How To Make The Hard Choices: An Interview with Dr. Ruth Chang

Earl Meagan, February 3, 2019

Ruth Chang is a professor of analytic philosophy at Rutgers University, where her areas of interest include decision-making and the immeasurability of values. Her work has been featured in radio and print media throughout the United States, as well as Brazil, Taiwan, Austria, Australia, Canada, Israel, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

ADVERTISEMENTS

In May 2014, Dr. Chang gave a TED Talks presentation focusing on the problem of personal dilemmas, entitled “How to Make Hard Choices,” which received 4.3 million views on the internet. Brain World recently had the opportunity to speak with her on this topic, one that she has passionately researched, and one which is all too often on the minds of many of our readers, eager to embark on the next chapter of their lives and the hard choices this entails.

Brain World: How did you first get interested in philosophy?

Ruth Chang: I think I got into it the way most philosophers do — you grow up, surrounded by family in an environment where you do what you’re told, and you accept all implicit and explicit propositions, and then you discover there’s this discipline devoted to looking in a critical way at things that one takes for granted. That’s an incredibly liberating feeling — that there’s more to life besides accepting orders.

BW: Did your legal career impact the way you’ve thought about philosophy, and how so?

RC: You know, I have to say it didn’t really affect how I think about philosophy because they’re very different disciplines. One thing that my legal career reflected really, was my desire to do some good. Having practiced law and being as it were in the real world, I’ve worked on a death penalty case, I’ve worked on a nuclear power plant liability case, I’ve worked on medical malpractice, I’ve worked on landlord and tenant law, and I’ve come to realize that people’s lives matter. It’s made me want my philosophy to make a difference — to somehow influence or intersect with the way in which people live their lives, and it’s brought me to think about hard choices.

As an ethicist, I tend to think that the most important question is, “How should we live?” The next important question is, “How should we choose to live?” Unlike nonrational animals, we are capable of making choices rather than just living by instinct. So we regularly make choices, and that’s what makes hard choices so interesting.

BW: How would you define hard choices?

RC: When you choose between two alternatives, there’s always stuff that matters. There’s your well-being, your child’s well-being, what’s good for the world, or something more specific, something that would give you the most money, or whatever would give you the most intellectual satisfaction. In a hard choice, A is better than B with respect to some of the things that matter, but B is better with respect to some of the other things that matter, and finally it seems that neither is at least as good as the other overall.

That’s a hard choice, and our natural response is to assume that you have to pick one or the other and both choices are equally good, but how could they be equally good? Your career as an architect or as a journalist both seem to be good decisions to choose between — but to flip a coin and choose one or the other is nuts. You could improve on your journalism career more easily than at your career as an architect, so they aren’t equally good — so there must be something else.

What else is true of a hard choice? Well, maybe they can’t be compared at all, but that doesn’t seem right, because if you can’t compare the two careers against each other and choose between them, then you don’t choose as the rational agent. You can’t exercise your practical rationality — that goes out the window. So I think this is what Jean-Paul Sartre and all the existential philosophers were going on about, when they say that you just choose — what they have in mind is that there is no comparable value anywhere in the world that’s synced to your choice. All you can do is pick, or as I call it prompt, pick one or the other without considering their worth, but you’re not really acting as a rational agent when you prompt.

You can come up with reasons for your choice after the fact, say it has rational value, but it really doesn’t. Maybe the problem is that we’ve been assuming that value is just like length and weight, and so I have this idea that we just crawl out of the cave and see a bunch of stuff in the world and try to understand it, and we find this really great tool to understand the rock, the tree, and the river — numbers! Let’s measure the weight of the rock or length of the river, and once we assign numbers to everything like this, we are forced to compare things by a trichotomy of more, less, or equal — and we try to assign this to ideas that can’t be numbered so easily: morals or values. If we see everything using this trichotomy, we don’t really understand hard choices, but there is a forkway approach to looking at it, what I call “on a par.”

RC: When you make your hard choices, I say to seek alternatives that are on a par. If you’ve got two items that are qualitatively very different — like the architect career and the journalist career  — but nevertheless in the same overall neighborhood of value, then that’s a mark of parity. If you think about most hard choices people have to face, you’ll find that to be the case.

BW: Would you say hard choices are necessary?

RC: I’d say yes, they are necessary, because they are the nexus at which we can actively determine what we have most reason to do. We come out of the womb, stuff happens to us, we come with genes and dispositions, and then there’s causation. The environment causally impinges on the stuff that we come with; our psychological economies. If you have this psychological makeup and you’re in this kind of environment, then you’ve got most reason to be a journalist rather than an architect. The other passive story is that it turns out that because of what you’re born with and the environment you grew up within, you have all these desires, to find out about stuff, and those desires give you reason to be a journalist rather than an architect, since being a journalist satisfies those desires in a way that being an architect wouldn’t.

Both of those stories don’t mention you as an agent. Your will or your agency as a self plays no role. You’re just sitting back and letting other things determine which you have most reason to do. There’s no role for you or yourself to make that decision.

BW: Why do the hard choices we make define us?

RC: Well, there are two rational responses to a hard choice. When you have a parity, you can commit — that is, you throw yourself behind it. The most common example of where we commit is in romantic relationships. Say you’re casually dating someone who gets sick and he asks for your kidney. But if it is someone you are committed to, you throw your agency behind this task, you agree to give up a kidney and your reaction is very different. You will see that you have a reason to give up your kidney that you didn’t have before.

ADVERTISEMENTS

Commitment is like that with careers, too. You commit to being a journalist and the obstacles you face are different from ones you would face if you chose another career. Say your editor yells at you for a mistake you make — how you react says a lot. If you’re committed to being a journalist, you’ll think, “What can I do to avoid that mistake again?” If you’re not, your reaction will be, “I should’ve just been an architect!” So in a hard choice, one of the rational things you can do is commit to one of the alternatives. By committing to be a journalist, you actually create new reasons to be a journalist, and those aren’t reasons given to you by the world, but ones you make for yourself.

The other rational response is not to commit, but to drift, intentionally choosing an option without throwing your agency behind it — just as you might drift in your dating life without committing to one person. You’re kind of just going with the flow, not doing something you stand for, maybe choosing one career to make your family happy, or make a lot of money.

It defines who you are, and many people spend their entire lives drifting and never exercise their normative power to create meaning for themselves. That’s a shame. It’s perfectly rational to be like that, but it’s a shame — you never become the author of your own life.

BW: You’ve had a great deal of experience with making difficult decisions — do you think there’s one particular way to go about making them, that works the best?

RC: I have a little acronym, a recipe for making hard choices. [Laughs.] So, it’s spelled “AUTHOR,” and the “A” stands for “Assess” — what matters in the choice between the alternatives. Not everyone’s sure what matters, so you have to figure out what does. “U” is for “Understand” — really understand what’s behind each alternative — will it give you the security or emotional well-being that you want?

For “T,” you “Tally” up each value, each of the things that matters between each choice. Sometimes you can get stuck here (A and B have good things behind them for different reasons), so from here you sometimes end up starting over. Then for “H,” you “Hone” in on a parity. You conclude that the choices aren’t equally good, they’re on a par where they can be compared.

For “O,” you “Open” yourself for commitment to one of the alternatives. You may fail, and that’s OK. Then you reach “R,” where you “Realize” who you are through your response to the parity, and in doing so, you become the author of your life.

This article was originally published in the Fall 2016 issue of Brain World Magazine.