What’s the Good of Bearing a Nudge? Ethical Dilemmas of Nudging in the Circular Economy.

Abstract

Whilst the demand for new products continues to rise, society’s resources are being rapidly depleted. The circular economy is one way of addressing this tension. Although historically consumers have been largely excluded from the circular economy discourse, more recent work has explored how they can be encouraged — as ‘resource gatekeepers’ — to embrace activities and practices (e.g. recycling) that contribute to the circular economy. One promising approach open to firms involves exploiting the consistent cognitive ‘errors’ to which human beings fall prey; ‘nudging’ consumers to behave in more pro-circularity ways. At the same time, this raises ethical issues. In this conceptual paper, we unpack these issues: We use a lens comprised of the principles from three classical schools of ethics to debate the question of whether a potential application of nudging — as a ‘stealthy’ technique of persuasion — to the circular economy is ethically appropriate. In doing so we make a theoretical contribution to the intersection between firms and consumers in the circular economy, and specifically to the ethics of persuasion in this context. Further, we foreground the implications of our contribution for practitioners and make suggestions as to how they can navigate a more ethical involvement of their consumers in their circular economy initiatives.