The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [19]
Choice is the elephant in the room, whether we are discussing money, sex, politics, or crime. Yet we don’t recognize it, much less understand it.
So let’s start understanding choice where most of the action happens—in our brains.
II
Limits and Influences
3
Our Choices, Our Brains
My will is strong, but my won’t is weak.
—Cole Porter, 1928
One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her—is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?
—Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, 1995
CHOICES DEPEND, FIRST AND FOREMOST, on our brains. Ambrose Bierce once wrote that the brain is “an apparatus with which we think what we think,”1 and for the non-neuroscientists among us that is about all we know. But we do have a sense that if our brains work well, we have a good chance of making a good decision. If our brains are not working well, then we might make bad decisions.
Here’s a sad story. Raelyn Balfour, an auburn-haired thirty-six-year-old administrator for the U.S. military, left her office in Charlottesville, Virginia, on a cool day in March a couple of years ago after a day of work. She was tired. She had been up most of the previous night, babysitting for a friend and then caring for her nine-month-old son, Bryce, who was suffering from a cold.2
The moment she returned to her car, parked all day in the office lot, was to be the worst in her life. Bryce was in his car seat, dead. Balfour had forgotten to drop him off at day care that morning, and even though the temperature that day was only in the 60s, the interior of the car had risen to over 110 degrees. The heat had killed him.
The 911 recording of a passerby calling for an ambulance is heart-wrenching. You can hear Balfour wailing, “Oh my God, no! No, no, please, no!”3
Balfour’s dreadful mistake is not as uncommon as you might think: it happens in the United States fifteen to twenty-five times a year. Usually a few circumstances conspire together—the parent is tired and distracted and stressed; there is a change in routine; and there is some kind of breakdown in precaution or preventative stopgap. In Balfour’s case, because Bryce had been sick the night before, he dozed off in the car, making no sound. Balfour herself was sleep-deprived and stressed, spending much of the drive to work talking on her cell phone, dealing with crises at work and with relatives. Bryce’s usual car seat, positioned where she could see it behind the passenger seat, was empty. Balfour had planned to take the car seat to the local fire station to be professionally installed. So Bryce was sitting in another car seat, directly behind Balfour, where he was both quiet and out of sight. She simply forgot about dropping him off. Later, when she was at work, the babysitter called Balfour to ask why Bryce had not been dropped off, but she dialed Balfour’s mobile phone and not her office. The cell phone went unanswered inside Balfour’s purse.4 It might have been too late even if she had picked up, since the car got hot enough to kill Bryce in as little as forty minutes.
Balfour’s mistake was gut wrenching and perhaps inexcusable. But it is not incomprehensible. Stories like this give me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach because I can empathize completely with Balfour’s situation. I have never forgotten my child in the back of the car, or at school, or at a friend’s house. But I understand how it could happen, and I bet most parents can too. On the morning I was writing this chapter, I offered to walk my wife to the train, forgetting for a moment that by doing so I would leave our young son sleeping alone in the house for