Artificial Intelligence and Value Alignment

Presented by ��ƵCollege of Arts & Social Sciences

2026 Myint Zan Law and Philosophy Lecture

“Value alignment”—the challenge of ensuring that the outputs of artificial intelligence and other machine systems reflect and respect human values—has emerged as an urgent concern as computational technologies increasingly encroach upon central domains of human decision-making. Existing strategies for alignment fail to account for the phenomenon of “hard choices”—cases that are distinct from uncertainty, incompleteness, or indeterminacy. Instead, they operate on the assumption that, when faced with a choice between A and B, a system must either select A, select B, or arbitrarily choose between them.
Human life, however, does not conform to such tidy structures. If value alignment is to be meaningfully achieved, a different approach to AI design is required—one that accommodates the reality of hard choices. In this talk, Professor Chang will present an alternative framework for AI design that enables systems to recognise hard choices and incorporates human input in a novel and essential way. Progress toward the development of such systems—both symbolic and large language model–based—is already underway.

��Ƶ the Speaker

Ruth Chang is Chair and Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at University College, Oxford. Prior to this, she was Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She has also held visiting positions at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the University of Chicago Law School.

Before her academic career in philosophy, she worked as a law associate on a pro bono death penalty case, as well as on several product liability and medical malpractice cases. She holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an A.B. from Dartmouth College.

Her current research focuses on the nature of normativity, the structure of values and reasons, practical reason, agency, rationality, population ethics, love, commitment, decision-making, and the self.

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