On Meaningful Choices and Unchosen Obligations in the Liberal Art of Government

As regular readers know, I tend to think of liberalism as an ameliorative art of government or reform program committed to creating the conditions for individuals to make their own meaningful choices securely alongside a commitment to moral egalitarianism, legal equality, and property rights. Conceived thus, it’s not an especially novel project (tracing it back to Adam Smith as I do), although I suspect people continue to underestimate how much more needs to be done to trust people to control their own individual and collaborative destinies even in places that pride themselves on being a ‘democracy.’ Currently, I am writing a kind of ‘manifesto’ to articulate this perspective pitched at the level, I hope, of my more thoughtful students and people interested in public affairs.

Political projects such as my own that promote ‘experiments in living’ face a known objection from thoughtful conservative critics at this point. It was put to me by Yoram Hazony over dinner last week (although I have reformulated it a bit). A critic may well suspect that my focus on ‘meaningful choice’ is really a way to speak about ‘autonomy’ without using fancy language. And the problem with ‘autonomy’ for such a thoughtful conservative critic is that it encourages the idea that we can go through life without accepting unchosen obligations and so ignore the demands of tradition, community, family, the state (etc.), and the past more generally.[1]

The critical point cuts deeper yet. After all, many progressive critics note, correctly, that liberals tend to have an uneasy relationship with the past and, say, obligations that are a consequence of historical injustices.[2] (Nozick and the post-Nazi-Germany Ordoliberals’ commitment to reparations (recall) being the rare exception that seem to prove the rule.) Such progressive critics see utilitarianism as a resolutely forward looking ideology that, as a feature (not a bug), can take any historical status quo as a baseline and, thereby, ignore its own embeddedness in imperial, land-grabbing and (eugenically) racist projects. The Rawlsian comes off not much better because she abstracts away from any pertinent details such that it is fair to say with Charles Mills that “the remediation of the legacy of white supremacy is apparently not of the slightest interest or concern for Rawls” (and his followers).[3]

The conservative and progressive critics have an important point. And since I am re-telling the story of liberalism as a tradition it would be especially odd if I would not accept their fundamental insight that, to reformulate it in more contemporary jargon, path dependencies can create downstream obligations. So, why do I think the liberal can incorporate these in our self-understanding without any special problem?

While there are many streams of liberalism that take autonomy and its demands very seriously, it’s not intrinsic to the liberal project to do so. In my programmatic writings, I don’t appeal to autonomy because I want to be a broad-tent liberal (and some liberals reject the very idea of autonomy). I also resist the suggestion that liberalism must posit ‘isolated’ or ‘atomistic’ individuals or ‘pure wills;’ often it is thought that ‘autonomy’ talk leads there. In addition, I tend to think of play as an important example of meaningful choice, and that tends to sit uncomfortably with a focus on autonomy (which quickly gets moralized and moralistic). More subtly, a focus on autonomy often ignores the many meaningful choices the vulnerable (patients, the deprived, etc.) must make under conditions that cannot be said to be autonomous.[4] In political programs we must take such constrained realities seriously not just because we must devise means to eliminate them, but also because we cannot stop living until we have succeeded doing so.

On my view all kinds of unchosen obligations follow naturally from our ordinary epistemic condition living, as we do, in complex societies with advanced (cognitive) division of labor. (This is not ad hoc because my liberal project takes this as a starting point.) We simply cannot know all the downstream effects from our meaningful choices not just because social life is so unpredictable and complex, but also because we often lack the technical knowledge to do so and lack the money or time to avail ourselves of the expertise that might help inform us. But our lack of knowledge and foresight does not prevent us from being accountable for our choices (as partners, parents, kids, employees, teammates, friends, co-religionists, etc.), which may also generate obligations on us we could not have appreciated beforehand.[5] This is especially so for so-called transformative experiences (for example, a sex or gender change, which I take as a very meaningful choice in our contemporary social contexts) and our highest aspirations (where by definition we don’t know what awaits us); but it is also so for decisions that are less dramatic in character in virtue of the fact that we often simply cannot foresee what will be required from us to get a particular task or job done.[6]

In fact, the very idea of a meaningful choice that I have been defending presupposes that there may be some unexpected, surprising, or unforeseeable obligations that follow from it. (Even a successful suicide, which necessarily leads to death, may generate all kinds of unexpected effects on the ‘last will’ or estate of the deceased.) So, in a very ordinary way, as agents, we accept unchosen (because unknowable and often unforeseeable to us) obligations all the time. So, there is nothing especially problematic about unchosen obligations to a liberal like myself. Of course, such obligations can be defeasible or overridden by other considerations.  

To put the point in decision-theoretic language: many if not most meaningful choices involve at least some uncertainty about what follows from them. (Lurking in my treatment is a kind of contrast between risky, technocratic choices and uncertain, meaningful decisions. But it’s not needed for the argument.) Yet this uncertainty does not absolve us from the obligations that the choice, or the means to achieve it, generates.

So while a liberal may reject some unchosen obligations, including some that a conservative may prize especially, this is not in virtue of rejecting the very concept, ‘unchosen obligation’ in the name of autonomy. Rather, when particular unchosen obligations are rejected it can only be done on a case by case basis in virtue of the character of the obligation that is being advocated or the political-programmatic aims it supports. So, for example, your church or social movement may well make many demands on you in virtue of being part of the congregation or the movement (including some that would raise political eyebrows), but you need not comply if asked, say, to destroy the property of non-members. As this example hints at, questions of civil disobedience do raise special problems for liberals who focus on meaningful choices. But that’s for another time.

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[1] Scruton, Roger. "Reply to Critics." Perspectives on Political Science 45.4 (2016): 290.

[2] Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. Reconsidering reparations. Oxford University Press, 2022.

[3] Mills, Charles W. "Rawls on race/race in Rawls." Southern Journal of Philosophy 47.S1 (2009): 161.

[4] Khader, Serene J. Adaptive preferences and women's empowerment. Oxford University Press, 2011. See also her more recent scholarship.

[5] In the language of professional philosophy, I take special obligations as a natural effect of our unproblematic affective ties to others and that there are distinctively political reasons to take them seriously.

[6] Ullmann-Margalit, Edna, and Sidney Morgenbesser. "Picking and choosing." Social research (1977): 757-785. L.A. Paul Transformative experience. OUP Oxford, 2014. Callard, Agnes. Aspiration: The agency of becoming. Oxford University Press, 2018.