The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [5]
What explains these intuitions? There are a number of possibilities, including a belief that work is more important than baseball (I shudder to think), that the responsibility of an employer to one’s employees is stronger than that of a baseball club to its fans, or that the costs of precautions in the hatchet factory were minimal and the costs of protecting fans in the ballpark would be too high.
What this means, then, is that even though both cases seem to depend on an examination of the nature of the choices Lamson and Costa made, the results we lean toward have little to do with choice. Or, maybe, what we mean by choice is elastic depending on the situation. If that’s true, then our usual rhetoric about choice and personal responsibility is bound to be too simplistic. It’s also bound to lead us to wrong conclusions.
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Why does all this matter? Why should anyone care so much about the meaning of choice?
The reason is that it is fundamental to the American sensibility to praise personal autonomy and require individuals to take responsibility for their decisions. We are the cowboy culture, prideful and self-assured.5 We respect people’s choices and hold them accountable for their decisions.
Except when we don’t.
Here’s the puzzle. While we laud choice and rail against those who want to avoid the effects of their decisions, we often seem to excuse people from the choices they make. Lamson is not an isolated example.
Take for example Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Some experts call it the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history. Hardest hit were some 200,000 New Orleans residents who chose to stay in their homes in the face of a mandatory evacuation order issued the day before the storm landed. Most of those who stayed behind were poor and African American. Once the levees broke, their homes were flooded, they lost their possessions, and they were put in serious personal danger. Almost two thousand lost their lives. Those who lived sought refuge or waited for rescue in squalid conditions in the Superdome or elsewhere.
In the days following the disaster, some commentators placed blame for these horrors on the people themselves. Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that the high death toll would be “attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings.” Senator Rick Santorum suggested that people who had chosen to stay should be subject to criminal penalties. The conservative Washington Times ran a harsh editorial, saying that “thousands of New Orleans residents . . . failed to show personal responsibility.” Other commentators went further, saying that the victims had put themselves in harm’s way through their poverty, which was their own fault. Talk radio personality Neal Boortz suggested that people around the country should be generous to the victims but not “ignore the behavior that put them in this position in the first place. Hurricane Katrina has shown all of us . . . that poverty is a behavioral disorder.” He piled on: “What we saw in New Orleans was poor people demonstrating the very behavior that made them poor in the first place.”6
In this view, the main blame for the horrors of Katrina should be borne by the victims themselves. They made themselves poor, and their decision not to evacuate was simply another example of the same kind of bad choices. In the days immediately following the disaster, this “blame the victim” view had some traction. According to a Time magazine poll in the week following the breach of the levees, 57 percent of Americans agreed that “people hit by the hurricane” bore some or a great deal of the responsibility for what went wrong with relief efforts.7
This narrative did not last long. The mantra of personal responsibility—mostly seized by conservatives—did not convince most people. Americans generally felt compassion and empathy for the victims