How to make hard choices | Ruth Chang

Hard choices are significant decisions where neither alternative is definitively better than the other overall, even if each has distinct advantages. This applies to both major life decisions and seemingly small choices, challenging the idea that such choices are a result of our ignorance or that one option is objectively better.

We often perceive hard choices as situations where one option is truly superior but we lack the understanding to identify it, or where both options are equally good. This leads to common pitfalls like choosing the safest option due to fear, as exemplified by the speaker's own career decision. However, hard choices are fundamentally different; the difficulty stems from the absence of a 'best' option, not from our inability to discern it.

The idea that hard choices involve equally good options is a mistake. If options were truly equally good, a slight improvement to one would make it definitively better, which isn't the case in hard choices. This highlights a flaw in comparing values as if they were quantifiable scientific properties.

Values like justice, beauty, or kindness cannot be quantified in the same way as physical properties like weight. Hard choices introduce a fourth relationship between alternatives: they are 'on a par'. This means they are in the same neighborhood of value, yet distinct in kind, explaining why the choice remains difficult even after careful consideration.

Hard choices are not a curse but an opportunity. They reveal our unique human power to create reasons for ourselves, shaping who we become. Instead of being enslaved to predetermined reasons, we get to decide who we are by putting our agency behind an option, making a choice that defines our identity.

People who fail to exercise this normative power in hard choices become 'drifters', allowing external factors like reward, punishment, or ease to dictate their lives. By consciously reflecting on what we can be for and committing to an option in a hard choice, we write our own life stories and become the distinctive individuals we are.