ISSUE 136
136"The absence of choice is a circumstance that is very, very rare."
I fundamentally agree with the author's contention that the absence of choice is a very rare circumstance. In my view, only in some extreme and rare conditions, people are truly deprived of the freedom of choices; in most conditions, people are free to make their own choices irrespective of the possible consequences.
In only extreme conditions, people forfeit the freedom of making choices. One such example is when one has been severely injured or suffered from grave diseases that let him/her in a comatose state. In such situation, one truly loses the right to make conscious choices. Another telling example is that humans by nature cannot choose their parents, sexes, nationalities, races and the like that are determined before their birth and beyond their control. Apart from the above examples, even a young baby, or a person under incarceration, can still possess the right of making limited choices to a certain extent, such as crying to attract their parents in terms of the babies or making physical movements or protests for the prisoners.
It is the fact that everyone of humans in most cases can make their own choices irrespective of the results of their choices. A aspiring young person can choose to be a student majoring in music in spite of his/her parents' desire for him/her to be a lawyer major or pursue some other professional careers. Though the consequence of such choices might annoy the parents and lead to the broadened generation gap between that young person and their parents, the right of choice is still in the hands of the young person.
In fact, many people confuse the lack of the right of choice with the lack of the right of agreeable and pleasant choice, the former of which is determined by the will and volition of an individual while the latter of which depends largely on the realistic conditions. One apt illustration of this contention involves the voting rights of citizens, which is a basic right in any democratic society for the citizens over a certain age limit. The citizens of course own the rights of determining which candidate they will vote for according to their own will. However, it is possible that none of these candidates seem to be qualified for them, which renders them cannot make a vote that satisfies themselves and most reflect their true attitudes. From such example, we can see that people really enjoy the freedom of making choices, while the consequences of their choices would be limited by the exterior conditions.
The contention that everyone in most cases has the freedom of making choices accords with the spirit of democracy. The main responsibility of democratic society is to protect the freedom of their people to behavior according to their own choices and any attempt to circumvent such right of free choices in fact serves to undermine the foundation of democratic society. In this sense, the author makes a sound and sensible contention that the absence of choice is a very rare circumstance.
In sum, the author's contention is consistent with the fact of the society and with the spirit of democracy. It is true that people own the freedom of choices in most cases and only in some rare exceptional situations that people are in a comatose state due to various reasons or over some issues which are determined before the birth, people cannot exert the right of choices for themselves.