Zan Boag: When you first started out making decisions about what you were going to do with your life, you had to make a difficult choice as a young student: law or philosophy. You chose law but then switched to philosophy. What drove each of the decisions and how did you decide on each occasion which choice to make?
Ruth Chang: I was a classic case of someone who was facing a hard choice and unable to commit to either option. So, I did what one typically does in these cases: I took the safest option, which of course was to go to law school, be financially secure, and, as the child of poor immigrants, give my parents the relief of ticking off one child-to-worry-about box. From the hundreds of letters I’ve received from people looking for help with their hard choices, I can report that I did what people are typically inclined to do, namely go for the least risky option. In short, in hard choices, people have an instinct or tendency to act out of fear of making the wrong choice, so they choose in a way to minimise potential future damage. This approach to hard choices is, I believe, profoundly mistaken, at the very least because in genuine hard choices there is no wrong choice.
Once I became a lawyer – don’t get me wrong, it had its rewards – but the truth was, I wasn’t committed to that life. I was, as the saying goes, ‘going through the motions’ and relying on external motivations and distractions to keep me chugging along from one day to the next. But as often happens in hard choices, when you drift into one option – that is, you choose it without standing behind it and being committed to it – you eventually get yourself into the position of being able to commit to something. It might be to love or to leave the law. In my case, drifting into a legal career put me in a position to commit to being a philosopher. So, in short, what drove my decision to become a lawyer was fear, and what drove my decision to become a philosopher was commitment. Today I’m both. But mostly a philosopher.
I’d like to delve further into the idea that opting to minimise future harm is a profound mistake in hard choices, but first, can you explain more specifically what ‘hard choices’ are?
What makes a choice hard is how the options in fact compare with one another: neither option is better or worse than the other, but they aren’t equally good either – it would be a mistake to flip a coin between them. At the same time, the choice is between options that can be compared – incomparable options lie outside the scope of rational agency, but the kinds of hard choices between careers, loves, places to live are all typical choices within the exercise of rational agency. I say that options in hard choices are ‘on a par’, comparable but just qualitatively different.
Here’s an example. Suppose you’re choosing between a career as a lumberjack and one as a journalist. In making the choice, you will want to know things like how beautiful the outdoors will be in the lumberjack job, how interesting the stories you’ll write about will be in the journalist job, and so on. But you likely can’t know in advance all the details that you would reasonably regard as relevant to the choice. And so the choice seems hard because you don’t know all the facts you need to make your decision. But now let’s transport you to Mount Olympus or heaven where some omniscient, beneficent god lives. That god – or AI – who knows everything, is in a position to make the choice for you. But here’s the kicker: in hard choices, even a god who knows everything would find the choice hard. This is because the two life paths you could occupy as a lumberjack and as a journalist – every detail of which the god knows – are just very different sorts of lives. One isn’t better than the other, and it’s not that they’re equally good either. They’re just very different lives – they’re on a par. That’s why the choice is hard. So even if we had all the information that we in fact don’t have, it doesn’t follow that the choice would be easy. Even a god would find hard choices hard. They’re hard because there is no best option.
Getting back to philosophy vs. law. Many people drift into the safest option in hard choices – you’d be surprised how many students become lawyers because they can’t figure out what else to do with themselves – you drift not because you’re lazy or stupid but because neither career is better than the other and more information wouldn’t change this. You drift because you’re not in a position to commit to either option, and so you dip your toe into one path in the hopes that you’ll eventually be able to commit to that path or commit to taking a different direction. The key here is that having more information won’t help you. You need to do something, that is, commit to an option if you can. So the cure for hard choices isn’t more information, it’s commitment.
So your two careers are on a par. But what is parity? How is it different from equality? In the careers case, if neither career is better than the other and they are comparable, don’t they have to be equally good? And why does it matter that in hard choices our options are on a par?
Well, here’s a clue that the careers aren’t equally good: it would be a mistake to flip a coin between them. Flipping a coin is always intrinsically rationally permissible when faced with equally good options. But there’s also a little test you can perform to prove to yourself that in a hard choice, the options aren’t equally good. Suppose you’re struggling over where to go to school, where to take your next vacation, whether to quit your secure job to start your own business. After doing your due diligence, you conclude that neither option is better than the other. Must they then be equally good?
Here’s the test. Improve one of the options a bit – enough to make it clearly better than it was before the improvement. So maybe you discover that mountain vacation now includes free ski rental. Does that improvement now make the mountain vacation better than the beach one? Probably not. If not, then the original vacations could not have been equally good. That’s because if you take two equally good things – say, two identical strawberry sundaes – and you make one better – by adding some whipped cream on top – the improved one has now got to be better than the other. That’s just part of the logic of equally good things. Improving one of them tips the scale in favour of that option.
But in hard choices, that’s not so – you can make a small improvement to one of the options, and that won’t settle the matter as to which you should choose. This is because in hard choices, options are on a par, and when options are on a par, they are qualitatively different and this difference can’t be captured by the crude trichotomy of categories ‘better’, ‘worse’, and ‘equal’.
So parity is distinct from equality in the way we’ve just seen: add value to one of the options in the case of equality and that tips the scales. Not so in the case of parity. Roughly speaking, parity holds between options that are qualitatively very different from one another – a career in hang-gliding and one in accounting – but neither is better than the other and nor are they equally good. If you think back on the hard choices you’ve faced in life, they will likely be between qualitatively different options.
Now you ask a good further question: why does parity matter? Well there’s an ivory tower answer and a more in-the-world answer. The ‘academic’ answer might be illustrated by an analogy with Edwin Abbot’s novella, Flatland. Abbot was a maths teacher in Victorian England who wrote a charming story about A Square, who sees his world in only two dimensions – everything is flat. One day, he meets A Sphere, who blows his mind by introducing him to three-dimensional space. Oh, A Square thinks, “I’ve been understanding the world according to the mistaken assumption that everything is flat – I’ve understood the world through blinkered lenses – because space is more complicated with more dimensions than I thought.”
In a similar way, I believe, we have mistakenly assumed that the world of value is like the world of length, divisible into only three categories of being longer/better, shorter/worse, or equal/equally good. We’ve mistaken assumed Trichotomy, the view that things can be compared only in terms of the three relations of ‘better’, ‘worse’ and ‘equal’, and see the normative world through those blinkered lenses. In fact, the world of value is more complicated with a fourth dimension – parity – that helps us to understand hard choices. If we’ve misunderstood the world of value in this way, there are a lot of implications for the way we currently make policy decisions, distribute health care resources, conduct business, design technology, govern human life: we’ve got the wrong underlying picture of the oughts and shoulds of life and so we need to fix our approaches to decision-making to reflect the truth about human values, namely, that they can’t be shoved into the three boxes of ‘better’, ‘worse’, and ‘equal’ but require a fourth box – ‘parity’. Parity gives expression to qualitative differences among values.
The more in-the-world answer is that if in hard choices our options are on a par, we need to change the way we make decisions. Decision-making isn’t trichotomous, it’s tetrachotomous. Typically when we make decisions, it’s as if we take out of our back pocket one of those old-fashioned balance scales and put our options on each of the pans of the scale. What we’re trying to figure out is what the balance scale tells us to do: if one pan dips down, then there’s more reason to choose that option, and if the pans are evenly balanced, then the options are equally good and we can just flip a coin to make our choice.
But if in hard choices our options are on a par, the balance scale never settles. It doesn’t tell us what to do. This means there’s more to being a rational agent than just following what a balance scale tells us to do. Hard choices show us this. So the next time we face a choice, we need to have in front of our minds the possibility that while they can be compared, neither option is better than the other and nor are they equally good. They are on a par.
I just want to quote something you said in another interview. You spoke about making choices using reasons created by us, looking for reasons “in here”. And the quote is, “When we choose between options that are on a par, we can do something that’s really rather remarkable. We can put our very selves behind an option. Here’s where I stand, here’s who I am. I’m for banking, I’m for chocolate doughnuts. This response in hard choices is a rational response, but it’s not dictated by reasons given to us. Rather, it’s supported by reasons created by us. Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here. Who am I to be?” I love this. How important is this process of putting our very selves behind an option when we’re faced with a hard choice?
I believe it’s absolutely central to what it is to be a rational agent. So the standard way of understanding rationality – it’s risen to the level of dogma – is what I regard as a too-passive picture according to which our job as rational agents is to discover and follow the reasons given to us by the world. Here’s a reason given to me by the world: there’s a tiger around the corner! That’s a reason to run away! That’s a reason ‘out there’, given to me by the way the world is. But in hard choices, the reasons ‘out there’ are on a par – the balance scale doesn’t settle in favour of one option over another or tell you to go ahead and flip a coin. So instead, what you have to do in a hard choice is to create a reason from ‘in here’. When I committed to being a philosopher, I created a reason for myself to become a philosopher that wasn’t out there, given to me by the world. Hard choices are opportunities for us to create reasons for ourselves and make it true that we have most reason to pursue one path in life over another. That’s why parity is so important to recognise as part of the world of value. This is what I think of as an ‘activist’ view of rational agency: our job as rational agents is centrally to create reasons for ourselves and make it true for ourselves that it’s rational for us to do one thing rather than another. Our job here on earth is not simply the passive one of obeying the reasons given to us by the world, but to create reasons for ourselves by committing to certain paths over others.
You mentioned once how a world full of only easy choices would “enslave us to reasons”. I suppose it is the hard choices that define us. Now, my son’s playing a lot of golf at the moment and he was complaining about a golf hole being particularly difficult. And so, I put it to him, “Well, imagine if every single golf hole was the same: flat, no bunkers, no water, short, the greens had no slope. Well, then golf would lose all purpose for you. It’s only through the difficulty of each hole that it’s interesting for you.” I know this is somewhat different, but do you think having hard choices is what defines who we are, giving us purpose and something to move towards in our lives. That is, if we were to lack these hard choices, then our lives would have less meaning?
So the metaphor with your son and golfing is nice, but one important difference is that what makes a golf course interesting when you’ve got sand traps and hills and so on, is the physical difficulty of traversing it. The purpose and point of golf is to develop a certain skill. That’s why mini-golf tries to be less boring by adding slopes, windmills and loop-de-loops. We can certainly gain purpose in life by developing skills. But hard choices don’t make life purposeful by allowing you to develop a skill. Hard choices give life meaning because they are the junctures for the exercise of a very deep freedom we have: the freedom to create a normative truth about ourselves. Here’s something amazing you can do without any practice whatsoever: you can quite literally make it true that a career in journalism is better for you than a career in lumberjacking. By committing to journalism, you create a reason for yourself to pursue that career instead of any number of other possible careers that are on a par with it. And that can in turn make it true that you have most reason to be a journalist rather than anything else. So what path you should take in life isn’t determined for you by the world. You get to give yourself most reason to pursue one life rather than another through your commitment in hard choices. We are our most free in hard choices. And our commitments in hard choices gives our lives meaning. I made it true that this life is best for me! That’s how my life can have meaning even if I’m destitute and living in terrible circumstances.
Now I should say something about this idea of creating reasons, which may seem pretty radical. But it’s not; each of us creates reasons all the time without really noticing what we’re doing. We don’t only create reasons in hard choices but in easy choices, too. My friend Kate recently had a baby. For her it was an easy choice to have a baby. You can commit to an option that is clearly better than all the others. So Kate committed to have a child, and so she gave herself more reason to have a child than she would have had, had she just decided to have a child in order to go along with her husband’s wishes. She’s also committed to the flourishing of her child. What does that commitment look like? Well, it’s putting her very self behind the well-being of her child so that besides all the reasons the world gives her to care for her child... she has these special commitment-based reasons besides.
Compare her with a deadbeat dad who is totally uncommitted to the welfare of his child. Like Kate, the deadbeat dad has all the reasons given by the world to look after the child – he can be had up for child neglect if he doesn’t – but Kate has these further reasons based in her very self.
Commitment is putting your very self behind something. So by committing to something, you change yourself; you change what’s true about you. This is most pronounced in hard choices. For me, the choice of whether to have a biological child was hard. Eventually, I was able to commit to being a sad, miserable, childless cat lady. By committing to not being a biological mother, I did this remarkable thing. I made it true that I had most reason not to get pregnant. Before my commitment, the options were on a par – it was a hard choice. After my commitment, I had most reason to remain child-free.
This power we each have to make it true that we have most reason to do this rather than that in hard choices is what makes hard choices so important in our lives. They are the junctures at which we have the power to make ourselves into one kind of person rather than another.
Some years back I interviewed the philosopher L.A. (Laurie) Paul, I don’t know if you’ve come across her, she writes on change. To me, one of her ideas relates to what you’re talking about here when it comes to parents. She talks about transformative experiences – that there are processes that you undergo at certain points in your life: transformative change. She likened becoming a parent to becoming a vampire. It’s not until you are a parent that you understand what it’s like to be a parent, just like it’s not until you’re a vampire that you could understand what it’s like to be a vampire. I wonder if by putting yourself behind a choice, a decision, you become transformed and also the thing itself becomes transformed, because you are putting yourself behind it. Am I clutching here or is there some sort of similarity there, in that there’s a change that you undergo that you can’t understand until after you make that decision?
Laurie’s sense of transformative experiences has to do with not being able to understand what something is like. So, there’s a specific kind of phenomenological knowledge that we can’t have unless we experience it. And I think that’s absolutely right. I can’t know, at least in very fine-grained detail what it’s like to be bitten by a shark, what it’s like to drink coffee with mustard in it, what it’s like to have a baby, until I actually experience it. So the phenomenon of not knowing exactly what something is like, phenomenologically speaking, without having experience of it seems to me ubiquitous. And sometimes experiences we have can change our preferences. That is absolutely right. People who experience trauma will often prefer safety over danger, and sadly many prefer to numb their pain with drugs and alcohol. Laurie helpfully points out that some experiences can change our preferences drastically, and I would add that it’s not just those that she calls ‘transformative’ that can have this effect. It’s not just experiences that I have to have that can transform my utility functions; lots of experiences, even those about which I have a pretty darn good idea of what they’re like, can change my preferences drastically. I think where our interests go in different directions is that, as I’ve been arguing for many years, through commitment, we can change not just our preferences but the actual reasons and values in our lives. After all, preference change is relatively simple – hypnotise me or give me a pill and my preferences will change. The story of interest to me is not the mechanistic, causal – and I think Laurie accepts Trichotomy – one of how our preferences change, but the normative one of how our reasons to do things change. Preferences aren’t the same as reasons. I might prefer to eat the whole chocolate cake, but my reasons are: don’t do it! And I think the deepest story about how our reasons can change is that we can create reasons through our commitments. But we are both interested in change, Laurie in change in preferences and me in change in the reasons we have to do things.
You say we can put ourselves behind our choices, but how can we, as we’re going through life and we develop our own ethics and morality, how can we balance this with what society expects from us when we’re making choices? Your parents had some expectations for you, very strong expectations for you when you were younger and you had to get yourself to a point where you felt like you could challenge those expectations. What I’m getting at is this: how do we balance personal values with societal norms and the expectations of others when we’re making choices in life?
It’s interesting that so many examples of hard choices I’ve received from people involve just this quandary: the choice is hard because the reasons are on a par, but often there’s one option – usually is the safe option – that fits better with everyone’s expectations, whether they be moral or otherwise. A lovely woman from Turkey contacted me a while back, and her issue was that her very Christian Yazidi family was dead set against her marrying her Muslim, Kurdish boyfriend of some 10 years – they were certain that some of his relatives were responsible for the rape, torture, and murder of some of their relatives in Kurdish north of Iraq. It is also part of Yazidi culture to remember the long history of persecution they have endured at the hands of Muslims. But she and her boyfriend loved each other, she wanted to start a family, and her biological clock was ticking. It was him, a child-free life, or adoption, the latter two options with the full support of her family. I take it that this is the kind of case you’re asking about: personal reasons to do one thing and societal or familial reasons to do another.
Some people try to minimise this conflict between – let’s call it ‘morality’ and ‘prudence’ – either by claiming that these are two distinct domains of demands on a person that just can’t be reconciled or by distorting one so that it includes the other: if you understand morality properly, you’ll see that following its dictates makes your life go best, or if you really understand what your well-being involves, you’ll see that being moral is part of what it is to pursue a life that’s best for number 1.
I am pessimistic about these strategies and think that what society demands of us can often conflict with what is in our own best interest. Sometimes we should sacrifice our own interests and do the moral thing – you should ruin your proverbial expensive Italian shoes to save the proverbial person drowning in the pond. Sometimes morality gives way, and we can do what’s in our own best interest – while it would certainly be brave of you, you don’t have to run into a shopping mall where there is an active shooter to try to save some strangers. I am depressed that that particular example is the one that leapt to mind.
At any rate, understanding hard choices gives us a different way of thinking about the toughest of such conflicts. Sometimes options are on a par and the choice is hard. My lovely Turkish woman faced a hard choice between doing what was best for herself – starting a family with the man she loved even at the cost of being ostracized by her family and community – versus giving up what she knew was best for her and instead fitting in with her familial and community expectations – maybe they weren’t entirely ‘moral’ – maintaining their love and support, and hoping that she would fall in love with someone else in the next year or two when it would still be safe for her to be pregnant. Once she recognised that she had the normative power to create a reason for herself to go in one direction rather than another, she could turn her attention to the question, ‘who can I commit to becoming?’
If she could commit to one option, she could make it best for her. But of course in hard choices like these, people are often not quite ready to commit. In this case, all she could do is drift into one of the options, taking her lumps as they come. Notice that if she could commit to an option, what would have seemed like horrible problems occasioning regret if she had not committed to it, would present themselves as mere challenges to be overcome. Commitment changes the normative landscape.
When you’re talking about ‘hard choices’, I can’t help but think of Kierkegaard, who wrote about how, when you make a difficult decision, you’ll regret it either way: “Marry or don’t marry, you’ll regret it,” and so on. I just wonder how much regret or perceived future regret plays when we’re trying to make these hard choices, when we try to project into one future or the other. How much of a role does regret play when we’re faced with hard choices?
This brings us back to where we began: the profound mistake of acting out of fear in hard choices. There’s a related view about decision-making that is similarly wrong-headed: the ‘deathbed’ approach to decision-making. This is how you should make decisions: pretend you’re on your deathbed and ask yourself, “Would I regret making that choice?” If the answer is no, go ahead because you’re permitted to choose it. This way of thinking about decision-making is problematic in so many ways, not the least of which is that your future self – the one wasting away in a hospital bed because of cancer – may have very different values and reasons from your present self. But the main thing wrong with the deathbed approach is that it assumes that a rational agent’s life is linear in its trajectory – that it’s never rational to change directions and grow as a person even if that means sometimes you take the worse option. I think that’s a profound mistake and a terrible way to live.
In hard choices, if we default to taking the least risky option, we overlook the normative power we have to create reasons for ourselves and to make true that we have most reason to be, say, journalists rather than lumberjacks. We miss out on what is to my mind one of the most remarkable facts about the human condition: that we have the capacity to make ourselves into creatures who have most reason to do this rather than that and thereby write the stories of our lives.
