Title

Which Choice Situation?

Abstract

Human life is structured by choice situations. Yet a neglected question concerns what determines — and, more importantly, what justifies — an agent's being in one choice situation rather than another. At a given moment, one might be deciding whether to continue reading an abstract or to make a cup of tea, but one might instead have been in a choice situation in which one is deciding whether to donate to Oxfam or the Red Cross. In this talk, I discuss the problem of explaining and justifying being in one choice situation instead of another, criticize several debunking approaches to the problem, and propose a candidate solution. The proposed solution highlights an underexplored dimension of how agents can be authors of their lives.

Speaker Bio

Ruth Chang is the Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. Her expertise concerns philosophical questions relating to the nature of value, value conflict, decision making, rationality, love, population ethics, human agency and artificial intelligence. Her current academic work focusses on developing an alternative theory of rationality and building with a team of computer scientists and engineers an AI Agent that can identify and help human users make good choices. She has shared her research in public venues including radio, television, and newspaper outlets such as National Public Radio, the BBC, National Geographic, The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. She has lectured or been a consultant for many institutions including Google, the CIA, the World Bank, the US Navy, the Bhutan government, Big Pharma, and many banks and financial organizations. Her TED talk on hard choices has over ten million views. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Time

17:00-19:00

Date

Wednesday 11 March 2026

Location

Ante Room SW1.17, Somerset House East Wing

Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS