Picking and Choosing

Abstract

Sometimes people choose: they decide on the basis of reasons. But sometimes people are strictly indifferent as between the alternatives: they pick. Facing a row of Campbell’s soup cans in the supermarket poses a case for picking. Examples of picking, as opposed to choosing, turn out to be pervasive in human life, especially in commercialized societies, which would be much harder to navigate if people tried to choose instead. Even more, picking rather than choosing may underlie, at the core of our being, what we are.

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