Beyond Nudge

The rise of Behavioral Sciences has profoundly transformed the concept of the economic agent, replacing the fiction of Homo Oeconomicus with real individuals, possessing limited and ecological rationality. In Beyond Nudge, it is explored how this new behavioral regulation challenges the foundations of the Rule of Law, demanding that the "goodness of the end" does not disregard the legitimacy of the means employed.
The work addresses fundamental epistemic and volitional problems, questioning whether the State can truly know citizens' preferences through the criterion "as judged by themselves," or if this degenerates into a paternalistic hetero-definition. Through a refined normative analysis, each tool is confronted with the pillars of Autonomy, Transparency, Legitimacy, and Equality, exposing the risks of manipulation and behavioral regressivity that disproportionately burden the most vulnerable groups.
The author proposes an innovative structural solution: the Adaptive-Constructivist Core Preferences-Based Welfare Model (ACCP-WM) and a polycentric "constitutional" approach. Inspired by Elinor Ostrom's governance of common-pool resources, this proposal advocates for the distribution of epistemic authority across multiple decision nodes, ensuring cognitive proximity and socio-cognitive subsidiarity. It is an invitation to overcome a potential "Technocratic Nudge Republic" in favor of an Institutional Ecology built by and for the people, where regulatory effectiveness and legal ethics go hand in hand.

Work Details:

• Author: Rute Saraiva
• Publisher: AAFDL Editora
• Number of Pages: 614