The 2026 Donnellan Lectures concluded last Thursday with the final talk in a three-evening series by Professor Ruth Chang, Chair and Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. Held at the JM Synge Theatre, Arts Building, the lectures attracted a strong and engaged audience each night, with discussion and questions following each talk.
Professor Chang's lectures spanned three interconnected themes: practical decision-making in everyday life, hard cases in legal reasoning, and the implications of hard choices for artificial intelligence and value alignment.
The first lecture, Which Choice Situation?, examined what justifies an agent being in one choice situation rather than another, and what this reveals about human agency and authorship. The second, Hard Cases and Law's Rationality, offered an alternative account of legal hard cases, arguing that they are not failures of legal reasoning but moments in which law's rational structure is actively developed. The third lecture, Hard Choices and Value Alignment in Artificial Intelligence, addressed the limitations of current approaches to AI alignment and proposed a new framework that makes room for genuine hard choices in machine decision-making.
The Donnellan Lectures are one of Trinity's longest-established lecture series, instituted in 1794. Previous lecturers include Jerry Fodor, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, David Chalmers, and Susan Wolf.
The Department of Philosophy thanks Professor Chang for an excellent series of talks, and all those who came along and took part in the discussions across the three evenings.
