Ruth Chang is the Chair and Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at University College, Oxford. Her current academic interests focus on normativity, the structure of values and reasons, practical reason, agency, rationality, population ethics, love, commitment, decision-making, and the self. Recently, she has been exploring how the AI alignment problem might be addressed by designing technology capable of recognizing ‘hard choices.’
Registration for these Distinguished Lectures is mandatory. If you are interested in attending, please register by 01 April HERE.
1st Distinguished Lecture
Date & venue: 07 April 2026 (15:00–17:00), Sala Jane Addams, Faculty of Philosophy (4th floor), University of Barcelona.
Title: “A Puzzle Concerning Rationality and Meaning in Life”
Abstract: Human life is structured by choice situations. Yet a neglected question concerns what determines—and, more importantly, what justifies—an agent’s being in one choice situation rather than another. At a given moment, one might be deciding whether to continue reading an abstract or to make a cup of tea, but one might instead have been in a choice situation in which one is deciding whether to donate to Oxfam or to the Red Cross. In this lecture, I discuss the problem of explaining and justifying being in one choice situation instead of another, criticize several debunking approaches to the problem, and propose a candidate solution. The proposed solution highlights an underexplored dimension of how agents can have meaning in their lives.
2nd Distinguished Lecture
Date & venue: 09 April 2026 (15:00–17:00), Sala Albert Calsamiglia, Campus de la Ciutadella, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona.
Title: “Law’s Rationality”
Abstract: The law is interestingly dynamic when existing legal materials appear to
underdetermine how a judge or legislator should decide a case. Standard accounts treat such cases in one of two ways: either the indeterminacy is merely apparent and a uniquely correct legal answer awaits discovery, or the law genuinely runs out and the decision-maker must appeal to extra-legal considerations or sheer stipulation. Both approaches, I argue, rest on an overly static picture of legal rationality. This talk offers an alternative account of hard cases, one that understands legal reasoning as a form of practical rationality that is neither exhausted by the application of rules or principles nor displaced when they fall silent. On this view, hard cases are not pathologies but moments in which the law’s rational structure is actively developed. They reveal law not as a fixed system, but as a living, evolving practice whose rationality is exercised—rather than suspended—precisely when legal determination is most difficult.
These Lectures are financially supported by grant CEX2021-001169-M (funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), and by the Department of Philosophy and the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona.
OUTREACH
Public Lecture with Ruth Chang
Date & venue: 08 April 2026 (18:30 – 20:00), Sala Pompeu Fabra, Ateneu Barcelonès, Barcelona.
Open to all (registration not required).
Title: “A Fork in the Road: Value Alignment and Human Values”
Abstract: ‘Value alignment’, roughly the problem of ensuring that the outputs of Artificial Intelligence and other machine systems align with human values, has become an urgent problem as computer technologies begin to encroach on central domains of human decision-making. Existing strategies for alignment make no allowance for the possibility of ‘hard choices’ – distinct from cases of uncertainty, incompleteness, and indeterminacy – but assume that in a choice between A and B, machine outputs must fall into one three categories: choose A, choose B, or arbitrarily select between them. But human life is not so neat. If we are to achieve value alignment, we need a different approach to AI design that makes room for the existence of hard choices. In this talk, I present an alternative framework for AI design that allows machines to recognize hard choices and puts humans ‘in the loop’ in a novel way. Progress in building such systems is underway.
This event is organized by BIAP in collaboration with Ateneu Barcelonès.
The programme with abstracts can be downloaded as a PDF HERE.
