The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [65]
The answer, of course, depends on which brand of personal responsibility I subscribe to. If I believe that people should act maturely, it need not offend my sense of personal responsibility to require motorcyclists to don helmets. If, on the other hand, I believe people should make their own choices, then I will think the government should not be involved. People should choose for themselves.
But not so fast.
Remember the key to the personal-responsibility-as-choice framework is that people have to pay for their decisions. They have to suffer the consequences; the government should not protect them. How does this requirement play out?
Let’s say that one evening as I return from a night out on the town I lose control of my motorcycle and hit a tree. I would be seriously injured even if I were wearing a helmet, but my injuries are even worse because on this night I was not. I lie unconscious at the base of the tree until an ambulance arrives. The paramedics look at my broken body and notice the lack of helmet. As a policy matter, what does a respect for personal-responsibility-as-choice require of them? Should they help?
To ask the question is to answer it. Of course they should help. The same goes for the doctors and nurses in the emergency room and indeed any bystander. They should not only care for the injuries that occurred through no fault of my own, but also for the injuries that my choices brought about. We simply do not live in a society where we leave injured people at the side of the road, whether they brought the injuries on themselves or not. Personal-responsibility-as-choice does not require others to be Hard Hearted Hannahs.
If respect for individual choice did indeed require hard-heartedness from others, this itself would be a cost that many would not freely accept. Many of us do not want to live in a society where we are required to turn away from people in need, even if that need is brought about by poor individual choices. If personal-responsibility-as-choice requires ambulance drivers, bystanders, or neighbors to turn away when I am suffering because of my own choices, that forced insensitivity is itself a cost that should not be forced onto them.
This means that without some kind of legal rule, there is no option to insulate my decision from imposing costs on others, even if we believe in personal-responsibility-as-choice. Others either have to suffer the psychological cost of looking at my broken body and doing nothing, or they themselves have to be willing to pay for my care. In other words, a libertarian framework creates a choice for bystanders, but neither choice is good.
It is not an answer to this concern to say that any Good Samaritans’ decisions to help me are their own, and they should bear personal responsibility for them. This answer does not avoid the point that absent some kind of governmental or legal intervention, my decision not to wear a helmet will undoubtedly impose costs on any potential Good Samaritan who comes my way. Either they suffer financially from helping me out or psychologically from turning away.
Here’s the point. The notion of personal-responsibility-as-choice is empty without some kind of legal rules surrounding it and governmental enforcement to police it. Without government intervention of some kind, my choice of not wearing a helmet is bound to impose costs on others.
What does it mean, then, to require me to suffer the consequences of my choice? At the very least, it means I should pay the financial costs of my own care. But medical care is expensive, and few of us could afford to pay for weeks of hospital care and rehab out of our own pockets. Those costs will quickly make me insolvent, meaning that in fact I will not be forced to suffer the full financial costs of my decision. As a matter of public policy, then, perhaps the best way to