The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [64]
To make sense of this kind of personal responsibility—personal responsibility as pure choice—the person who chooses has to suffer the consequences of the decision. If I choose not to wear a helmet and I get hurt, then I have to pay for the consequences of my choice. The only way it is coherent to link the notion of choice, regardless of its quality, with the notion of responsibility is to focus on the costs of those choices. “Responsibility” does not mean maturity. It means accountability.
In this view of personal responsibility, the worst thing is to protect people from the costs of their own choices. They have to pay.
So let’s return to my original question. Let’s assume that I believe in personal responsibility and want to decide whether to wear a helmet. If we take the view that personal responsibility means being responsible, then the answer is clear: I should wear a helmet. If on the other hand we take the personal-responsibility-as-choice perspective, the framework offers no guideline for the substantive decision. A belief in personal responsibility of this stripe does not help me decide whether to wear a helmet. All it says is that the choice is mine to make, and I should bear whatever costs flow from the decision.
Now we can see something peculiar about the kind of personal responsibility defined by choice. It is completely indeterminate as a guide for individual decisions. It is not a guide for personal behavior at all. It helps me not a whit in deciding whether to wear a helmet or, for that matter, whether to eat a Big Mac, buy health insurance, or stay in my home in the face of an imminent hurricane. All it means is that those decisions are mine to make.
This brand of personal responsibility is only a guide to public policy. It is simply another name for leaving people to their own devices, allowing them to make their own decisions, and then making them suffer the consequences.
This brand of personal responsibility rhetoric seems to be in the ascendancy. It is used to oppose health care reform, support tort reform, and explain away problems of homelessness or delays in hurricane response. This brand of personal responsibility builds on the rhetoric of respect for individual choice to make the political point that government should be small, uninvolved, and deferential to individual decisions.5
And the point is not exactly soft-pedaled. A 2010 opinion piece in a prominent national publication argued that health regulations on food undermine “what were once considered quintessential American characteristics—personal responsibility and freedom of choice” and that such regulations have “sent us barreling down the slippery slope toward authoritarianism.”6
The rhetorical link between personal-responsibility-as-choice and governmental and legal inaction is quite powerful. But it is also fundamentally flawed as a concept, and it collapses with only a bit of poking and prodding.
2.
We can easily recognize the differences between personal responsibility rhetoric that advocates maturity in decision making and personal responsibility rhetoric that is a placeholder for a respect for individual choice. The former is a guide for individuals; the latter is not. Instead, personal-responsibility-as-choice is about public policy. It says that government should avoid making decisions for individuals, and that individuals should suffer the consequences for their own decisions. Politicians of all stripes can agree on “personal responsibility” only because they can choose which brand of personal responsibility (“maturity” or “choice”) they mean. But when the rubber meets the road, the policy prescriptions of the two brands are vastly different.
Let’s look again at the helmet choice, this time asking what the law should be, not whether an individual is wise to wear one. If I believe