brainwagon

My blog is mostly a lark. Someone once said that sports were invented just so men would have something to talk about besides themselves and their feelings when they congregate in groups, and this blog serves much the same purpose.

But some people think bigger thoughts, and I enjoy reading their blogs too. Again, I found myself back at Lisa’s blog, where she is talking about the role of choice in society, and why choice is not enough. Go ahead, wander over there and read it, then come back. I’ll still be here…

Okay, just a few things to add. The problem with a society which says “oh well, they made their choice” is that often the individual under consideration didn’t really make a choice, at least not in the sense of “weighing the alternatives and picking a rational course of action”. Most teenage mothers don’t really make an informed choice about becoming parents. Most individuals don’t make informed choices about drugs and alcohol. And perhaps most notably, people don’t make informed choices which result in their living in poverty.

It’s a neat, tidy philosophy to presume that everything which happens to a person is solely their fault and solely their responsibility. It’s just not a very realistic one. The poor are largely poor because their parents were poor. Teen mothers are often teen mothers because their mothers were. Very few of us have the perspective, knowledge and control over a large enough segment of our lives to actually have any real effective choices about our lives.

Consider a reasonably popular idea: the idea of “giving choice” to parents in where they send their kids to school. Politicians have promoted the use of school vouchers, which would give the parents a choice of either attending a public school, or opting out and sending their child to a private school and receiving a voucher to help pay for this private school. Proponents would say this is a great thing, because parents now have a choice.

But do they really have a choice? The amount of these vouchers is not sufficient to fund attendance at a private school if you are poor, so for poor parents (presumably, those in most need of help) this represents no real choice at all. If you come from a well-to-do family, then you already could afford to send your child to a private school, so this doesn’t expand the choices available to you at all. If you are in the middle, where private schools were just slightly out of reach, you may have an additional choice, but here’s the rub: private schools are under no obligation to educate anyone for any particular price. Therefore, they could just charge more money to all their current (well-to-do) students), make higher profits, and continue to be out of the price range of middle income parents. So in fact, no one here gets any more choices at all.

Some of our choices aren’t really choices at all.