Two people sit down in two restaurants.
The first menu runs to several pages: good options, priced within reach, in a language the diner reads fluently, with time to decide.
The second menu has three items. Two are harmful and one is unaffordable. It is printed in a second language, the kitchen is closing, and the diner has been awake for two days.
Both people order. Later, we review their choices - and we review them with the same rubric, as though choosing were the same act in both rooms.
Most public moralising about responsibility is exactly this: a verdict on the order that never glances at the menu.
Agency is real. Both diners chose. But a theory of choice that ignores the menu is not rigour - it is a way of congratulating those of us handed the long menu, in our own language, with time to spare.
In my work I sit with people choosing between bad loans, between unsafe schooling and no schooling, between an exhausting support system and none. They are choosing constantly, with more deliberation than the long-menu world ever spends. The problem was never their choosing.
Read the menu before you judge the order. Better: ask who printed it.
Filed under Fragments · Back to Field Notes