By Kent Greenfield, a law professor and Law Fund Research Scholar at Boston College Law School.
Americans love to be able to choose. The typical grocery store has more than 45,000 different items; the average American family has access to about 120 television channels. Glenn Beck opines, “for us to be able to choose, that’s a blessing.”
An analogue to the fixation on choice is the focus on personal responsibility. Because people make choices, they should be able to take personal responsibility for those they make. This sounds like something all of us could agree on, even in this especially tendentious moment in political history.
My new book, The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility In a World of Limits, articulates some reasons to question this mantra of choice and personal responsibility.
Choice is limited in all kinds of ways. Humans are limited by brain science, habit, authority, culture, and the so-called “free” market, which restricts as much as it empowers. We are easily overwhelmed by choice. Consider the grocery store and television statistics mentioned above -- studies show that people are happier when they choose among fewer, not more, items; television viewers may want lots of channels but actually watch only a handful.
Acknowledging the limits on choice is the first step toward recognizing the insidious nature of “personal responsibility” rhetoric. More and more, those on the right equate “personal responsibility” with choice. It is not about maturity or accountability but simply another way of saying that individuals get to make choices for themselves; they are masters of their fate.
This brand of personal responsibility is used to oppose health care reform, support tort reform, and explain away problems of homelessness or delays in hurricane response. It uses a respect for individual choice to make the political point that government should be small, uninvolved, and deferential to individual decisions.
