Kent Greenfield

  • October 6, 2011
    BookTalk
    The Myth of Choice
    Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits
    By: 
    Kent Greenfield

    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.

  • June 12, 2009
    Guest Post

    By Kent Greenfield, Professor of Law and Law Fund Research Scholar, Boston College and is presently writing a book about choice and consent in law, politics and economics. Greenfield is a former Clerk to Justice David Souter (1994-95).

    Ever since President Obama announced that he would seek out an empathetic replacement for David Souter on the Supreme Court, the nation has engaged in a revealing debate about empathy. No one denies that empathy is an important quality for our daily lives, and something we should engender in our kids. But there is an honest disagreement about whether empathy is an appropriate qualification for a judge.

    Liberals like empathy, because compassion brings mercy, and mercy is seen as an important part of good judging. Conservatives denounce empathy, saying compassion breeds judicial activism. Law professor Steven Calabresi has warned that asking judges to be empathetic is like removing the blindfold from the iconic Lady Justice, allowing the judge to decide in favor of whichever perspective elicited more feelings of compassion.

    If empathy is simply a matter of being open to feeling a certain amount of sympathy for one party or the other, the conservatives may be right that it creates risks for a judicial institution. Judges might be too quick to base judgments on unacknowledged bias or prejudice.

    There is a better definition of empathy for the judicial context, however, that focuses not on how judges feel but how they think. This kind of empathy is not only beneficial for the institution, but crucial. And David Souter has embodied this kind of empathy in his tenure on the court. Let me explain.