![]() 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. You can’t exercise your practical rationality - that goes out the window. ![]() 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 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. 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. 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. 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. RC: When you choose between two alternatives, there’s always stuff that matters. So we regularly make choices, and that’s what makes hard choices so interesting. 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.Īs 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. 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. One thing that my legal career reflected really, was my desire to do some good. RC: You know, I have to say it didn’t really affect how I think about philosophy because they’re very different disciplines. That’s an incredibly liberating feeling - that there’s more to life besides accepting orders.īW: Did your legal career impact the way you’ve thought about philosophy, and how so? ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. 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.īrain World: How did you first get interested in philosophy? In May 2014, 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. ![]()
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