What If It Was a Choice?

“Being gay is not a choice” is an argument I have never liked as a defense of anyone’s right to be respected.

What if it was?

I am bisexual. I could date women exclusively. I don’t want to. I am not choosing the attraction, but I do choose whom to pursue, whom to date, and what kind of relationship I want. Those choices are mine in exactly the ordinary sense that a straight person’s choices are theirs.

The defense is understandable. If someone thinks homosexuality is a bad decision, explaining that it is not a decision addresses the accusation. But it leaves a more basic question unanswered: why would choosing it make the mistreatment reasonable?

The conversation has already conceded too much when the person defending their freedom has to establish that they could not have done otherwise.

What choice has to do with it

We protect plenty of things people choose. Freedom of religion includes the freedom to change your religion. Freedom of expression would be fairly useless if it only covered things you could not help saying. A considerable part of freedom consists of being able to make decisions other people dislike.

Intimacy seems an especially obvious place for that principle to apply. Two consenting adults do not need to establish that their relationship was biologically inevitable. They do not owe anyone proof that they considered a more acceptable partner and found the attraction insufficient.

Straight people choose partners constantly. Sometimes badly. They marry people they barely know, stay with people they dislike, leave people they love, and build arrangements that make no sense to anyone outside them. We understand that an outsider finding a relationship unattractive is not much of a reason to interfere with it.

Imagine having to justify your marriage to everyone who finds your partner ugly or your life together boring. Their opinion might be irritating, or funny, or occasionally worth hearing. It would still have no bearing on your right to the relationship.

That distinction gets lost remarkably quickly when the couple is gay. The outsider’s discomfort becomes a matter the couple is expected to resolve. Explain yourselves. Show that it is natural. Show that you cannot change. Give us a reason to leave you alone.

I think the reason was there before any of those questions were asked.

A right and a privilege

There is a scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation, in “The Drumhead,” where Picard recalls a warning from Judge Aaron Satie: “With the first link, the chain is forged.” He is talking about the first freedom denied, and how the damage extends beyond the person whose freedom it was.

What I like about the scene is how clearly it captures the structure of a right. The protection matters even when you have no personal attachment to the person being protected. Especially then, because that is when you find out whether you believe in the protection or simply like its current beneficiaries.

People often seem to confuse a privilege they currently enjoy with a right.

If your life fits the expectations, nobody interferes. Your relationship looks respectable. Your family belongs here. Your way of speaking, dressing, or worshipping attracts no particular suspicion. You may live quite freely without ever having to ask what secures that freedom.

But being left alone because nobody objects to you is a different arrangement from being entitled to be left alone when they do.

A privilege depends on who you are, whom you know, or whether the people granting it approve of you. It can feel permanent when you have always enjoyed it. A right gives you something to claim regardless of that approval. The distinction becomes visible when you fall out of favor.

Rights can be violated, and their enforcement can fail, but the violation does not become legitimate because enough people approve of it. A privilege can be withdrawn on the same terms on which it was granted. With a right, withdrawing the protection is itself something that has to be justified.

The “not a choice” defense leaves that distinction unresolved. It offers a reason to excuse a particular person while leaving the authority to judge their life largely intact. It may persuade someone to be kinder. It does less to explain why their kindness should not be necessary.

What money cannot secure

A society organized around rights has something to offer the privileged too. That seems to get overlooked, including by people whose wealth should give them ample time to think about it.

Money buys privacy, lawyers, access, and a considerable amount of protection. It can make a difficult situation easier to escape. But it cannot establish a limit on power that everyone, including the person exercising it, is obliged to respect. If your security depends on access to that person, you still have to keep the access.

Consider the spectacle of immensely wealthy people courting political favor. People with enormous net worths and egos to match, accustomed to being obeyed, become suddenly attentive to the mood of someone they may privately regard as merely a politician. Or something less printable.

They can afford almost anything. Apparently they still cannot afford to stop flattering him.

Some are buying advantages, of course. But the need to remain in favor also tells you something about the security their advantages provide. A relationship with power has to be maintained. The person changes. The demands change. What was sufficient yesterday may cease to be sufficient tomorrow.

Rights, backed by functioning institutions, offer a baseline of security that a personal fortune cannot establish on its own. Your property, your liberty, and your ability to seek redress should not depend on whether someone important currently likes you.

There is something odd about compulsively accumulating wealth in pursuit of independence while supporting arrangements that leave you dependent on favor. Even the richest could sometimes use less privilege and more rights.

The economic argument is broader than personal security. A functioning society is a better place to live, work, invest, and build. Other people’s education, health, safety, and capacity to participate are part of the economy from which the wealthy derive their wealth.

A large share of a failing society can be worth less than a smaller share of a prosperous one. Relative advantage and absolute prosperity are different things. If what you want is a better life, rather than simply a greater distance between your life and everyone else’s, the distinction matters.

None of this means every reform pays every rich person back. Some privileges are profitable precisely because others bear their costs. But the assumption that making society work better must come at the expense of those doing well in it is remarkably shortsighted. They live there too.

When the rule reaches you

The confusion becomes especially visible when a policy reaches someone who expected to remain exempt.

A restriction sounds reasonable when you picture it being applied to someone you dislike. Then it reaches a person you care about, and the details become suddenly important. Their circumstances, their intentions, the life they have built. You can see all the reasons the rule should not apply so bluntly.

Those reasons were worth examining before the person had a familiar face.

People can support a policy against a group while assuming their own circumstances will keep them outside its reach. They are good citizens. Their partner is a good person. Their case is different.

They expect their privilege to hold.

Sometimes the case really is different. A badly written rule can erase distinctions that matter. But noticing that only when it reaches you suggests that you had not thought very hard about what you were supporting.

The same habit appears in less personal decisions. “Cutting bureaucracy” sounds good until the procedure being removed was your opportunity to object. Giving authorities more power sounds good while you imagine authorities whose judgment you trust. Development sounds good until you discover what has been approved next to your house.

Which procedure? What power? Which development, with what conditions?

These are the questions that determine what happens. It is strange how secondary they become to the question of which side a person is on.

The road still needs repairing

I find the reduction of politics to ideology especially difficult to understand in matters of ordinary administration.

A road needs repairing. Somehow this becomes an argument about socialism. Do conservatives teleport? Their cars presumably use the road too.

What will the repair cost? Who pays? Which road gets repaired first, and which other work has to wait? People can agree that a functioning road is desirable and disagree about all of those things. The disagreement has enough substance of its own. I do not see what is gained by turning it into a contest between inherited accounts of how the world is supposed to work.

Marx offered a perspective on labor, ownership, and power. Liberal thinkers offered others. Those perspectives can be interesting and useful to examine. That does not make them instructions for managing a particular country, in a particular century, under conditions their authors never encountered.

Even a careful economic model depends on assumptions. You have to find out whether those assumptions hold before relying on its conclusions. A political doctrine does not become more reliable because it is famous, or because several generations have learned to identify with it.

Yet the identity often arrives first, and the decisions are expected to follow. You are a socialist, a liberal, a conservative. Now work out what someone of your kind should think about housing, transport, healthcare, or a power plant.

Why start there? The place already exists. It has people, resources, institutions, obligations, and problems that can be investigated. Start with those.

If the appeal is the atmosphere, watch Suits or Mad Men. There are dramas for the other preferences too. A taste for corporate ambition or revolutionary romance does not tell you how to manage a city.

Even the softer labels seem needlessly confusing. Progress and tradition are presented as opposing commitments, as though improving a railway required demolishing a historic square. A place can preserve what is valuable and change what works badly. Deciding which is which requires looking at the place.

There will still be disagreements. People have different interests, needs, and judgments, and some of those genuinely conflict. I do not expect administration to eliminate them. I expect it to deal with the actual disagreement rather than assign everyone a role in an ideological drama.

The actual decision

Data centers are a useful example because the questions are so concrete. They need power, connectivity, and cooling. Some sites are better suited than others. They can also bring noise, pressure on local resources, and costs that fall on people who receive little of the benefit.

Those constraints need examining. They do not make a developer’s preferred solution inevitable. A location can be convenient for the company and poor for the community. Compare the alternatives. Examine what infrastructure each would require. Decide which costs are acceptable and who should pay them.

That is substantial work. “For AI” or “against AI” contributes almost nothing to it.

A resident objecting to noise does not need to have a position on the future of intelligence. A developer promising investment should still have to explain the agreement. What is being built? What does the approval require? Who benefits? Who pays if the promises fail?

The answers will not tell you which political identity to adopt. They will tell you whether the project makes sense.

I think we lose a great deal by treating governance as an expression of identity. The same person can be perceptive about their work, careful with their household, and strangely incurious about a policy they support. They know how to examine consequences. They do it whenever they recognize something as their business.

But a society’s rules are their business, including the ones they do not expect to need. So are the institutions that keep those rules from depending on personal favor. Wealth and social acceptance may make that dependence easier to tolerate. They do not remove it.

I am bisexual. I could date women exclusively, and I don’t want to. Someone else might find that difficult to understand. I find plenty of other people’s relationships difficult to understand too. It has never struck me as a problem their relationships were obliged to solve.

Understanding someone can make you more considerate. It should not be the condition that makes their life their own.