PROMISCUITY OF CHOICE Frank Furedi adwler's lament about contemporary Western culture entifies numerous symptoms of moral disorienta- tion and illiteracy. As someone who is strongly wedded to the tradition of Enlightenment humanism, I too am concerned by the force of cultural relativism and the manner in which it discourages people from making judgments of value about the key issues that confront us in our everyday life. There is something desperately sad in the way that society incites people to seek refuge in the self. All the self-obsessive practices that Lawler cites--the preoccupation with safety and health, prohi- bitions on so-called risky behaviour, parents living through children--are testimony to the powerful cur- rent of cultural pessimism that dominates society's imagination. In line with current thinking, Lawler accepts the view that today's obsessions of the self are the product or associated with the ascendancy of rampant individual- ism. He is particularly concerned with the influence of a 'promiscuous pro-choice ideology' that apparently dominates intellectual and political life. Of course pro- choice rhetoric can be used to avoid taking responsibil- ity for one's action as it can be to evade the making of moral judgments. But pro-choice advocates do not have a monopoly on this matter. In recent times many oppo- nents of abortion have shifted their argument from the sphere of morality to that of health (its emotional or physical damage on women) or have sought to exploit the current public sensibility towards disability to strengthen their arguments. And as the therapeutic turn of so much of organized religion shows, many in the anti-choice camp are no less obsessed with sell"than their pro-choice counterparts. It seems to us that contemporary society's valorisation for the self has little to do with a robust culture of indi- vidual or a profound yearning for choice. Far from there being a libertarian free-for-all, there is a perceptible trend towards confining choice to the realm of consump- tion. At the same time the imperative of regulation is clearly evident in the domain of human behavior and informal life. Regulating children's lives and education has become widespread. Parents can no longer always choose what parenting or disciplinary strategy they adopt towards their children without inviting the attention of officialdom. Pregnant women who choose to smoke or have the odd glass of wine invite informal and some- times formal stigma. Personal behavior and interaction with colleagues is now subject to formal rule making at the workplace. In universities, ethics committees vet research and the freedom of speech has become com- promised by a variety of formal speech codes. People can not exercise the choice to be offensive to someone without violating an institutional norm. One reason why Lawler's 'promiscuous pro-choice ideology' has such a restricted existence is because mod- ern society's version of the individual is a distinctly feeble one. Every society has a story to tell about the meaning of personhood. Such accounts indicate how much ad- versity a person can face, what is a reasonable risk, when resignation is appropriate, what is acceptable behavior at times of crisis, when help should be sought and how much responsibility one has towards the events of one's life. Today, the individual is defined by his or her vulnerability. People are seen as 'at risk' rather than as risk takers. Adversity is portrayed as an expe- rience that is traumatic or stressful and makes you ill. The message that you can not be expected to cope on your own is frequently presented as a prelude to the demand that you should seek help and support. Prevailing cultural norms suggest that the integrity of the person is threatened through exposure to adversity and pain. The tendency to inflate the problem of emo- tional vulnerability and to minimize the ability of the person to cope with distressful episodes runs counter to the rhetorical idealization of the self-determining individual. However in our therapeutic age, self de- termination never grants individuals the right to de- termine their lives. Self-discovery is a process achieved through a professional intermediary since people are deemed to be helpless to confront problems on their own. This diminished sense of personhood distances the self from the consequences of one's action and thereby helps weaken the notion of individual responsibility. Not surprisingly this fatalistic account of the self is skepti- cal of the aspiration for self determination and the abil- PROMISCUITY OF CHOICE 57