Navigating the Unavoidable: A Critical Overview of Ruth Chang’s TED Talk “How to Make Hard Choices”
[Your Name] Date: 14 April 2026 1. Introduction In her 2015 TED Talk, “How to Make Hard Choices,” philosopher Ruth Chang (Harvard University) confronts a dilemma that pervades everyday life: the need to choose between options that are equally compelling and lack a clear hierarchy of value . While conventional decision‑theory prescribes that rational agents should defer to preferences, probabilities, or external criteria, Chang argues that many of our most consequential decisions are hard precisely because they are incommensurable —no single metric can rank the alternatives. ruth klang ted