Moral philosopher Jeremy Waldron offers this powerful critique of “soft paternalism” or the use of state-sponsored “nudges” to change behavior (emphasis ours):
… it may help to think about a slightly different sort of nudge—an informational nudge, where we manipulate the information given to people who use certain heuristics, in order to achieve the behavioral change that we figure the proper processing of correct information would lead to.
For example: between 15 and 20 percent of regular smokers (let’s say men sixty years old, who have smoked a pack a day for forty years) will die of lung cancer. But regulators don’t publicize that number, even though it ought to frighten people away from smoking, because they figure that some smokers may irrationally take shelter in the complementary statistic of the 80–85 percent of smokers who will not die of lung cancer. So instead they say that smoking raises the chances of getting lung cancer. That will nudge many people toward the right behavior, even though it doesn’t in itself provide an assessment of how dangerous smoking actually is (at least not without a baseline percentage of nonsmokers who get cancer).
Or consider the way lawmakers nudge people away from drunk driving. There are about 112 million self-reported episodes of alcohol-impaired driving among adults in the US each year. Yet in 2010, the number of people who were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes (10,228) was an order of magnitude lower than that, i.e., almost one ten thousandth of the number of incidents of DWI. The lawmakers don’t say that 0.009 percent of drunk drivers cause fatal accidents (implying, correctly, that 99.991 percent of drunk drivers do not). They say instead that alcohol is responsible for nearly one third (31 percent) of all traffic-related deaths in the United States—which nudges people in the right direction, even though in itself it tells us next to nothing about how dangerous drunk driving is.
In other words, smoking and driving under the influence are, of course, risky activities — compared, that is, to not smoking and to not driving under the influence — but how great is the true risk? Is it ethical for our government to present a false or distorted picture of the actual magnitude of the true risk, as in the two examples above?
prior probability 
Nudges are not unethical. They are necessary to get the pojt across to people who would otherwise take he actual numbers and disregard the risk altogether. Actually The government is actually doing a good thing by “nudging.” If one knew that the actual risk were so small the more people would take the actual risk which would increas the fatalities or the risky behavior.
Those are good points, especially if we were to take a consequentialist or utilitarian view of nudges, but don’t you feel we are being lied to (or at least manipulated) when we are presented with such a distorted picture of these risks?
In my opinion, nudges seem like kind, humanitarian acts, that those of us who know better, could apply to help those who don’t. On the other hand, next time I participate in the car-buying process, I will bear in mind that I’m being nudged every step of the way and that the dealer really has no intention of being kind to me.
This a great point. One could argue that a “nudge” in and of itself is neither good nor bad, since it depends on who is doing the nudging and for what purpose!