The normal operation of healthcare systems necessitates a variety of pro-social behaviours. There is usually a chronic shortage of organs to transplant, blood from donors of specific types, and other biological material donations that make a huge difference in people's lives, such as breast milk donations, which are critical for feeding premature children. This chronic shortage is distinguished by the fact that demand is consistently far greater than supply. Hence a question this chapter will try to address is how can we incentivise desirable pro-social behaviours? How do individuals react to health inequality? How should social decision-making be reconsidered when we consider the fact that individuals face cognitive biases? Social preferences include certain types of pro-social behaviours such as altruism and reciprocity, as well as a genuine preferences against inequity. The chapter discusses explanations for social preference behaviours and the motivation and incentives of pro-social behaviours and the role of altruism in health. Finally, we examine inequality aversion, namely how sensitive people are to inequality.

The chapter focuses on how the behavioural insights discussed in previous chapters affect policy, and how policy can use behavioural incentives to be more effective. It offers examples of policy interventions that have been successful in settings around the world. It provides some history and context for the proliferation of behavioural economics-related efforts in policy and in heath policy specifically. It describes four of the frameworks used to describe policymaking with behaviour in mind; MINDSPACE, COM-B, EAST and BASIC. It includes examples from international contexts where behavioural health policies have been enacted.

A focus on care draws attention to the fact that ethical self-cultivation, even in traditions that foreground moral autonomy, relies upon relationships of dependence. The recognition of relational and ethical dependence is familiar to anthropologists and has long been central for feminist ethics. However, the enormous body of anthropological scholarship that has emerged on care over the last decade raises the question of ethical dependence anew. This chapter problematizes the concept of care. It asks: how might ‘care’ as a topic, and as engaged ethnographically, trouble some of the ways that ethical life more broadly has been conceived in the philosophical and anthropological literature? Conversely, how might attention to the ethical stakes of care trouble some of the rich ethnographic scholarship on care? The chapter draws most substantially on anthropological and philosophical scholarship in virtue ethics and in phenomenology to consider both the relational complexities of care and care’s ineffable and elusive ethical dimensions.

The willingness to trust others does not just happen. We are taught to trust by those who have lived before us and by observing whether it is safe to do so. We are also schooled in the benefits of trustworthiness. The level of trust existing in a society influences the way life is organized. These concerns raise certain questions that we hope to answer in this chapter. For example, how do we learn to trust each other? Once a convention of trust is created, how is it passed on from generation to generation? Does intergenerational communication increase or decrease trust? Does it increase or decrease trustworthiness? Is trust profitable? What is the causal relationship between trust and trustworthiness? In this chapter we use an intergenerational version of the well-known trust game (Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe, 1995) to help us answer these questions about how trust is developed and communicated to others. We find that advice seems to decrease the amount of trust that evolves when this game is played in an intergenerational manner in that it decreases the amount of money sent from senders to receivers. Ironically, advice increases trustworthiness in that receivers tend to send more back. However, in no case, on average, does it pay to send any money. We explain this contradiction by examining the asymmetrical impact that advice has when serving as an anchor from which sending and returning behavior is adjusted. Further, we have discovered that subjects appear to follow conventions of reciprocity in that they tend to send more if they think the receivers acted in a “kind” manner, where “kind” means the sender sent more money than the receiver expected. Finally, while we find a causal relationship between trustworthiness and trust, the opposite cannot be established. We note that many of our results can only be achieved using the tools offered by intergenerational games. The intergenerational advice offered provides information not available when games are played in their static form. Combining that information with elicited beliefs of the senders and receivers adds even more information that can be used to investigate the motives that subjects have for doing what they do.

This chapter expands on the concept of reciprocity, looking at how it can be defined, its key characteristics, and the three key functions it plays: in norm creation, as a condition, and in execution of the law. It examines the defining elements of reciprocity: proportionality, relativity, equality, and interdependence. The chapter goes on to examine the nature of reciprocity, and its relationship to custom and general principles, two sources of international law. It illustrates how it is reciprocity’s relationship with the structural characteristic of sovereign equality in international law that explains many of its roles and defining characteristics.

The conclusion highlights some conclusions on the nature and role of reciprocity in public international law, on the basis of the analysis in foregoing chapters. It highlights the link between reciprocity and the principle of sovereign equality, before briefly outlining the functions, limits, and some of the specific meanings of reciprocity in public international law.

The negative connotations of reciprocity and its link to conduct-based responses in a lawless context have led to a juxtaposition in legal doctrine of reciprocity with community interests, institutionalisation, and the existence of objective legality. This chapter provides an overview of existing approaches to the subject and introduces the argument of this book, that reciprocity in public international law is not antithetical to community interests and obligations, but that its importance is explained by a structural factor: the sovereign equality of states. This explains and predicts where reciprocity will be relevant, and where it will find its limits.

This chapter addresess the operation of reciprocity in the enforcement of international law. It looks at the roles reciprocity may play in the consequences of a breach of international law, analyzing the exception of nonperformance and State responsibility. In particular, it analyzes the consequences that attach to the breach of erga omnes obligations or peremptory norms, and the rules and limitations on countermeasures. The structure and mechanisms of international responsibility demonstrate the persisting importance of reciprocity in international law and the structural limitations that international law’s horizontal nature poses to establishing specific consequences for breaches of community obligations.

This chapter analyzes reciprocity in the social sciences, historical forms of law, and domestic contexts, including the law of contracts and in federal States, to shed light upon some of reciprocity’s fundamental characteristics. Reciprocity is not incompatible with the existence of a community, but necessarily requires a social relation, and one of its defining characteristics is its relationship with equality. Rather than being a negative concept, based on occasional and discontinued instances of interaction on the basis of reactions to conduct, reciprocity is a concept fundamental to the existence of social relations, and inherent to ideas of justice and fairness.

Following the finding in Chapter 3 that reciprocity encounters limitations when the subjects of a legal relationship are not equal, this chapter analyses the role of reciprocity in rules pertaining to the treatment of individuals in international law, assessing how reciprocity functions differently depending on who rights are owed to in different substantive areas of law. First looking at historical standards of treatment including those based on reciprocity and the use of the minimum standard of treatment, the chapter goes on to examine how reciprocity functions in national treatment and the most-favoured nation clause. The chapter then goes on to examine the treatment of individuals under human rights, international humanitarian law, and international investment law, analyzing the differences that arise in the role of reciprocity when the legal obligations in question are owed directly to individuals. The chapter ends with an examination of recent developments in diplomatic protection.

I argue that one of the basic tenets of classical liberalism is that, if left free, people will cooperate and reciprocate with others as a means to pursue their own individual desires. Yet, if one is not careful, the rules and institutions that evolve within society over time may crowd out the motivation for people to reciprocate, and may instead crowd in their tendency towards selfish egoism. Policy makers therefore have a role to play in nurturing the conditions that, ideally, protect and foster the intrinsic human tendency to reciprocate. However, one should not try to force people to be cooperative; the tendency to reciprocate ought to be autonomously driven, and the extent to which people are driven to reciprocate – both positively and negatively – will often be influenced heavily by perceptions of desert. I finish by proposing a few ways for reciprocity to be nurtured: namely, for policy makers to emphasise the importance of this basic human tendency in their rhetoric; to address the extreme concentrations in income and wealth that have been allowed to accumulate in many countries over recent decades; and to decentralise, as far as possible, public policy decision making.

I begin with the origins of reciprocity, since this motivational force takes a central position in my political economy of behavioural public policy. The behavioural influences that tend to be labelled as errors by most behavioural economists, and as such have served as the justification for a paternalistic direction in behavioural public policy, in an ecological sense may not be errors at all. We thus cannot conclude that attempts to modify people’s choices in accordance with these so-called errors will improve the lives of those targeted for behaviour change. Where people are imposing no substantive harms on others, policy makers should restrict themselves to protecting and fostering reciprocity, which benefits the group and most of the people who comprise it, irrespective of their own personal desires in life. However, when one party to an exchange uses the behavioural affects to benefit themselves but imposes harms on the other party, the concept of a free and fair reciprocal exchange has been violated. I thus argue that there is an intellectual justification to introduce behavioural-informed regulations against activities that impose unacceptable harms on others.

This book is the third of a trilogy of books that I wrote on the past, present and my preferred conception of the future of the field of behavioural public policy. The first book was titled ’The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy’, and the second ’Reciprocity and the Art of Behavioural Public Policy’. This Introduction summarises the content of those two books to remind the reader where I have got to in the trilogy, and then briefly details some of the main arguments in the current book, to signpost to the reader where I am about to go.

This chapter begins by showing why Hegel thinks that recognition depends on sociality, on shared forms of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). Drawing on a comparison with Rahel Jaeggi’s conceptions of “social practices” and “forms of life,” I consider the central elements of the social theory advanced in the Phenomenology. I show that “ethical life,” in particular when understood as a configuration of “spirit,” both provides the terms for individual self-understanding and secures the conditions for equality and reciprocity with other subjects. At the same time, I demonstrate that relations of reciprocal intersubjective recognition will not be possible in all forms of social life. While social forms that entrench relations of domination and inequality among their members are among the primary threats to the achievement of reciprocal recognition, I argue that, in the Phenomenology, Hegel makes a unique argument that it is possible for a form of social life to be structured so that no one is recognized within them, in which even one-sided configurations of recognition are impossible. I conclude by pointing to Hegel’s proposed solution to this problem, a universal conception of the self that is explicitly articulated within a shared way of life.

I begin my interpretation of the text by situating the idea of recognition in Hegel’s account of “self-consciousness.” I argue that what is distinctive of self-consciousness is not that it is apperceptive (all forms of consciousness are apperceptive in a significant sense for Hegel), but rather that it has a specific “double-object” structure. Just as the implicit aim of any shape of consciousness is to achieve knowledge of its object, so the implicit aim of self-consciousness is to achieve knowledge of its (ultimate) object, namely itself. Instead of depending on the idea of a quasi-natural “desire for recognition,” recognition provides a novel instance of this double-object structure, which it shares with desire. I show that recognizing and being recognized by others are sources of a distinctive kind of self-knowledge, but they are not necessary for the achievement of (mere) self-consciousness. My account also shows why recognition is necessarily reciprocal, since a relation of recognition between subjects has the “double-object” structure characteristic of self-consciousness only when both individuals relate to one another in the specific mode of recognition. I conclude by demonstrating how acts of recognizing give rise to forms of sociality.