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By Root 397 0

said this is a choice that counts, even though it might not feel like much of a choice. The choice between serving your country in the armed services and being openly gay was seen as valid until recently; now it’s not. A choice to engage in consensual sex gets respect—it counts—unless the choice is to have sex for money, in which case it does not count (at least in most parts of the United States). If a woman “chooses” to wear a burqa because of cultural expectations and religious beliefs, such a choice is usually respected (I saw a woman wearing one recently in my local mall), but not in France, where burqas are now banned in public.

All in all, we might think we like choice, but the question of which choices count and which do not is very, very tricky.

The second big problem with our fixation on choice is that both the civil libertarians and the Tea Partiers assume that if the government is not involved, what remains is a sphere of freedom, choice, and personal responsibility. But the reality is different. In fact, the most significant constraints on choice come not from government but from a host of other forces.

For example, we are constrained by our own biology. You can’t open a newspaper or magazine these days without learning of some new study showing that our behavior is predictable and explainable as a matter of brain science. There is nothing hotter in the world of science, and no area of science that has captured more of the public’s attention, than the study of how our behavior, beliefs, and decisions are profoundly influenced by what goes on in different areas of our brains. It is as if the brain is the new focus of science’s age-long effort to explain seemingly random events in the world around us. The more we know about the brain, the easier it becomes to explain and anticipate the seemingly random behavior of any one of us.

Other constraints are just as profound. For example, the influence of culture is easy to ignore, but cultural norms about everything from gender roles to religious mores are pervasive and powerful. Most of us do not even recognize them, much less resist them. In all honesty, did you choose your gender role, or was it “chosen” for you by the culture you live in? Also consider the role of power and authority when it comes to choice. Most of us, most of the time, respect authority figures and do what they say. We follow orders, even when we shouldn’t and even when they’re not really orders. If a scientist told you to shock someone with an electronic pulse as a part of an experiment, would you do it even after it was clear you were causing pain? We’d like to think we wouldn’t, but good evidence says we probably would, and we might even say that we “had no choice.”

A final example of a pervasive influence is the market. Markets are wonderful in allocating goods and services to the highest bidder, and they might seem to embody the very notion of choice. (Coca-Cola recently ran an ad in my hometown newspaper crowing that it offers “over 650 ways to help you achieve a balanced diet and active lifestyle.”) But depending on markets means that if you have few resources, you have little choice. Also, markets limit choice by making manipulation of our choices profitable. Markets also put price tags on things we don’t want to commodify—left to their own devices, markets sweep up all kinds of things we’d otherwise choose to protect from markets, like babies or kidneys.

So we are faced with a tension. On the one hand, our political and legal rhetoric applauds and deifies choice, autonomy, and personal responsibility. On the other hand, we face profound questions about when choice is real, and about the reality of pervasive constraints on our choices. Once we take into account the influences of biology, culture, authority, and economics, the scope of our choices is much narrower than we have long assumed.

This book is about that tension. Can our legal system and our political debates become more sophisticated in their understanding of the nature of human choice? Can we craft public policy so that