Zealous nudging can deteriorate into paternalistic bullshitting (in Harry Frankfurt’s technical sense). To the extent that William Simkulet’s paper is a reminder against that danger, it does us good service.
The problem starts with Simkulet’s formal definition of ‘bullshit’, which says that conveying x while intending one’s audience to believe y is sufficient for bullshit. This, however, is not true since the bullshitter’s not caring whether x is true is constitutive of bullshitting, and hence a necessary condition. Why, we then ask, must such lack of care be the case with the doctor who nudges? It is at least prima facie easy and intuitive to think of scenarios in which the ethical…