The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [3]
I wish I could report that my civil disobedience led Mrs. Connor to see the error of her ways and adjust her rules for hallway conversations, but I have no memory of that. I do remember being more careful about my loose lips on the way to the lunch room. The next year, Mrs. Connor and the school principal recommended me for admission into a “special” educational program that, not coincidentally, was located at another school.
I had learned a lesson. Choices have consequences, some bad—a paddling on my behind—and some unexpectedly better—the special program, which turned out to be quite good. I also learned that I was supposed to accept the consequences of my decisions even if I had not anticipated them.
The notion that we’re defined by, and responsible for, our choices is at the core of the American story. Even eight-year-olds are supposed to understand it. But it’s not just something we teach our children. It is at the center of our political theory and our legal system, as well as our advertising. Our nation’s founding documents base the legitimacy of government on the “consent of the governed.” Our laws are based on the fundamental notion that people know what they’re doing, whether in committing crimes or signing a contract. We idolize choice, using it to market everything from political causes (the right of access to an abortion, to its supporters, is the “right to choose”) to fast food (“Have It Your Way”).
But what if choice is fake?
What if we have much less ability to choose than we think we do? What if our choices—even the ones we think we are making—are so limited that we are less like wild horses on the plains and more like steers in a cattle chute? What if we are driven much more by the demands of economics, culture, power, and biology than we realize?
What if people “choose” outcomes in the same way I “chose” to be paddled when I stood up to my teacher? That is, hardly at all?
1.
Let’s say you’re a guy who works with his hands. Your job is in a small factory, painting hatchets. You paint them and then place them on a rack above you to dry. You’ve worked there for years. One day, your employer installs a new hatchet-drying rack and you quickly notice that the new rack is unstable. If it were to collapse, you’d probably get hurt by the falling newly painted hatchets. So you warn your boss that the new shelf is dangerous and needs to be replaced.
Your boss listens attentively but tells you he’s not going to fix the shelf. It’s your choice, he says. You can take the risk of working there, or quit. Since you need the job, you shut up and keep working under the rickety rack.
Would you think that you had made a real choice?
This really happened. The shelf really fell, and the hatchet painter, whose name was Henry Lamson, was really hurt. He also really sued.
The Massachusetts court deciding the case ruled for the employer. The opinion was written over a hundred years ago by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who would later become one of the nation’s most famous Supreme Court justices. He said that Lamson made his choice to accept the risk when he chose to go back to work knowing that the shelf might collapse. The fact that he needed his job to provide for himself and his family did not make his returning to work any less of a choice. “He stayed, and took the risk,” said Holmes.2 Lamson made his bed, so to speak, every day when he showed up to work.
To modern readers, this old case seems just that—old. We believe employers today have a responsibility to provide safe workplaces. This responsibility is both