Face-to-face group activities are valuable because they help breed social trust. Cooperation is unlike an ordinary consumer good which, once expended, is gone. Rather, it more resembles capital assets that yield ongoing dividend flows. Accordingly, Putnam employs the term social capital to refer to enduring trust relations. Social capital is a near kin to what economists have dubbed human capital: those personal capacities that afford continuing returns.

Some investments in human capital, such as apprenticeship in a craft or long hours practicing the flute, enable their possessors to perform one particular kind of activity. Other kinds of human capital can be profitably deployed in many arenas; such is the theory behind an education in the liberal arts. But whether narrowly or broadly focused, human capital is a kind of property that brings benefits to its owner. Thus, there is no mystery about why people invest in accumulating human capital; they do so for the same kinds of self-interested reasons that motivate them to buy mutual funds or washing machines.

Social capital, however, is not similarly assignable. That is because it is manifested in persistent relationships within interactive communities. Whether I am able to take advantage of opportunities for profitable transactions with my fellows does not depend so much on whether I am content to cooperate with them as it does on whether they are inclined to trust me (and others) as potential partners in joint activities. If we are all mutually suspicious, then we will tend to wall ourselves off from one another and lead cramped, parched lives. Conversely, if we customarily accord each other the benefit of the doubt, then our chances of gain from cooperative interaction are good. Generalized social trust, therefore, has the nature of a public good, one available to many if available to any.

How a social order secures for itself an adequate supply of public goods is one of the most persistent conundrums confronted by economics and political philosophy. When benefits are indiscriminately enjoyed by all, there is a powerful incentive to withhold one’s own contribution in the hope of freeriding on others. The customary remedy is coerced subscription. More often than not, that approach leads to overpayment or buying the wrong things entirely.

Putnam offers a different approach to the problem of accumulating social capital. It is the product, he maintains, of repeated interactions among individuals engaged in purposeful activity. More specifically, it is a byproduct. Without ever consciously aiming at the establishment of trust relations, that is what joiners and doers achieve. Moreover, if they genuinely cherish their lodges, volunteer fire departments, and bowling leagues, they achieve it painlessly, with no perception of sacrifice.

The author supplies a wealth of data indicating that since the 1960s American social capital has been significantly depleted. The material served up in Bowling Alone goes down so easily that readers are apt not to realize how much information they are receiving. Interpretation, though, is often double-edged. For example, are virtual conversations in Internet chat rooms better understood as manifestations of connectedness or instead as a further atomizing of Americans? If millions of women have exited their clubs and charities for roles in the workplace and soccer-mom service, can we be confident that the transformation constitutes a net diminishment of social capital?

Even the book’s title is problematic. Leagues may have dwindled, but a visit to your local bowlarama will reveal that their place has been taken by groups of friends out for a good time, not one-to-a-lane solitary keglers. Because the waning of old organizational forms is more readily observable than the gestation of new ones, Putnam’s verdicts may be overly pessimistic.

It is easy to identify vulnerable patches in Bowling Alone, but that fact should not overshadow the book’s considerable merits. Free markets are central to the thriving of a liberal order, but so too, Putnam reminds us, are the nonmarket relationships we freely take on. No contemporary theorist has so comprehensively and eloquently underscored the importance to a society’s health of rich networks of voluntary association. He may perhaps be faulted for insufficiently attending to the ways in which the welfare state has displaced the functioning of private associations, but the clear thrust of Putnam’s message is pro-freedom. As such, Bowling Alone makes a substantial addition to the intellectual capital of liberalism.

A John Elway forward pass travels toward its receiver at over 70 miles per hour; Randy Johnson’s fastball darts from his hand at over 90 miles per hour; Pete Sampras’s serve booms across the net at 120 miles per hour. Unless you know how to play the game, you’re advised to stay safely away. But should you find yourself in even a minor fender-bender, you may be on the receiving end of an air bag deploying at up to 200 miles per hour.

For most people most of the time, impact with an air bag is benign compared to what they would have hurtled against had they been traveling unprotected. Although the air bag affords less protection than the seat belt, the air bag is, on balance, a wonderful safeguard. Since 1990 over 3,500 lives have been saved and numerous injuries averted, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration says.

But the air bag’s benefactions do not come free of cost. Although deployment usually produces nothing worse than soon-healed bruises, a significant minority fares worse: over 120 people have been killed by air bag impact, almost always in low-speed accidents from which they otherwise would have walked away.

Any fatality is cause for regret of course, but realism compels us to acknowledge that few valuable interventions come altogether without cost. People die on operating tables during routine surgery, drown while enjoying an invigorating swim, get hit by lightning while out on a golf course. We can and should try to minimize the occurrence of such tragic outcomes, but as Milton Friedman famously observes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Air bags save on the order of 30 lives for each one lost. It would seem on first blush that this lopsided ratio is an eloquent testimonial to the regulatory regime that mandated them in all new vehicles. Few public safety measures, we might say, can claim so enviable a record of success.

Identifiable Victims

Complicating the appraisal, however, is the fact that air bag fatalities do not occur at random. Most victims of air bags are children (66 of the fatalities since 1990), typically infants or toddlers traveling in the front seat either unbuckled or strapped into child carriers. The air bag is most forceful as it leaves the dashboard, and carriers, especially backwards-facing ones for infants, bring their occupants closer to the point of explosion. Already vulnerable because of their small size, being in a forward location heightens their risk. Otherwise innocuous collisions produce crushed skulls, even a reported decapitation in an Idaho parking lot. Also at considerable risk are the very old, the very frail, and short drivers who seat themselves close to the steering column. For them the air bag is not a friendly bodyguard but potentially a weapon that maims and kills.

By requiring manufacturers to install air bags in all new cars, the federal government is, then, not simply mandating a policy that confers substantial benefits on the population at large, albeit tempered by occasional harms. Rather, governmental policy deliberately and knowingly enhances the safety of one identifiable group of citizens at the expense of another. It literally has redistributed expected life years between these two classes.

Last fall, the government sought to address this problem in its characteristic way. Instead of permitting freedom of choice so people can select safety features tailored to their own circumstances, it proposed fine-tuning the rules to take into account that small and unbelted bodies may be in the seats. The auto industry fears the newly mandated air bags will be as dangerous as the first generation of bags that threatened children and small, frail adults. Even if this attempt at central planning of technology works, it won’t take effect until 2006. (Earlier, the government tried to address the danger by allowing qualifying citizens to have a disabling switch installed.)

Some observers find troubling all governmental edicts designed to protect people against themselves, to force them “for their own good” to act in ways they less prefer or that attempt to engineer compliance by subsidizing officially approved behavior and laying taxes and other penalties on that which is disapproved. For one who takes the free society seriously, this sort of governmental paternalism is odious. I confess I am troubled by these incursions on individual choice. If people wish to drive around in their cars unbelted or dispense with helmets while motorcycling, choose to smoke cigarettes or consume slabs of marbled beef followed by gooey chocolate desserts, I may regard their decisions as imprudent. But if those engaging in these behaviors are competent adults I do not see that I—or anyone—enjoys the prerogative of constraining them to do otherwise.

One need not be a dyed-in-the-wool opponent of paternal government to be disturbed by regulations that protect us from ourselves. That’s because they contravene broadly shared moral principles that address the acceptability of forced tradeoffs across persons and that govern the relationship between a liberal government and its citizens.

Ends in Themselves

There is no more fundamental principle of ethics than the proposition that human beings are special. Each person manifests a uniqueness that confers a dignity that no mere thing possesses. They are not interchangeable components of a social whole who may be plugged in and plugged out like chips in a computer. In the Western tradition of moral reflection, this understanding has been expressed in many forms. One is the theory of basic human rights that establish zones of limited sovereignty within which individuals may act without interference so long as they respect the similar liberty of others. Another is the traditional natural-law doctrine which insists that no otherwise good state of affairs can be pursued if doing so requires acting with injustice toward another human being. Yet another version is the Hippocratic Oath’s insistence, “First, do no harm.” But this moral insight was perhaps best expressed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant when he insisted that human beings, whether oneself or another, are not to be used as mere means for someone’s projects but rather must always be treated as ends in themselves. Although it is not altogether certain what this dictum comes to, there are clear cases of its application to which there is general assent. They spotlight what is morally distinctive about persons. Let me offer a few simple examples.

Although it is entirely reasonable to take apart one auto to salvage parts that will restore five other vehicles to operability, it is strictly impermissible to mine one healthy person’s body for organs that could be transplanted to save five other individuals. Similarly, it is unacceptable to frame an innocent person in a kangaroo court so as to mollify the mob milling ominously about. Fraud and deceit evince a willingness to manipulate the beliefs and desires of others so as to render them instruments for one’s own designs; assault and rape run roughshod over the essential embodiedness of persons; theft is the action of treating someone as a resource one may freely plunder for one’s own ends; murder is literally the obliteration of personhood. Using others as mere means achieves its most fully developed institutional form in the practice of slavery.

It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that insofar as current air bag policy knowingly advances the life prospects of one group of citizens at the expense of another, it violates this most fundamental of moral precepts. It also puts in jeopardy the bedrock principle of liberal democratic government, political neutrality. Briefly, this is the requirement that the state not take sides concerning the projects and pursuits of its citizens. Individuals acting in their private capacity are free, of course, to be passionately partisan with regard to their religious creeds, ideological convictions, aesthetic tastes, and conceptions of the good life; the state, though, is not permitted to anoint winners and losers in these disputations. Rather, its role is to be the fair and impartial enforcer of the rules under which individuals operate, an umpire rather than a player in the game.

If air bags were options that car buyers could select if they desired, but forgo if their individual circumstances so dictated, then no class of individuals would be forced to be the unwitting instruments of others’ ends; the government would not be acting with partiality toward some at the expense of others. Note that even those who qualify for the disabling switch are nevertheless financially penalized by the mandate. Do we really believe it acceptable for the government to penalize those who wish to safeguard the health and lives of their loved ones?

Protection for the Imprudent

As noted at the outset, air bags burst out at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour. If they were less forceful they would still adequately protect motorists who are belted in, but those who neglect to use seat belts will sometimes suffer injuries that high-speed air bag deployment could have obviated. There is, then, a tradeoff implicit in the regulation as it stands: it affords greater protection to the lazy and imprudent at the expense of babies and others. Make no mistake about it; there is nothing in the technology that renders this tradeoff unavoidable, and the government says it’s now interested in air bags with adjustable deployment speeds. But today’s dangerous air bag was deliberately engineered through governmental mandates.

If all air bags could be disabled via a standard switch, then foolish or unwise drivers might forgo protection that they would be better off having. To protect them against themselves, parents are impeded in their efforts to better protect their children. Can anyone reasonably deny that these examples of regulatory partiality are morally bizarre?

One response that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has offered in the wake of revelations about air bag injuries and fatalities is that children under 13 should not, whether in car seats or otherwise, be placed in the front seat. The intended implication is that children are not so much the victims of air bags as they are of parental malfeasance.

The point is, to an extent, well taken. To assign credit or blame to regulators does not absolve parents of responsibility. However, this response hardly gets the regulators off the moral hook. First, it does not address the issue of other vulnerable populations such as short drivers and the elderly. Second, it sometimes is impossible or impracticable to place all child passengers in the back seat. And third, it is in tension with a regulatory structure that is predicated on the assumption that individuals are not competent enough to be left to make their own choices. At the very least, then, it is a piece of bad faith to downplay the enormity of the human costs air bags impose by protesting that they would be lower if people were generally more provident.

Unrealistic Demand?

What will the regulators say in defense of their position? They might argue that to impose on social policy the condition that it produce only winners and no losers is unrealistically idealistic, indeed unworldly. Virtually nothing could traverse so high a barrier. For example, polio vaccination has mostly eliminated in this country what was once a deadly scourge. Yet each year some individuals come down with polio, in almost every instance from the vaccine itself. Should we allow the return of polio epidemics rather than accede to these very occasional instances of harm due to inoculation?

That objection misfires because the analogy on which it rests breaks down. To be sure, some individuals who are vaccinated would have been better off had they not received the vaccine. However, we cannot tell in advance which ones they are. For each person getting the vaccine, the ex ante probability of a polio-free life is augmented. Probabilities are not certainties, so ex post some will find that they have pulled the short straw and are worse off. That’s too bad for those who lose, but it does not falsify the proposition that for all players it was a good bet to take.

Such is not the case, however, with air bags. Babies and small adults are placed in jeopardy so that those older and larger can be afforded greater protection. The regulators know this now, and the record indicates that they knew it back in the late ’70s when air bag regulations were initially being promulgated. So a closer analogy would be to a world in which vaccine is produced by knowingly and deliberately inflicting some with full-blown polio so that their tissues can be harvested and used to confer immunity on others. Would we regard that as acceptable social policy?

Regulation’s Opportunity Costs

There are numerous other grounds for questioning the federal government’s air bag mandates. Insistence on universal employment of this one safety device precludes experimentation that might generate better alternative safety measures. If cars are made more expensive by the requirement that they carry air bags, then car owners will have less money available to spend on other safety-enhancing measures. (The new generation of bags might add as much as $160 to the car’s price.) For example, they may not be able to afford to get their vehicles serviced as often as they otherwise could. Perhaps they will be forced to drive around longer in older, relatively unsafe automobiles rather than purchase newer, relatively safe ones. Or with the money freed up by not purchasing an air bag, consumers could purchase larger vehicles that better withstand crashes. (At least they could if the government did not discourage manufacture of big cars that burn more gas than little cars. This is yet another irony transfixed like a hapless fly in the regulatory web.) It is also the case that individuals differ in the strength of their needs and desires for enhanced safety. Someone who drives defensively and who routinely uses his seat and shoulder belts may quite reasonably judge that the increment of safety afforded at the margin by an air bag does not justify its cost.

These grounds for opposing mandatory air bags commonly pop up in the policy debate. Each is essentially based on an economic way of thinking that bids us to be aware not only of the benefits that we procure through our expenditures but also their associated costs. In calling these reasons economic I do not mean thereby to disparage them. To the contrary: such efficiency considerations are central to rational policy-making. However, they often spawn a response to the effect that issues of public safety transcend dollars-and-cents calculations. Life is too precious, it will be said, to be stuffed into Procrustean cost-benefit computations; morality ought to trump mere monetary considerations.

I could not agree more. This discussion has insisted that morality does indeed matter. It has, however, seriously called into question whether federal bureaucrats and so-called consumer advocates genuinely do occupy the moral high ground. The fact that air bags on balance save lives does not necessarily secure for them this position. There are other criteria that must be met, criteria such as treating individuals as ends in themselves and not bending the technology of governance to the service of some classes of citizens at the expense of others. It is simply unacceptable to save lives by knowingly forfeiting others.

Years before the automobile evolved into a transportation necessity, before meandering mudded ruts were replaced by multilaned asphalt, pioneering motorists took to the roads for pleasure. Today tens of millions still drive for pleasure, but increasingly it is a guilty pleasure. From a multitude of quarters motorists are indicted for the harms they leave in their wake. Drivers generate suburban sprawl, exacerbate the trade deficit while imperiling national security, foul lungs and warm the atmosphere with their noxious emissions, give up the ghosts of their vehicles to unsightly graveyards of rubber and steel, leave human road kill in their wake, trap each other in mazes of gridlock, and, adding insult to injury, commandeer a comfy subsidy from the general public. It is only the presence of unconverted cigarette smokers that deprive them of the title Public Nuisance Number One.

Barring a radical re-engineering of America, there is no prospect that we will any time soon toss away our car keys. Cars (and trucks) are here to stay. But as the automobile enters its second century of transporting Americans from here to there, momentum for curbing its depredations grows. Construction of significant additions to the interstate highway system has ground to a halt. Lanes on urban roads are declared off-limits to solo motorists. Federal fuel-efficiency standards require automakers to alter their mix of product to emphasize lighter, less gasoline-hungry cars. Taxes on fuel have been increased only modestly, but if critics of automobiles have their way, America will emulate Europe and the tax will go up by a dollar or more per gallon. The revenues will be directed toward more mass transit, pollution relief, and research on alternate modes of transportation. Some argue that employer-provided parking should be taxed as income to the employee or disallowed as a business expense to the provider. Others advocate following the model of Amsterdam by barring nearly all automobiles from entry into the center city. And supplementing policy proposals is moral suasion. In the name of social responsibility, individuals are urged to carpool or avail themselves of public transportation; scrap their older, fuel-intensive vehicles; and to eschew unnecessary automobile trips.

Why this assault on the automobile? I have no wish to deny that some of the charges advanced by critics are true. Automobile carnage is indeed dreadful. The number of people killed each year on our roadways far exceeds the total who succumb to AIDS. Automobiles do pollute, all to some extent, some much worse than others. Anyone who has ever been trapped in rush-hour gridlock, fuming inside at the delay while being engulfed by the fumes outside spewing from ten thousand tailpipes, knows that the simple job of getting from here to there in one’s automobile can be the most stressful part of the day.

But even accepting all the above, it does not seem sufficient to explain the intensity of opposition directed toward the automobile. There are costs associated with any large-scale enterprise, and so a critique that merely reminds us of the nature and extent of these costs is only half useful. What is also required is, of course, a statement of the benefits derived from the enterprise and a plausible accounting of whether those benefits do or do not exceed the costs. How to identify and measure costs and benefits of automobile usage poses very difficult methodological problems that I shall not address here. I do note that the overwhelming popularity of the automobile is itself prima facie evidence that, from the perspective of ordinary American motorists, the liabilities of operating a motor vehicle are more than compensated by the benefits. Just as theorists speak of people “voting with their feet,” we can count those who vote with their tires. And the vote is overwhelmingly pro-automobile.

Critics may contend, though, that the election has been rigged. They can maintain that it is the absence of public transportation and compact neighborhoods integrating commerce, industry, and housing that force us so often into our cars. And even if it is the case that each of us values the options and mobility that automobile transport affords, we might disvalue yet more the stress, delay, and pollution imposed on us by others.

There is at least this much merit to the critic’s case: a purely behavioristic appraisal of automobile usage is insufficient for evaluating it. We need also to think more intently about how to classify and understand as a distinctive human practice the action of driving a car. Opponents of the automobile argue that the most telling way in which to understand this is: creating a public bad. That is the appraisal I shall dispute in this essay. My focus will not be on the many practical uses to which the automobile is put (driving to work, car-pooling the kids, buying groceries). Rather, I shall concentrate on what is intrinsic to automobility. As such, automobility is complementary with autonomy: the distinctively human capacity to be self-directing. To be autonomous is, minimally, to hold values—ends taken to be good as such—and to have the capacity to direct oneself to the realization or furtherance of those ends through actions expressly chosen for that purpose. This is what motorists do. Therefore, insofar as we have reason to regard self-directedness as a valuable human trait, we have reason to think well of driving automobiles.

I am making a strong claim. Automobility is not just something for which people in their ingenuity or idiosyncrasy might happen to hanker. Rather, automobile transport is a good for people in virtue of its intrinsic features. Because automobility is a mode of extending the scope and magnitude of self-direction, it is worthwhile.

Moreover, the value of automobility is strongly complementary to other core values of our culture, such as freedom of association, pursuit of knowledge, economic advancement, privacy, even the expression of religious commitments and love. If these contentions are even partially cogent, then opponents of the automobile must take on and surmount a stronger burden of proof than they have heretofore acknowledged; for they must show not only that instrumental costs of marginal automobile usage outweigh the benefits, but they also must additionally establish that these costs outweigh the inherent good of the exercise of free mobility. That heightened burden will be difficult indeed to satisfy.

Movement, Choice, and Human Potential

Concern about automobiles may be a modern phenomena, but analysis of the distinctive nature of automobility is not. For Aristotle, being a self-mover is the crucial feature distinguishing animals from plants and, thus, higher forms of life from lower. That distinction is itself preceded by a yet more basic one that separates the organic realm from that which is lifeless. To be alive is to be possessed of an internal animating force, psyche. The customary translation is “soul,” but in the context of Greek biology that is misleading. For us “soul” tends to carry a theological and thus elevated sense, but in classical Greek thought it marks the divide between inert things and those imbued with a vital principle. At the highest level is the rational soul, the intelligence exhibited among the animals only by man.

The conception of motion has a wider scope than traveling from place to place. We retain residual traces of this broader meaning in expressions such as “a moving experience” and in the etymological history of “emotion,” but in the philosophical language of the Greeks the more inclusive sense is primary. Any transformation of a subject from the potential to the actual with regard to some quality is deemed motion. Movement, therefore, is not simply descriptive of getting from here to there but is normatively rich. To move is to progress—though, of course, it can also be to backslide. For people there is not only a better and worse but a chosen better or worse toward which we deliberately direct ourselves. Crucial to the elevated status of human beings as compared to other beings is intelligent automobility.

Commuting and Community

Automobility is, by definition, promoted by the automobile. The complementary nature of autonomy and the automobile is only slightly less evident. Being a self-mover in the latter part of the twentieth century is, to a significant extent, being a motorist. Because we have cars to drive we can, more than any other people in history, choose where we will live, where we will work, and separate these two choices from each other. We are more able to avail ourselves of near and distant pleasures and to do so at a schedule tailored to individual preference. We are less constrained in our choice of friends and associates by accidents of geography. Our ability to experience an extended immediate environment is notably enhanced. The automobile is, arguably, rivaled only by the printing press (and perhaps within a few more years by the microchip) as an autonomy-enhancing contrivance of technology.

No one who has ever been caught up in rush-hour gridlock will maintain that commuting to and from work is unalloyed joy. Competing with tens of thousands of other motorists for scarce expanses of asphalt can be reminiscent of the Hobbesian war of all against all. For critics of the automobile this is not a negligible point. But neither are its implications entirely clear-cut. Just as worthy of notice is how many people voluntarily subject themselves to that ordeal. Have they not realized how much time they are wasting behind their steering wheels? Such inadvertence isn’t plausible. In their judgment, the costs of commuting are amply compensated by the benefits. The more the critics emphasize the magnitude of the costs, the more these critics underscore, knowingly or otherwise, the extent of the benefits.

Commentators from the Greek philosophers to Adam Smith to Karl Marx have noted that the nature of the work one does largely shapes the quality of life one leads. To do work suited to oneself in a satisfactory environment is for nearly all of us a great good, while to perform alienating labor under unfriendly and unhealthy conditions is a correspondingly great evil. Similarly, to reside in a comfortable and functional dwelling situated in a neighborhood one finds hospitable is also a considerable good. For most people throughout human history, neither occupation nor place of residence has afforded more than a negligible range of choice. One did the work one’s father or mother did, or to which one had been apprenticed, or which was the kind of work available in that place. And one lived where one must or where one could.

The increased affluence and openness of liberal capitalist society has vastly expanded the range of choice. Previously one either lived close to one’s work or else on a commuter rail line. But motorists are not bound by the geography of the New York, New Haven & Hartford tracks. Depending on how much time they are willing to invest in transit, they can live at considerable distance from where they work while also being emancipated from mass-transit rigidities. Cultured despisers of suburban existence can and do decry this circumstance, but millions of Americans (and, increasingly, the rest of the world) disagree. It can hardly be denied that the suburbs are an object of choice by those who live there. To respect the autonomy of persons is to acknowledge that expanding their options with regard to work and residence is a plus.

Nineteenth-century socialist reformers decried industrial capitalism’s exploitation of workers. Although it could reasonably be contended (as F. A. Hayek famously did in Capitalism and the Historians) that workers voluntarily abandoned their rural domiciles for the factory town only because they regarded it as a net improvement, it must nonetheless be conceded that their situation was not enviable. The work was grueling, and opportunities for self-directed choice were minimal.

Yet no syndicalist scheme or string of workers’ cooperatives remotely approaches the automobile as an instrument of emancipation. Insofar as it extended the feasible range of commuting between residence and work place, the coming of the motor car augmented the bargaining power enjoyed by workers. In theory, under a legal regime of free contract, workers always enjoyed the right to terminate their employment when they wished to do so, but in practice this liberty often proved discouragingly costly. Automobility significantly lowered those costs. Detroit has done more for the liberation and dignity of labor than all the Socialist Internationals combined.

Liberation can also be observed when viewing the employment-residence nexus from the other direction. The ability to choose where one will live makes a considerable difference to the exercise of self-determination. Life in the suburbs is not inherently better than life in the central city, but it is different. To the extent that one possesses a real opportunity to choose between them, one is thereby able to give effect to significant values that shape a life. If one is mobile, the question of where to live is answered by an act of positive choice rather than through inertia or extraneous constraints such as the location of one’s place of employment.

Choice of residence is a major avenue through which Americans exercise their right to free association. One thereby decides with whom one will live. And perhaps even more importantly, one decides with whom one won’t live. An ethic that endorses autonomy must acknowledge that, the content of individual choices aside, it is a good thing that people are able to make up their own minds and then act on that decision concerning where they will live.

Mobility and Knowledge

For much the same reasons that automobility and autonomy are good things, so too is knowledge. Like self-moving, knowing affords us a firmer grip on our world. Indeed, choice and knowledge are complementary. We might say that choice without knowledge is blind; knowledge without choice is impotent.

Automobiles enhance mobility, and mobility enhances knowledge. Insofar as the area within which one is able to move is increased, so too is the range of one’s knowledge-gathering capacities. Knowledge need not be grand or profound to be valuable in itself and as a complement to choice. If I drive north along the lake to see how the autumn leaves have turned and whether the Canada geese are still milling or have flown, then I may have gained experience that I take to be inherently valuable. Driving through the various neighborhoods of a city reveals where the bakeries and hairdressers and Thai restaurants are located, who is having a garage sale this week, and which parts of town are becoming distinctly seedier.

When the range within which one moves about becomes extended, so too does the range of one’s potential base of knowledge. And the automobile is the quintessential range extender, not only by lengthening the trips one can take but also by multiplying the number of available routes. Cars do not only go to malls and theme parks but also to libraries, universities, and museums. Urban centers of learning are rendered accessible on a regular basis to those who live many miles distant.

The Wheels of Privacy

Another complement to autonomy is privacy. Some quantum of privacy is requisite for self-determination. The automobile is for twentieth-century American society the quintessential bastion of privacy. For many of us it’s the Honda rather than the home that is the castle. Ironically or not, those minutes between home and office on a freeway clogged past capacity with tens of thousands of other cars may be one’s most private time of the day.

Social planners are wont to gnash their teeth at the number of motorists who could arrange to carpool to work but instead “inefficiently” take up roadway space with a solitary-occupant car that could carry several times as many people. Diamond lanes and other inducements have only a limited effect on average occupancy statistics. This may be viewed as a failure of policy, but it can also be seen as a reasonable and in some ways estimable response to the valid human desire for privacy. Privacy in virtually all its forms, including that afforded by the automobile, is a good to which significant costs come attached. I shall not dispute here whether the costs incidental to automotive privacy exceed the benefits; my point is that there are genuine benefits from driving solo. Any cost-benefit analysis that aims to be unbiased must acknowledge that privacy is a good and then proceed from there.

Being alone is one aspect of privacy, but it is not, I believe, the most central. What is more salient is a (re)gaining of control over one’s immediate environment. I may be surrounded by other people, but if I am able to determine to a significant degree what they shall be allowed to perceive of me and know about me and impose on me, then to that extent I have retained a private self. Surely one reason for the fondness people often hold for their cars and for automobility in general is the scope afforded with regard to that sort of control. Pushing one button turns on the radio. Pushing another changes the station, lowers the volume, turns off the radio and switches to the tape player. It is one’s own choice whether to listen to news reports, Beethoven, Beatles, or nothing at all. Next to the switches for the stereo are those for climate control, windshield washing, blinking one’s lights, perhaps even a cellular phone. Individuals exercise control over the internal environment of their cars in a manner that is not possible with any alternate mode of getting around. Once we focus attentively on the good that is privacy, it will no longer appear obvious that rush-hour gridlock on highways is an unacceptably high price to pay for the opportunity to be one’s own man or woman behind the wheel of one’s own car.

The Road from Serfdom

In light of all these considerations, why has motoring fallen under such a cloud? Three possible reasons suggest themselves. First, although the critics acknowledge the range of goods afforded by automobility, they have identified accompanying evils that in their view drastically outweigh the goods. Second, the critics may be oblivious to the various autonomy-enhancing features of automobility. Third, they may recognize these features but regard them as goods of a much lesser status than I have claimed or, indeed, even as detriments.

Could the automobile’s critics have failed to observe that cars support autonomy? If these effects were slight and subtle that might be a reasonable supposition. But we have seen that they are not, that when compared with alternate means of transportation the automobile stands out as the vehicle of self-directedness par excellence. Not to observe this would be like visiting the mammal area at the zoo and failing to notice that the elephants are rather larger than the zebras, camels, and wart hogs.

I am convinced that the automobile’s most strident critics are well aware of the fact that automobility promotes autonomy—and that is precisely why they are so wary of it. To be in the business of formulating policy is to be professionally predisposed to consider people as so many knights, rooks, and pawns to be moved around on the social chessboard in the service of one’s grand strategy. Not all analysts succumb to this temptation, but many do.

People who drive automobiles upset the patterns spun from the policy intellectual’s brain. The precise urban design that he has concocted loses out to suburban sprawl. If people rode buses and trains whenever they could, less oil would be burned and fewer acres of countryside would be paved over. Perhaps communities of an old-fashioned sort would be restored. Perhaps the central city would come alive again other than between the hours of 9 and 5. Perhaps. . . . But why go on? These lovely visions are blocked by the free choices of men and women who resist all blandishments to leave their cars in the garage. They wish to drive. Automobile motoring is good because people wish to engage in it, and they wish to engage in it because it is inherently good. So the intellectuals sulk in their tents and grumpily call to mind utopias that might have been.