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Issues with choice architecture, environmental ethics, and globalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2018

Edward Sankowski
Edward Sankowski*
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma
*
Correspondence: Edward Sankowski, Department of Philosophy, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma. Email: esankowski@ou.edu
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Abstract

Cass R. Sunstein’s book The Ethics of Influence appears to have three ideological features notable for purposes of this essay. The book emphasizes choice architecture (and related notions such as nudges and defaults), which should be ethically scrutinized to guard against ethical abuses and to assist us in ethically desirable uses of scientific psychology and behavioral economics. (1) This particular book focuses more on scrutinizing nation-state government than on corporate activities. (2) This book focuses more on domestically directed governmental action than on externally directed governmental action. (3) This book focuses more on certain developed liberal democracies than on the more comprehensive global situation. Sunstein is especially interested in environmental issues, particularly energy policy, global warming, and climate change. This essay argues that Sunstein’s conceptual scheme can be fruitfully expanded to progress toward a normative environmental ethics that can be integrated with the insights of global political economy.

Keywords

Choiceclimateglobalizationenergypolitical economy
Type
Forum
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Spring 2018 , pp. 130 - 134
Copyright
© Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 2018 

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References

Sunstein, C. R., The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
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Sunstein, chap. 7, “Green by Default? Ethical Challenges for Environmental Protection,” pp. 159–186.Google Scholar
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Sunstein, pp. 26–27. In a list of nudges, Sunstein mentions “disclosure of factual information” and refers to various communications that include value judgments. This appears to be analogous to international discourse that includes exposure of facts about human rights abuses, supplemented by ethical principles along with the justification of such principles.Google Scholar
One interesting account including reference to various analogous forms of global and international influence, some nudge-like, subsequently discussed here (though very briefly) is in Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
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