Œconomia (Dec 2023)
Behavioral Food Public Policies: The Relevance of Identity
Abstract
Among the many sorts of policies used to fight obesity and overweight, behavioral public policies are currently expanding. However, by their very nature, behavioral public policies may threaten the respect of persons’ identity. In particular, the normative status of behavioral interventions is questionable because of the way they interfere with people’s choices. Indeed, behavioral interventions may sometimes affect individuals’ attitudes and choices without the targets being aware of this influence. This article discusses whether and how dietary guidelines and their related tools, as cases of behavioral public policies, deal with the respect of persons’ identity. This issue is central to assess the normative status of these public policies. Identity is a recent issue in economics but some works show that identity plays a role in economic behavior. We thus develop a method to characterize identity. On this basis, we examine how behavioral public food policies take identity into account. We analyze dietary food guides of four countries and some of their related tools. We show that dietary food guides give a strong attention to (some) cultural and personal identity and aim at respecting the persons’ autonomy. However, their declination through tools appears more problematic and includes choice restriction and eventually the exploitation of cognitive biases. Such a difference between the claim of respecting identity and actions calls for a discussion of the normative status of those policies. From a philosophical account of autonomy, we argue that the major issue associated with behavioral public policies is not that they interfere with one’s behavior but rather that they must give sufficient attention to the respect of a person’s values, i.e., to respect her personal and social identity.
