The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [69]
Fast-food executives bear the responsibility for the choices they make in developing foods that take advantage of human cravings for fats and sugars, and pushing their foods through ad campaigns that activate those cravings. Congress bears responsibility for subsidizing corn and other crops important for the fast food industry but not fresh produce. It is agricultural subsidies, not the free market, that make a super-sized meal cheaper than a salad and a bottle of water.19 Communities bear responsibility for making it difficult to ride bikes safely or failing to provide parks that are inviting and safe. Schools bear responsibility for serving lunches of pizza and Tater Tots rather than beans, fresh vegetables, and lean meats.
If we take personal responsibility seriously, either in the sense of maturity or in the sense of choice, we cannot let people who make decisions avoid responsibility just because they aren’t the last person in the causal chain. Too often, the rhetoric of personal responsibility is a way for those who ought to admit to shared responsibility to point the finger at someone else.
In December of each year, the City of Boston performs an annual census of the city’s homeless population. Much effort goes into persuading the homeless to come in from the winter cold. After the 2007 census, the mayor’s words were a headline in the Boston Globe: “Some folks, no matter what we do, don’t want to come inside.”20
Pause for a moment on these words. At one level, they are undoubtedly true. Some homeless people are mentally ill. Some have been victimized in local shelters. Some may actually want to die.
The mayor’s comments also contain a tinge of blame. By emphasizing individuals’ own choices, the story becomes a morality tale about personal responsibility, making it much easier to read as I sip my coffee and eat my blueberry pancakes. If we have any responsibility at all toward the homeless, it is to ask them if they want to come in from the cold. If they do not, it’s their own fault for freezing to death, and I can go on with my life.
The emphasis on the last choice in the chain ignores the constraints on those choices, not to mention the choices of myriad others who created the situation in which people freeze to death in the world’s richest nation. As legal scholar Joseph Singer reminds us, “People do not voluntarily sleep outdoors in wintertime if they have a family to be with or a safe place to go.”21
The rhetoric of personal responsibility is often a cover for the avoidance of shared responsibility. A fixation on the choices of the last person in the causal chain allows us to feel comfortable with a lack of charity springing from our hearts or wallets. It also allows the rhetoric of personal responsibility to provide a cover for simplistic libertarian phobias of government regulation, whether of motorcycle helmet laws or health care reform.
Too often, the rhetoric of personal responsibility essentially urges the rest of us not to care about our fellow citizens. It avoids any sense of shared concern, of shared responsibility for others.
And that’s why I am against it.
8
Umpires, Judges, and Bad Choices
All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed. For after all, he was only human. He wasn’t a dog.
—Snoopy, 1991
Storytelling awakens us to that which is real . . . Stories bind . . . They are basic to who we are.
—Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 1987
ON JUNE 2, 2010, a mild, cloudy Wednesday night, the Cleveland Indians were in Detroit for a baseball game against the Tigers. There was no reason to expect anything special. The Tigers had lost seven of their last nine, and the Indians were already twelve games out of first place