Chang graduated from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a B.A. in philosophy. In 1988, she graduated from Harvard Law School with a J.D. In 1991, she was appointed a Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, where she completed her D. Phil. in 1997 after two year-long visiting appointments at UCLA and the University of Chicago Law School. She also lectured at several of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in this time period. She became an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in 1998, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004, and to Professor in 2014.

Chang’s principal research interests lie in normative ethics, metaethics, action theory and moral psychology. Her work focuses on practical conflict, the nature of reasons and values and their relations, and rational agency. She is known for arguing that two items which are neither better nor worse than one another and yet not equally good may nevertheless be comparable: they may be ‘on a par’. Her work develops a view of rational agency, ‘hybrid voluntarism’, that grows out of her interest in the underdetermination of values and their associated reasons according to which agents can create reasons and values through commitment. She has also written on value pluralism and social choice. She has given various public lectures on decision-making, love, and commitment.