proponents of nudging suggest using this knowledge to tweak choice environments in a way that nudges agents into choosing options that are good for them. For example, agents often go along with an option, if it is the default. We can harness such status quo bias, by making desirable options the default. To increase the rate of organ donors, for example, a country might adopt an opt-out system such that being an organ donor is the default. Or to increase people's retirement saving, we can make it the default that employees are enrolled in a retirement plan unless they opt out.
Nudging has been met with both enthusiasm and sustained critical attention from all sides of the political spectrum. In this article, I focus on one important and common objection to nudging which I call the objection from alien control. The worry is that furnishing the government with far-reaching powers to nudge its citizens leads to problematic power relations, relations of alien control. An agent A holds alien control over someone else B, when A has the power to influence B's life and such power is not controlled by B (B is an individual, but A can include individual and collective agents). If the government holds alien control over its citizens, it can impose its will on them. Critics now argue that nudges are more inconspicuous and insidious than traditional interventions, such as taxes and mandates, which makes it hard to place them under suitable individual and democratic control. And because they are unsuitable to be controlled, far-reaching governmental power to nudge increases the extent to which the government holds uncontrolled power--or alien control--over citizens (Dunt 2014; Goodwin 2012; Grüne-Yanoff 2012; Hausman and Welch...