Cognitive incompetence cannot adequately explain the special character of children's moral status. It is, in fact, because children lack preference structures that are sufficiently stable over time that they are not ’temporally extended agents’. They are best viewed as 'special agents’, and parents have the responsibility of fostering the development of temporally extended agency and other necessary related moral capacities. Parental authority should be exercised with the view to assisting children to acquire the capacities that facilitate their transition from 'special agents’ to full and functioning members of the moral community.
Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler recommend helping people make better decisions by employing 'nudges', which they define as noncoercive methods of influencing choice for the better. Not surprisingly, healthcare practitioners and public policy professionals have become interested in whether nudges might be a promising method of improving health-related behaviors without resorting to heavy-handed methods such as coercion, deception, or government regulation. Many nudges seem unobjectionable as they merely improve the quality and quantity available for the decision-maker. However, other nudges influence decision-making in ways that do not involve providing more and better information. Nudges of this sort raise concerns about manipulation. This paper will focus on noninformational nudges that operate by changing the salience of various options. It will survey two approaches to understanding manipulation, one which sees manipulation as a kind of pressure, and one that sees it as a kind of trickery. On the pressure view, salience nudges do not appear to be manipulative. However, on the trickery view (which the author favors), salience nudges will be manipulative if they increase the salience so that it is disproportionate to that fact's true relevance and importance for the decision at hand. By contrast, salience nudges will not be manipulative if they merely highlight some fact that is true and important for the decision at hand. The paper concludes by providing examples of both manipulative and nonmanipulative salience nudges.
Manipulation is a means by which a person is gotten to do something that the person was not initially inclined to do. As such, it is a form of power. Distinguishing it from other forms of power, such as persuasion, coercion, and physical force, is both important and difficult. It is important because it often matters which form of power a political actor uses, and manipulation is commonly thought to be a form of power whose exercise is undesirable. It is difficult because the line between manipulation and persuasion is often obscure, and because the term manipulation can be applied to tactics that influence the target’s state of mind, and tactics that change the target’s situation. Political theorists and philosophers have offered several accounts of manipulation: Some see it as deceptive influence, some see it as covert influence, some see it as influence with covert intent, some see it as offering bad reasons, and some see it as changing the external situation. While each of these approaches gets some things right about manipulation, each faces important challenges as well. One reason why manipulation seems undesirable is that it appears to undermine autonomy. This fact helps explain why concerns about manipulation arise in discussions of “nudges” that are meant to improve people’s decision making without coercion. Even if nudges benefit their targets, they may be undesirable on balance if they involve autonomy-undermining manipulation. Manipulation is a useful tool for autocrats, but it poses serious problems for democracies. This is because it appears to undermine the consent on which democratic legitimacy depends. Some political theorists argue that the problems posed by manipulation can be best addressed through deliberative democracy. Others dispute this suggestion. At the level of practice, there is reason to worry that late-20th- and 21st-century developments in psychology and the social and information sciences, as well as changes to the media landscape, threaten to make manipulation more prevalent and effective.
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