Quotes from Cass R. Sunstein

Covertly influencing decision processes such as that the resulting decision is aligned with higher-order desires may actually enhance autonomy.

Centuries later, John Rawls wrote of the same possibility: "The benefits from discussion lie in the fact that even representative legislators are limited in knowledge and the ability to reason. No one of them knows everything the others know, or can make all the same inferences that they can draw in concert. Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments.

Any heterogeneous society faces a risk of fragmentation. This

Brandeis can be taken to have offered a conception of the social role of the idealized citizen. For such a citizen, active engagement in politics, at least some of the time, is a responsibility, not just an entitlement. If citizens are "inert," freedom itself is at risk. If

Terrible events produce outrage, and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumors that justify their emotional states, and also to attribute those events to intentional action.

Some rumors simultaneously relieve "a primary emotional urge" and offer an explanation, to those who accept them, of why they feel as they do; the rumor "rationalizes while it relieves.

The French thinker Francois de La Rochefoucauld proclaimed: "Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue."7 If the Rule of Law sometimes produces hypocrisy, at least we know what counts as vice and what counts as virtue.

Somewhat more broadly, I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law.

The first paragraph of The Federalist, No. 1 offers the following contrast: "It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Members of a democratic public will not do well if they are unable to appreciate the views of their fellow citizens, if they believe "fake news," or if they see one another as enemies or adversaries in some kind of war.

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.

too much dystopianism, too frequently or easily deployed, has its own costs. It's important to distinguish policies we don't like from policies that attempt a fundamental transformation of political institutions. That's true for purposes of conserving critical resources. But it's also true for purposes of drawing public attention and debate.

It might also count as an insult to dignity, and a form of infantilization, if the government constantly reminds people of things that they already know.

If government is to respect people's autonomy, or to treat them with dignity, it should not deprive them of freedom. It should treat them as adults, rather than children or infants.