When is it legitimate for a government to ‘nudge’ its citizens, in the sense described by
Thaler and Sunstein (2008)? In their original work on the topic, Thaler and Sunstein
developed the ‘as judged by themselves’ (or AJBT) test to answer this question (Thaler
and Sunstein 2008, p. 5). In a recent paper, Paul and Sunstein (2019) raised a concern
about this test: it often seems to give the wrong answer in cases in which we are nudged
to make a decision that leads to what Paul calls a personally transformative experience,
that is, one that results in our values changing (Paul 2014). In those cases, the nudgee
will judge the nudge to be legitimate after it has taken place, but only because their
values have changed as a result of the nudge. In this paper, I take up the challenge of
finding an alternative test. I draw on my aggregate utility account of how to choose in
the face of what Ullmann-Margalit (2006) calls big decisions, that is, decisions that
lead to these personally transformative experiences