Hard Choices and Easy Decisions
Almost one academic year down at NTU! In these couple of months, I’ve found myself returning time and again to one of my favorite talks by the Oxford philosopher Ruth Chang, where she offers one possible way we might make hard choices decisively. Chang proposes that we’ve radically misunderstood the nature of hard choices, and thus how to make them with both confidence and grace. Hard choices, she notes, are not hard because we have imperfect information: we don’t struggle over whether to move to a new place for our careers or stay put, for instance, because the true advantages and disadvantages of each option are murky to us. Most counterintuitively, having more information would not make the decision any easier. We also don’t struggle because both options are equally good, since if they are indeed equally good, as Chang very compellingly points out, we could simply flip a coin, and it wouldn’t matter whether it turned out to be heads or tails. But of course, the outcome does matter.
Why then are hard choices hard? Chang writes that they are hard because the alternatives are “are on a par.” “It may matter very much which you choose,” she observes, “but one alternative isn’t better than the other.” Instead, “the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value. That’s why the choice is hard.”
For Chang, this is precisely what makes the making of hard choices rewarding, for what makes a decision right is the reason we create for making that decision. Because the options we are presented with are on a par, the reasons for making them are not given to us. The obviously rational option is not available, and because of that, we get to exert our agency and “put our very selves behind an option,” and we come to decide what we stand for.
I’ve found this to be an absolutely liberating way of thinking about hard decisions, and it also makes the act of finally deciding on something feel so good. Instead of asking which option makes sense, it’s so much easier to ask “do I want to be the type of person who does X?” Framed in this sort of context, many decisions seem exponentially smaller by default, and also oddly matter-of-fact.
The full transcript of Chang’s wonderful talk can be found here: https://singjupost.com/ruth-chang-make-hard-choices-transcript/?singlepage=1
