A Cheap Shot At Individualism

Mark Kelman (following Hilzoy, following Gene Weingarten at the WaPo) offers thought-provoking ruminations on the baked-baby-in-the-back-of-the-car problem. A key point: the people who do leave their children to die in the heat seem not to be moral monsters, so much as decent people who make a horrible mistake. But then he goes off the rails:

American individualism, the great-granchild of the Puritan conscience, encourages us to make that sort of mistake. Individualism as a moral principle is helpful in getting people to take responsibility for their own actions. But individualism as an explanatory framework is harmful insofar as it leads us to try to fix the wrong problems.

Wait a minute, whoa there, big guy. Point me to an "individualist" (or anyone else, for that matter) who says "we want you to be more individualistic so as to increase the likelihood that you will accidentally kill your children. I suppose if he had given the matter another 10 seconds' thought, he might have reworded the sentence so as to say "the culture of individualism facilitates this kind of mistake. This proposition, whether true or not, is at least not loony.

As to whether, in addition to being not-loony, it is also true: I'd say that is a tougher call. I assume he's thinking that "individualist" would, as an entailment of his individualism, oppose the installation of $40 warning devices to reduce the likelihood of fatal error. I don't see why this is so: I would think that any self-respecting "individualist" would recognize that the primary focus of our concern here is not the parent who makes the mistake but the poor kid slowly and miserably dying in the back seat. Protecting an innocent victim from somebody else's error doesn't seem to me to raise an issue of individualism at all.

Self-styled individualists often do oppose supposed "Nanny state" initiatives to protect us from our own folly or stupidity, though I am not certain that this posture is an indispensiable component of an individualist view. People who do oppose these initiatives often suggest that these mandatory protective devices often do much more to enhance than to reduce the risk of the evil they seek to prevent, in that they serve to impair (not individualism per se but) a sense of individual responsibility. Again, they may or may not be more or less right. It's a contentious and I think not an easy question. But it's at least as respectable a proposition as the one that Kelman did not (but meant to?) experess.