Ruth Chang (Oxford): “Hard Choices”

Abstract: Life is rife with hard choices. Should you be a musician or a lawyer? Have children or remain child-free? How much money, exactly, should you give to charity? And what about hard choices faced by families, groups, and governments? Should the government enact policies that reduce the standard of living of its citizens now in order to benefit future generations? Much of the popular literature on hard choices is psychological–how we in fact make hard choices and what are the ways in which we can go wrong in thinking about them. But there is a prior question that has gone unanswered. What is a hard choice? Why are some choices hard while others easy? Once we get clear on what makes a choice hard, we are in a better position to understand what we should do in the face of such choices. In this talk, I examine what makes a choice hard and offer a new way to think about hard choices that points to a different way of thinking about our place in the world.

Ruth Chang is Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and Professorial Fellow at University College, Oxford. Her research concerns the nature of normativity, value, agency, rationality and their connections.