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Reason, Paternalism, and Disaster

Sunstein, Cass R. 2007. Worst-case scenarios. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 340pp. Thaler, Richard, and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 293pp + x

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Notes

  1. I do not know whether the problem is obsolete after the launch of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in September 2008 (Page references to these books are in the text next to either ‘WCS’ or ‘N’).

  2. Sunstein has an important chapter on future generations, which endorses a principle of Intergenerational Neutrality and explores its relation to discounting the future. There is no space to discuss this here.

  3. Sunstein does not go into how much extra weight should be given to the worst off, but this is tricky and not really to the point of his discussion. Norman Daniels describes this, in the context of health, as an ‘unsolved rationing problem’ (Daniels 2008).

  4. The authors do not say exactly what the default is for organ retrieval from the dead in the US, but their argument strongly implies that organs are not taken unless the dead people had consented. But this is not so. When people have not made their wishes known, the family are asked, and if they agree, retrieval may go ahead (Price 2000).

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Acknowledgement

My thanks to an anonymous referee.

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  1. School of Population Health, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand

    T. M. Wilkinson

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  1. T. M. Wilkinson
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Wilkinson, T.M. Reason, Paternalism, and Disaster. Res Publica 15, 203–211 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-008-9078-7

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