Because we are living, as it’s become a cliché to say, in an age of choice. And yet it can also seem like an age of limitation. Consider a service like Amazon.com. Surely there have never been more digital cameras, running socks, spatulas, and facial moisturizers placed simultaneously before more people in more places in the history of humanity. But because our decisions are relentlessly tracked and fed into algorithms, the choices that will be highlighted for us in the future become increasingly narrow. (Amazon has actually patented a service called “anticipatory shipping,” which would predict customers’ orders and possibly even go so far as to send them out for delivery before an order is even placed—the overlap here with the predictive ambitions of neuroscience is obvious, if slightly alarming.) Our choices can be liberating (“all the difference”), but they can also be confining, as if we were not brave, free souls standing at our ease before a crossroads, but rather rats running through a tapering maze. It is hard not to feel as if something more than simply the act of choice or the idea of free will is at stake in these debates. Because choices, we think, don’t simply happen in the way that snoring or sweating or pupil dilation occurs. No, there is always something behind a choice; something that seems dear to us, and worth protecting. There is the chooser.

The Chooser

They would not find me changed from him they knew—

Only more sure of all I thought was true.

FROST, “INTO MY OWN”

On April 18, 2006, during the height of the American occupation of Iraq, President George W. Bush was asked repeatedly by reporters about the status of Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense. Many of Rumsfeld’s predictions about the course of the invasion had proved to be, let us say, optimistic, and a number of former generals had publicly questioned his leadership. How do you respond, the reporters asked Bush, to critics who think that Rumsfeld should be removed? The president shook his head and grunted out a laugh. He said, “I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation.” He tapped the podium with the side of his hand. “But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best.”