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of choice and try to make sense of them. In the end, we will discover that we are better than it appears in figuring out when choice should count and when it should not. We actually have a more nuanced view of choice than our rhetoric about choice and personal responsibility might suggest. We are well attuned to the fact that some choices are compelled, that alternatives are limited, and that people often do not have the information needed to make good decisions. We also know—at least at some level—that our choices are often manipulated by marketing and fraud, even if we don’t always know how. As it turns out, our intuitions work pretty well, much of the time. We hold people accountable for “real” choices and give them a break when the choices aren’t “real,” or when their situation is more someone else’s fault than their own. In the end, we are fundamentally decent and generous about choice.

This book will explore what most of us seem to understand intuitively, namely that choices are constrained, manipulated, and forced upon us. I will flesh out our intuitions and discuss the effects of biology, economics, power, and culture on people’s choices. We will also discover areas where our intuition points us in the wrong direction. Obesity is one example, the Mount Hood climbers another.

This book will also look into why, if choice is so malleable and indistinct, we hear so much about it and its cousin personal responsibility. In fights about issues as diverse as health care reform, gay rights, educational policy, poverty, disaster relief, and abortion, why does so much of the debate turn on arguments about choice and personal responsibility? One answer is the rhetorical power of choice in a culture of individualism. We love to think we all have an abundance of choices and that we should take personal responsibility for the choices we make.

But there is a deeper reason choice is the preferred frame for so many political battles. In most cases, the rhetoric of choice gives the advantage to those in power. It is the rhetoric of the powerful. Saying that “people should bear responsibility for the choices they make” helps the powerful and hurts the powerless more often than not. Choice is a ready-made frame with which to oppose movements fighting for social justice, civil liberties, or economic rights, because opponents can point to people’s existing behavior as representing a choice—whether to work at Walmart, to live on the street, or to live in a country where the government taps one’s phone. In facing such assertions of choice, the person fighting injustice that occurs within the status quo must argue either that people are not really making the choices they seem to be making, that the choices made do not reflect the true preferences of the actors, or that the choices should not be respected. Those are hard arguments to make. This book will help make them, pointing out that people often have much less choice than we (and sometimes they) assume.

But this book will not take this state of affairs, this lack of choice, as unchangeable. I will also ask how we make choice more real. How can we give people the tools to take personal responsibility seriously? How should the law and public policy take into account the limitations on human decision making we know exist? How can individuals and law help build choice? Perhaps ironically, once we understand and take heed of our limitations as human beings, we can use this knowledge to become better decision makers and more confident and knowledgeable choosers.

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In Love with Choice

Ultimately, everything about politics—everything, everything—is about choice.

—Rahm Emanuel, 2010

For us to be able to choose, that’s a blessing.

—Glenn Beck, 2011

IF ANY SLOGAN CAPTURES the American mindset, it’s Burger King’s “Have It Your Way.” Originating in 1974, the slogan was linked to a catchy jingle that burrowed into your psyche like a Barry Manilow song.

Burger King revived the slogan a few years ago after ignoring it for a couple of decades because, according to a company