Technological Contributions to Ethical Nudging: Enhancing Safeguards

This article discusses the contributions that information-access-facilitator technologies promise to deliver in implementing ethical safeguards in the use of nudging techniques. It begins by identifying two broad issues within the debate on the ethics of nudging: first, the risk of misalignment between will and action that nudges can impose, and second, citizens' tendency to be oblivious to normatively relevant information regarding nudges. The subsequent analysis focuses on the safeguards intended to mitigate these two issues. Proceeding with the main argument, the article contends that leveraging technological potential can enhance the effectiveness of safeguards. Technologies meant to facilitate access to information, such as apps, Internet of Things products, wearable technologies, virtual assistants, and augmented reality applications, can be used as friction minimizers for obtaining information, saliency enhancers, enablers of information retrieval, and proactive measures to mitigate misjudgments, and can be characterized by a polymorphic warning design, resulting in nudging interventions that optimally fulfill ethical demands.