Bloco de notas. Decidir e escolher.

O livre arbítrio é uma puerilidade. Talvez possamos decidir consciente e livremente algumas raras e privilegiadas vezes. Não podemos decidir permanentemente tudo. Temos hábitos bem formados, enquadramentos sensatos e alternativas racionais pré-seleccionadas nas melhores hipóteses habituais. O melhor que temos a fazer pela liberdade é manter sob controlo os cenários de escolha.

Em notação, Sunstein e Thaler a sustentar que o paternalismo libertário não é uma contradição nos próprios termos.
The false assumption is that almost all people, almost all of the time, make choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are better, by their own lights, than the choices that would be made by third parties. This claim is either tautological, and therefore uninteresting,or testable. We claim that it is testable and false, indeed obviously false. In fact, we do not think that anyone believes it on reflection.
(...)
[I]n many domains, people’s preferences are labile and ill-formed, and hence starting points and default rules are likely to be quite sticky. In these circumstances,the goal should be to avoid random, inadvertent, arbitrary, or harmful effects and to produce a situation that is likely to promote people’s welfare, suitably defined. Indeed, many current social outcomes are, we believe, both random and inadvertent, in the sense that they are a product of default rules whose behavior-shaping effects have never been a product of serious reflection. When the direct welfare inquiry is too hard to handle, libertarian paternalists have a range of alternatives. They might, for example, select an approach that would be sought by the majority, that requires or promotes explicit choices, or that minimizes opt-outs.