Libertarian paternalism is a weak form of paternalism that recommends nudges rather than bans, restrictions, or other strong interventions. Nudges influence people’s choice by modifying contextual factors (the “choice architecture”). This paper explores the possibility of an epistemic analogue of libertarian paternalism. What I call “epistemic libertarian paternalism” is a weak form of epistemic paternalism that recommends “epistemic nudges” rather than stronger paternalistic interventions. Epistemic nudges influence people’s beliefs and judgments by modifying contextual factors (the “epistemic choice architecture”). The main (...) aim of this paper is to defend epistemic libertarian paternalism from the “irrationality problem”, which I take to be the most urgent problem for epistemic libertarian paternalism; given how epistemic nudges work (i.e. they typically co-opt psychological biases), nudged beliefs are irrational. In response to the irrationality problem, I admit that nudged beliefs are often (not always, though) irrational, but insist that there are conditions in which epistemic nudging can be justifiable nonetheless. I will propose two conditions that are jointly sufficient for justifiable epistemic nudging: “Veridicality Condition” (which says that nudged beliefs are more likely to be true than non-nudged beliefs) and “Not-More-Irrationality Condition” (which says that nudged beliefs are not more likely to be irrational than non-nudged beliefs). (shrink)

This paper offers an account of collective epistemic vices, which we call the “group identification account”. The group identification account attributes collective epistemic vices to the groups that are constituted by “group identification”, which is a primitive and non-doxastic self-understanding as a group member (Turner, 1982; Brewer, 1991; Brewer & Gardner, 1996; Pacherie, 2013; Salice & Miyazono, 2020). The distinctive feature of the group identification account is that it enables us to attribute epistemic vices not just to established social groups (...) (e.g. committees, research teams, juries) but also to loose social groups (e.g. loosely connected people in an echo chamber) when they are constituted by group identification. The group identification account is contrasted with Fricker’s (2010, 2020) influential account, the “joint commitment account”, which focuses on established social groups, and has difficulty in making sense of collective epistemic vices of loose social groups. The group identification account is motivated by the fact that collective epistemic vices can be useful to diagnose not only the epistemic performance of established groups but also that of loose groups in real-life cases, such as echo chamber (Nguyen, 2020), implicit bias (Holroyd, 2020), group polarization (Broncano-Berrocal & Carter, 2021), etc. (shrink)

Suppose that a patient is receiving treatment options from her doctor. In one case, the doctor says, “the surgery has a 90% survival rate.” Now, suppose the doctor instead said, “the procedure has a 10% mortality rate.” Predictably, the patient is more likely to consent on the first description and more likely to dissent on the second. This is an example of a framing effect. A framing effect occurs when “the description of [logically-equivalent] options in terms of gains (positive frame) (...) rather than losses (negative frame) elicits systematically different choices.” Framing effects are ubiquitous, but they are particularly troublesome in medicine. Many worry that there is tension between valuing informed consent and using framing effects in clinical settings. In this paper, I answer this question: if an individual is subject to a framing effect when she gives her consent, does this undermine the validity of her consent? I argue that framing effects do not undermine consent in general. (shrink)