Psychological interference, liberty and technology

Technology in Society, 2019

In this article, I examine how nudging powered by Big Data relates to both negative and positive liberty. I focus in particular on how liberty is affected by appeals to irrational mechanisms. I conclude that it is problematic to use liberty as an argument for nudging. Such an argument would have to be based on the concept of positive liberty, empowerment and emancipation from irrationality, but I argue that even stronger arguments against nudging can be built on the same conception of liberty. I consider Big Data-powered nudging to have the potential to be both manipulative and coercive, and believe that we should be wary of the effects such efforts have on liberty. As I consider liberty to be part of what makes a good society, this becomes an effort to analyse one aspect of the effects of technology on society in general. While I do not accept arguments in favour of nudging based on liberty, it is easier to see that arguments based on utility could support nudging. I do not evaluate what the proper trade-off is between utility and liberty in this article, and it is obvious that, at times, utility trumps an absolute demand for liberty. However, I argue in favour of transparent traditional regulation and rational persuasion instead of nudging, when these approaches can serve the same purposes. Should we choose to nudge, we should not euphemise our efforts by claiming that we do so on behalf of freedom.

Law and Philosophy, 2010

This paper presents an argument for the value of privacy that is based on a purely negative concept of freedom only. I show that privacy invasions may decrease a person’s negative freedom as well as a person’s knowledge about the negative freedom she possesses. I argue that not only invasions that lead to actual interference, but also invasions that lead to potential interference (many cases of identity theft) constitute actual harm to the invadee’s liberty interests, and I critically examine the courts’ reliance on a principle of ‘no harm, no foul’ in recent data breach cases. Using a number of insights from the psychology of human belief, I also show that the liberal claim for protection of privacy is strengthened by the observation that often the privacy invader cannot be held responsible for the influence on the invadee’s negative freedom.

This paper will provide a three-part analysis to demonstrate automated decisionmaking systems (ADMS), representing advanced technologies, can and do undermine our freedom. The analysis will assess their impact on our freedom with three perspectives of how freedom can be defined. Based on each perspective, the paper will address how the encroachment to our freedom can be mitigated and/or freedom preserved or regained.

Technology in Society, 2019

‘Big Brother is watching you!’ the posters in Orwell's Oceania told all its inhabitants. We have no such posters, but we live in the era of Big Data, and someone is watching us. Here, I discuss how Big Data is an omniscient and ubiquitous presence in our society. I then examine to what degree Big Data threatens liberty in both the negative and positive conception of the term. I arrive at three propositions: a) Big Data threatens privacy and enables surveillance, b) the lack of alternatives to lifestyles that involve feeding into Big Data leads to something akin to forced participation in the surveillance of Big Brother, and c) surveillance and lack of privacy are a threat to freedom, because i) the information gathered can be abused, ii) people have a right not to be observed (even if the surveillance is completely benign), and iii) being observed is an intervention that can affect those who are observed. Together, these propositions lead to the conclusion that Big Data threatens liberty. I argue that the positive conception of liberty provides the strongest argument against how we currently employ Big Data, but that the negative conception can also provide a sufficiently strong argument. On this basis, a liberal defence of privacy, and thus also of liberty, against this new form of surveillance can be established.

THR Blog, 2014

Can behavioral economics improve public policy? Should it? Making the case for both in their 2008 best-selling book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein popularized the idea that small tweaks to policies can make those policies more alert to innate human habits and behavior. Such tweaks can thus "nudge" individuals to make choices that are more beneficial to themselves, and to society-stopping smoking during pregnancy, say, or saving more for retirement, or purchasing appliances that are more energy efficient. When President Barack Obama appointed Sunstein as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2008 to tinker with existing regulatory policies, it was seen as a sign that Obama would work to nudge the government toward more nudging. And indeed, the White House is now forming a team to explore how behavioral economics may contribute to "evidence-based policy-making" in the future.

Common minds: themes from the philosophy of Philip Pettit, 2007

If moral and political philosophy is to be of any use, it had better be concerned with real people. The focus need not be exclusively on people as they are; but it should surely not extend beyond how they would be under laws as they might be. It is one of the strengths of Philip Pettit's work that it is concerned with real people and the ways that they think: with the commonplace mind. In this paper I examine Pettit's recent work on free will. 2 Much of my concern will be to see how his contentions fit with empirical findings about human psychology. Pettit is a compatibilist about free will: he holds that it is compatible with determinism. But he finds fault with existing compatibilist accounts, and then proposes his own amendment. My aim is to challenge his grounds for finding fault; and then to raise some questions about his own positive account.

Internet Policy Review, 2019

Since 2016, when the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal began to emerge, public concern has grown around the threat of "online manipulation". While these worries are familiar to privacy researchers, this paper aims to make them more salient to policymakers-first, by defining "online manipulation", thus enabling identification of manipulative practices; and second, by drawing attention to the specific harms online manipulation threatens. We argue that online manipulation is the use of information technology to covertly influence another person's decision-making, by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities. Engaging in such practices can harm individuals by diminishing their economic interests, but its deeper, more insidious harm is its challenge to individual autonomy. We explore this autonomy harm, emphasising its implications for both individuals and society, and we briefly outline some strategies for combating online manipulation and strengthening autonomy in an increasingly digital world.

2006

Technology in Society 34(4)

Technologies should be recognized as impacting personal choice concerning the good life. Yet, technological liberalism – the idea that technology permits an extending of individual volition concerning the good without distortion – remains a dominant collective belief. It is not enough to recognize that technologies can serve as “radical monopolies” or “script” human action. They also influence human action and choice in terms of cognition and affect. Technologies-of-choice can be viewed as enabling the belief that one may act as an unencumbered self, even though they do not unequivocally extend the human will. Consideration of the impact of technologies on human volition suggests possible avenues of research into when and how technologically reflexive decision making may actually occur as well as how societies could create space for technologies more compatible with alternative notions of the good, such as that exemplified in the philosophy of Albert Borgmann. Yet, the task of enabling a wider deployment of more focal or communitarian kinds of technology is far from straightforward.

Perspectives on Politics, 2021

sion of its own right, and characterized by horizontal equality and broad-based participation, requires institutional shaping. Second, nondemocratic governments do endure, but without expressing the normative ideal of action (potentia agendi) in possession of right, instead only producing effects (potentia operandi) with right. And third, oligarchic elites and associations in the people do undermine the state: yet formal and informal balancing (civic strengthening) rather than Hobbesian repression (chapter 9) is an alternative way to prevent oligarchy and sustainably ensure collective participation equality in the people. The institutional detail that Field provides to flesh out civic strengthening, across different regimes in Spinoza’s Political Treatise (PT), is a further strength of this book. In the monarchy, the size of the king’s advisory council, combined with a close to randomized selection procedure, minimizes the risk of oligarchic capture. In aristocracies, syndics ensure...