It’s been a while since I last saw a TED talk I had any inclination to blog about (so long in fact that I only just found out that TED now have their own WordPress short code) but I really enjoyed this talk by the philosopher Ruth Chang. It uses the notion of ‘hard choices’ as a way of discussing value incommensurability while avoiding any jargon whatsoever. She argues that these moments of decision, in which we are confronted with no best option, reveal something important about our humanity. These choices are not hard because of our liabilities, limitations or our lack of information, though these can surely contribute, instead being hard because they imply commitments which cannot be equally satisfied given the options available to us.
Chang argues that we often treat values as if they are at least in principle quantifiable. We assume that if we had more information we could make the ‘right’ decision. But in fact we can’t and in nonetheless making such decisions we establish something important – as Andrew Sayer would put it, we elaborate upon what matters to us. However we don’t always do this. Sometimes we stall. Sometimes we choose the safe and familiar option. But in doing so we subjugate ourselves to existing reasons for action – as Chang puts it, “a world full of only easy choices would enslave us to reasons”. It’s the difficult choices, where we don’t have established reasons that show us the best response, which lead us to clarify what matters to us and why – we act on reasons created by us rather than given to us. When we don’t exercise this normative power we become drifters, letting ‘the world write the story of our lives’: letting reward and punishment determine what we do. Hard choices give us an opportunity to reflect on what we can put our agency behind, what we are for and give us opportunities to become such a person.
Her talk seems slightly simplistic at a couple of points but I assume this is just a product of the TED format. I’m planning to read some of her academic work when I get chance. But I just wanted to get my initial thoughts down on paper about the shared intellectual space occupied by moral philosophy of this form and the sociology of thinking – the former can help elucidate the normative structure of decision making for the latter. But conversely the sociology of thinking can help flesh out the contextual dynamics through which ‘hard choices’ are inflected. It’s the distinction between reasons created by us’ and ‘reasons given to us’ which I find problematic & I suspect this isn’t entirely an artifcat of the TED format. Part of this existing stock of reasons has inevitably been informed by our past responses to ‘hard choices’ – given that these present moments for self-creation they in turn form a new context of action for future hard choices. This extract from Margaret Archer expresses this well:
Thus if one of our ultimate concerns is wife and family, the emotional commentary arising from an attractive occasion for infidelity will not just be the first-order desire for the liaison, but emotionally we will also feel it as a threat, as a potential betrayal of something which we value more. Its emotional important is literally that of a liason dangereuse. In an important sense, we are no longer capable of the simplicity of a purely first-order response: reactions to relevant events are emotionally transmuted by our ultimate concerns. Think, for example, of the commitment to writing a book and of how this filters our responses to otherwise pleasurable activities. We tend to feel irritability at the telephone ringing, even whilst acknowledging that it is a wanted caller; we can feel resentment in having to respond to what we simultaneously accept are other quite legitimate calls upon us; and disinclination to break up a weekend with what we know would be pleasant company. These events can no longer be taken ‘straight’, they come to us coloured as distractions and our responses to them are generally distracted.
Our commitments represents a new sounding board for the emotions. They both mean that we see things differently and feel them differently. Devoted parents see objects and events from the child’s perspective, feeling alarm for them at what will alarm them (rather than what is alarming to the adult, such as a big wave) and experiencing enjoyments through their child’s enjoyment, for they can ‘enter-into’ fairgrounds, flumes or pantomimes through the door of their commitments. (Archer 2000: 242)
They also shape the kinds of reasons that genuinely are ‘given to us’ because our responses to hard choices condition the relations we affirm and work to reproduce:
Books fairs are not meant to be dating agencies, canal restoration is not intended to circumscribe friendships, political protests are not film guides, nor are pop festivals planned to influence our child-rearing practices. Yet a concern is the source of ripple-effects, spreading out over our way of life and insulating it as they go. The concerned need one another for it is only together that they can be themselves (expressing their full personal identities), sharing spontaneously, without self-editing. The most significant transvalued feeling here is that of discomfort. It is felt by political activists when in mixed ideological company and reported by feminists when in predominately male gathering struggling for political correctitude. The mechanisms which circumscribes a way of life is bilateral. We know the edginess about entertaining those with other commitments than ours: the artificiality of censoring our languages and opinions to avoid giving offence; the apprehension that the guests will start to ‘go on’ in proselytising vein, or the sheer boredom when they never stop talking about their children, football, local environmental planning etc. The concerned are drawn to one another but also thrown together, and this accentuation and protection of commitments is significantly regulated by the transvalued feelings themselves. (Archer 2000: 245)
I really look forward to engaging with Chang’s work though. This is an area that fascinates me and it’s one in which moral philosophy and the sociology of thinking have important contributions to make to one another.
Mark Carrigan 