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Growing up in a small town in Kentucky as the son of a Southern Baptist minister, Law Professor Kent Greenfield remembers being confounded by the issue of “choice” from a very early age.
“Baptists believe that to be saved, we have to get there through our own choice, by accepting Jesus. I remember thinking that there was this conflict – how was this truly is a matter of choice? God already knows. He knows if you are going to accept him or reject him. So does free will really exist? It befuddled me, as a kid,” Greenfield remembers.
Years later, Greenfield faced the issue of choice again, this time before the US Supreme Court. Greenfield, founder and head of Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), led a lawsuit on behalf of a dozen law schools against the federal government, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in particular.
The suit questioned the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment, which requires universities to assist military recruiters or risk losing federal grant funding. Schools should not allow recruiters on campus, FAIR argued, because the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy conflicted with non-discrimination policies. Greenfield and his colleagues felt they had given an effective representation of the dilemma facing the schools — or so they thought.
“Chief Justice Roberts asked our attorney, ‘Why don’t you just choose not to take the money?’” recounts Greenfield. “And we lost. Unanimously.”
In his latest book, The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits, Greenfield raises questions about the dynamics of choice: What if our choices are more constrained and limited than we like to think? And if we have less free will than we realize, what are the implications for us as individuals and for our society?
Greenfield says that to be better decision makers, people need to be aware of market and economic manipulations and to understand that choice is limited — and that sometimes, he adds, limiting or removing choice is a good thing.
“People can be easily overwhelmed by choice. My wife wanted to buy a pair of running shoes. She came home without a pair, saying that she couldn’t decide because there were simply too many options,” said Greenfield. “It is a mistake to give people 100 choices, whether that be running shoes or mutual funds for a 401k. It can paralyze people not to act, even if acting is in their best interest.
“I think that this is a kind of book that people find obviously correct or obviously wrong,” said Greenfield. “Because one insight is that people respond to the world around them based on preconceived notions.
“One of the things about being a law professor is that you learn you really cannot understand the law without understanding a lot of other things – philosophy, psychology, politics, economics. Choice can be found in each of those disciplines,” said Greenfield. “The core concept of economics is choice: People can buy or sell. The so-called free market works because people are free to make choices.”
But the free market may not be so free, Greenfield says. Given that one in seven Americans is under the poverty level, he argues, “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."
Knowing what influences people’s decision-making can have far-reaching implications, says Greenfield. For example, those interested in passing a public referendum should know to form the ballot question to have a negative answer (“No on Question 2”) because it has been proven voters have a “no” bias.
Greenfield says he incorporates the themes of his book in his classroom discussion. “I teach constitutional law, and that incorporates First Amendment speech. In fact, just today we had a discussion about the end of racial segregation and I asked the question, ‘Do we give people the choice or do we mandate people to behave differently?’ It’s a hard question. We simply cannot turn a switch and have a change take hold.”
An interview with Kent Greenfield on The Myth of Choice, conducted by Associate Law Librarian Mary Ann Nearly, can be viewed at here.