The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [89]
Not all pre-commitments appear to work. So-called chastity pledges, where teenagers commit to remain chaste until marriage, have a notoriously high failure rate, and some evidence suggests that those who break their pledges are more likely to engage in unsafe sex than teenagers who do not take a pledge.19 Marriages, too, fail at a high rate, though I suspect they fail less often than relationships left unsolemnized.
I don’t believe these commitments will cure all ills, but I’m convinced that they are underutilized as a public policy tool. Cities and towns could ask families to make public commitments to live “greener” by riding public transportation more, by recycling more, or by reducing energy use in homes. These commitments could be publicly memorialized in some way, perhaps by giving residents yard or window signs, to retard backsliding. Secondary schools with high dropout rates could begin fall semesters by asking for public commitments from students and families to meet definable goals during the year. Businesses could be asked to join coalitions of firms that publicly agree to set aside a percentage of profits for charitable donations. And the right to marry could be extended to same-sex couples in those states that do not yet allow it, in order to expand the benefit of marriage as pre-commitment.
As I write this final chapter, my newborn daughter is sleeping nearby. By the time this book is published, she will likely be toddling about the house under the watchful eyes of her parents and older brother. As she grows, what will I teach her about choices, about personal responsibility? Will I teach her that choice is a myth, and that she is merely an object on which her circumstances and situation will act?
Of course not. But I will not take her abilities to choose for granted. I will understand that her nature and character will have a huge impact on her destiny, so I will try my best to mold them while they are moldable. I will help her understand the influence of her environment and culture on her choices, and I will be mindful of which influences I should encourage and which I should protect her from. I will understand that her choice making powers are not innately strong, so I will seek out ways for her to strengthen them. I will understand that she will make mistakes, so I will seek to be empathetic and in doing so teach her to be empathetic of the mistakes of her father and others.
This is my pre-commitment to her, memorialized in print.
So in the end, I am not as bereft of hope as the title of this book might suggest. I do believe that most of us, most of the time, would do well to recognize how often real choice is a mirage and how frequently the rhetoric of choice is misleading. But it need not be so.
It would be a nice legacy if, little by little, choice became more real, not only for my daughter and my son, but for you and your family as well.
Acknowledgments
I OWE MANY PEOPLE A DEBT OF GRATITUDE for their assistance and encouragement while I wrote this book. Thanks go to those who read partial or complete drafts and offered helpful suggestions: Richard Albert, Victor Brudney, Nicolas Dunn, Janet Gilmore, Barbra Greenfield, Harold Greenfield, Cliff Guthrie, Owen Jones, Mike McCann, Sashank Prasad, Jed Purdy, and David Yosifon. Special thanks to my colleagues at Boston College Law School and the students there who sat through myriad discussions of these topics as my thoughts coalesced. I want to acknowledge the excellent research help of my librarian colleague Mary Ann Neary, as well as the wonderful help I have received from several years’ worth of research assistants, most recently and notably Jason Burke, Colin Levy, and Meredith Regan. (I know it’s trite to say, but I could not have done it without you!) The project benefited greatly from feedback