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Details
Title: Hard Choices in Life, Law, and LLMs
Speaker: Prof Ruth Chang, Chair and Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow at University College, Oxford
Dates: Tuesday 21, Wednesday 22 and Thursday 23 April 2026
Time: 7.00pm - 8.30pm
Location: JM Synge Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin.
Cost: FREE to attend. Registration required. (Please note that registration covers all three evenings)
Overview
The Donnellan Lectures return to Trinity College Dublin in April 2026, bringing with them a rare opportunity to engage in sustained philosophical inquiry across a sequence of connected lectures.
Delivered over three evenings by Professor Ruth Chang of the University of Oxford, and organised by the Department of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, Hard Choices in Life, Law, and LLMs examines how we reason, decide, and take responsibility in situations where standard models of rational choice fall short.
Spanning practical decision-making in everyday life, hard cases in legal reasoning, and emerging challenges in artificial intelligence, the series invites an academically engaged audience to follow a single philosophical problem as it unfolds across three nights.
Schedule
Lecture 1: April 21 | Hard Choices in Life
Title: Which Choice Situation?
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, Professor Chang will 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 be the authors of their lives.
Lecture 2: April 22 | Hard Choices in Law
Title: Hard Cases and Law’s Rationality
Hard cases in law arise 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, Professor Chang will 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.
Lecture 3: April 23 | Hard Choices in LLMs
Title: Hard Choices and Value Alignment in Artificial intelligence
‘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, Professor Chang will 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.
Background to the Donnellan Lectures
The Donnellan Lectures are a long-established lecture series at Trinity College Dublin, instituted in 1794 and endowed from the estate of Anne Donnellan. The lectures have been run by the Department of Philosophy since 1987.
Designed as a connected sequence, the lectures allow a single philosophical theme to be explored in depth across multiple evenings. Previous lecturers include Jerry Fodor, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, David Chalmers, and Susan Wolf. The most recent series was delivered in Spring 2022, by Prof Linda Zagzebski (Oklahoma).