Green nudges, metacognition and rational agency. Do energy defaults undermine individual autonomy?

We define climate-change-responsive behaviors (CRBs) as explicit individual behaviors that directly result in a reduction of emissions. At present, the election of greener energy tariffs is a CRB well worth encouraging, and energy defaults have proved remarkably effective in achieving this goal. According to an apparently compelling objection, however, defaults would seriously undermine our rational agency, and their use in policy should therefore be opposed on moral grounds. We argue that this objection, while motivated by sharable concerns, appears to rest on an overly demanding view of intellectual autonomy – one that, we suggest, is ultimately implausible – coupled with an incomplete understanding of defaults’ psychology. In fact, once the metacognitive component of default-induced decisional processes is taken into due account, energy defaults can be seen as not just fully compatible with our rational agency, but also as an extremely valuable opportunity to more fully exercise it.