Just Because You Have a Choice, It Does Not Mean That Any of Them Has to Be Right

In September 2013 the Supreme Court of India directed the Election Commission to add a button to electronic voting machines that would allow a voter to reject all the candidates. The court held in a case brought by the People's Union for Civil Liberties that a citizen who dislikes every candidate has the right to say so without giving up the secrecy of his vote. The button, called NOTA for none of the above, appeared in elections that December. Its existence says something obvious, which a line from Norton Juster's children's novel The Phantom Tollbooth puts in a sentence. Just because you have a choice, it does not mean that any of them has to be right.

We tend to equate choice with freedom, and more choice with more freedom. A shopper who can pick among a hundred brands feels freer than one who can pick among five. But the number of options says nothing about their quality. A prisoner offered a choice of cells has not been freed. A patient offered three treatments, all of which have severe side effects, is in a hard position, though he has been told that the decision is his. Choice is the structure of a decision and does not guarantee that anything on the menu is good.

Psychologists have also found that too many choices can harm. In 2000 Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper reported a study in which shoppers were offered either six or twenty four flavours of jam at a stall. More people stopped at the larger display, but far fewer bought, about three per cent against thirty. Barry Schwartz built on this finding in The Paradox of Choice in 2004, arguing that abundance produces anxiety, regret and paralysis. Later reviews have found the effect to be less consistent than the first study suggested, but the broad point survives, that the number of choices is not the same as the value of choosing.

The topic goes further than the paradox of choice by saying that the problem may lie not in the number of options but in their rightness. In ethics there are situations in which every available action is wrong in some way. Sophocles' Antigone shows the tragic heroine caught between the law of the king and the duty to bury her brother, and Hegel read the play as a conflict of right with right. Agamemnon at Aulis must either sacrifice his daughter or abandon the fleet. Doctors in an epidemic who must decide which patients receive the last ventilators face a choice with no clean answer.

Doctors in an epidemic who must decide which patients receive the last ventilators face a choice with no clean answer.

Literature gives the problem many faces. Hamlet is offered a choice between action and inaction, to avenge his father or to let the crime lie, and neither seems to him clean. William Styron's Sophie, forced by a camp doctor to choose which of her two children would live, is given a choice that is a torture dressed as freedom. Such cases show that the offering of options can be an instrument of cruelty, and that the person forced to choose may carry the guilt for a lifetime though he did not design the menu.

Jean Paul Sartre gave the problem its best known illustration. In a lecture in 1946 he described a student during the German occupation of France whose brother had been killed in 1940 and who lived with his mother. He could join the Free French forces and fight, or stay at home and care for the one person who depended on him. No moral theory or priest could tell him what was right. Sartre's advice was that the student was free, and therefore he must invent his own answer, accepting responsibility for it. The point is that to refuse to choose is also to choose.

That last observation is the main limit on the topic. It is true that no option may be right, but one may not escape by treating the situation as a mere impasse. A voter who dislikes all the candidates may press NOTA, but the election will still be won by one of them, and abstention affects the outcome. A person who delays a decision about an ageing parent, an investment or a medical test has made one. The worst options sometimes include doing nothing. Inaction is a choice with its own consequences, and the person who makes it should be as accountable as any other.

How then to choose when nothing is right? Herbert Simon suggested in 1956 that real decision makers are not maximisers who find the best option but satisficers who accept one that is good enough. In moral life, the equivalent is to look for the least wrong course and then to own the cost. Max Weber distinguished the ethic of conviction, which acts on principle whatever the consequences, from the ethic of responsibility, which weighs consequences. A statesman who must choose between two harms has to use the second. Responsibility consists in recognising the moral residue of the chosen act and not pretending that it was clean.

The distinction matters in public life. Governments often present citizens with options framed as if one were correct, and the debate becomes a contest to prove that one side is right. Real policy choices usually involve trade offs between goods, such as growth and the environment, security and liberty, speed and caution, in which every option sacrifices something. An honest politician says what is lost under each. The citizen who accepts this will judge leaders by how they manage losses and not by whether they promise a world without any.

There remains a difficulty in the phrase right. If none of the options is right, by what standard do we say that one is less wrong? The standard must come from somewhere, from consequences, duties, character or conscience, and philosophers have not agreed on which. The student in Sartre's story had to decide without a standard that could settle the matter, and that is perhaps the root of the experience called anguish. We do not know whether a guide exists beyond the options, or whether the sense that there ought to be one is simply the shadow of a wish.