Ruth Chang

Ruth Chang is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University.^[2] She is known for her research on the incommensurability of values and on practical reason and normativity.^[3][4] She is also widely known for her work on 'hard choices' and decision-making, and her research has been the subject of radio, newspaper, and magazine articles in the United States, Brazil, Taiwan, Austria, Australia, Canada, Israel, Italy, and the United Kingdom.^[5] Her TED talk on the subject has had over 4 million views,^[6] and her ideas have been presented in popular venues such as The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and a number of international venues.^[7] She has been a consultant or lecturer for institutions and industries including video gaming, marketing, pharmaceuticals, the U.S. Navy, and the World Bank.^[8]

She is the author of Making Comparisons Count, and the editor of the first volume on the topic of incommensurability of values in the Anglo-American world, Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason,^[9] and has authored numerous articles and book chapters.

Education and career

Chang graduated from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a B.A. in philosophy.^[2] In 1988, she graduated from Harvard Law School with a J.D.^[2] In 1991, she was appointed a Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, where she completed her D. Phil. in 1997 after two year-long visiting appointments at UCLA and the University of Chicago Law School.^[2] She also lectured at several of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in this time period.

Research areas

Chang’s principal research interests lie in normative ethics, metaethics, action theory and moral psychology. Her work focuses on practical conflict, the nature of reasons and values and their relations, and rational agency. She is known for arguing that two items which are neither better nor worse than one another and yet not equally good may nevertheless be comparable: they may be ‘on a par’.^[1][3] Her work develops a view of rational agency, ‘hybrid voluntarism’, that grows out of her interest in the underdetermination of values and their associated reasons according to which agents can create reasons and values through commitment.^[10] She has also written on value pluralism and social choice.^[2] She has given various public lectures on decision-making, love, and commitment.

Awards and fellowships

Chang has received a number of fellowship awards including at the National Humanities Center^[11] and the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at the Kennedy School of Government.^[12] She was also a Laurence S. Rockefeller Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values,^[13] a Charles K. Ryskamp Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies,^[14] and a Nicholas Berggruen Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.^[15] She was a Scot’s Centenary Fellow in Scotland, which involved a lecture tour around Scotland.^[16]

Selected works

• Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) ISBN 978-0674447561
• Making Comparisons Count (New York: Routledge, 2001), Studies in Ethics, series editor, Robert Nozick. ISBN 978-0815337829
• "The Possibility of Parity" 112 Ethics July 2002, pp. 659–88.
• "All Things Considered" 18 Philosophical Perspectives, December 2004, pp. 1-22
• "Voluntarist Reasons and the Sources of Normativity", Reasons for Action eds., Sobel and Wall, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 243-71
• "Commitments, Reasons, and the Will", in Shafer-Landau, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 8, 2013
• "Grounding Practical Normativity: Going Hybrid", Philosophical Studies, 2013

References

External links

• Ruth Chang's personal homepage
• Ruth Chang's Rutgers department page
• Ruth Chang at TED