How to make difficult decisions, according to philosophy

our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed PhilosophyMind and BehaviorPersonal IdentityIdentity FormationEthical Decision Making Every now and then, life asks us a question with no easy answer. Which career should we pursue? Should we move to the coast or closer to our friends?

We gather information, read testimonials, and exhaustively research both options. One path seems better in some ways, the other seems better in others, and we find ourselves stuck between them. The best answer eludes us.

This is what the philosopher Ruth Chang calls a “hard choice.” What makes these kinds of choices hard, Chang says, is not so much their content but their structure: They don’t fit into our standard trichotomy of value in decision-making. Usually, we compare two options using the criteria “better than,” “worse than,” or “equal to.” If there are better reasons to do X than Y, then the rational thing is to do X; meanwhile, if X and Y are equal, then it doesn’t matter which one we pick. But hard choices defy this evaluative framework.

They are cases where options are no better or worse than each other — yet, crucially, they are not equal to one another either. Perhaps this seems strange. Our dilemma surely exists, we might think, because the options are equally desirable and we just can’t decide between them.

But Chang suggests this is a mistake. When we’re stuck in a hard choice, the decision is difficult not because it involves equality, but because it involves difference. One option is no better or worse than the other, but they lead to different — often mutually exclusive — kinds of futures, and we cannot decide which kind of future we want.

Get the fall print issue, shipping in October, to members only. When it comes to hard choices, Chang argues, the standard trichotomy of better than, worse than, and equal to is insufficient. To aid our thinking, she introduces a fourth dimension: parity.