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  1. An Identity Crisis in Philosophy.Samuel Kahn - 2025 - Argumenta 1:1-14.
    The following seems to be a truism in modern day philosophy: No agent can have had other parents (IDENTITY). IDENTITY shows up in discussions of moral luck, parenting, gene editing, and population ethics. In this paper, I challenge IDENTITY. I do so by showing that the most plausible arguments that can be made in favor of IDENTITY do not withstand critical scrutiny. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I document the prevalence of IDENTITY. In the second, (...)
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  2. Knowing What It Is Like.Yuri Cath - 2024 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    What kind of knowledge does one have when one knows what it is like to, say, fall in love, eat vegemite™, be a parent, or ride a bike? This Element addresses this question by exploring the tension between two plausible theses about this form of knowledge: (i) that to possess it one must have had the corresponding experience, and (ii) that to possess it one must know an answer to the 'what it is like' question. The Element shows how the (...)
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  3. Tackling Hermeneutical Injustices in Gender-Affirming Healthcare.Nick Clanchy - 2024 - Hypatia 39 (4):688-710.
    Previously proposed strategies for tackling hermeneutical injustices take for granted the interests people have in certain things about them being intelligible to them and/or to others, and seek to enable them to satisfy these interests. Strategies of this sort I call interests-as-given strategies. I propose that some hermeneutical injustices can instead be tackled by doing away with certain of these interests, and so with the possibility of their unfair non-satisfaction. Strategies of this sort I call interests-in-question strategies. As a case (...)
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  4. Transformative experiences, rational decisions and shark attacks.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6):1619-1639.
    How can we make rational decisions that involve transformative experiences, that is, experiences that can radically change our core preferences? L. A. Paul (2014) has argued that many decisions involving transformative experiences cannot be rational. However, Paul acknowledges that some traumatic events can be transformative experiences, but are nevertheless not an obstacle to rational decision-making. For instance, being attacked by hungry sharks would be a transformative experience, and yet, deciding not to swim with hungry sharks is rational. Paul has tried (...)
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  5. Transformative Choice and Decision-Making Capacity.Isra Black, Lisa Forsberg & Anthony Skelton - 2023 - Law Quarterly Review 139 (4):654-680.
    This article is about the information relevant to decision-making capacity in refusal of life-prolonging medical treatment cases. We examine the degree to which the phenomenology of the options available to the agent—what the relevant states of affairs will feel like for them—forms part of the capacity-relevant information in the law of England and Wales, and how this informational basis varies across adolescent and adult medical treatment cases. We identify an important doctrinal phenomenon. In the leading authorities, the courts appear to (...)
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  6. Transformative experience and the principle of informed consent in medicine.Karl Egerton & Helen Capitelli-McMahon - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-21.
    This paper explores how transformative experience generates decision-making problems of particular seriousness in medical settings. Potentially transformative experiences are especially likely to be encountered in medicine, and the associated decisions are confronted jointly by patients and clinicians in the context of an imbalance of power and expertise. However in such scenarios the principle of informed consent, which plays a central role in guiding clinicians, is unequal to the task. We detail how the principle’s assumptions about autonomy, rationality and information handle (...)
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  7. Hot-cold empathy gaps and the grounds of authenticity.Grace Helton & Christopher Register - 2023 - Synthese 202 (5):1-24.
    Hot-cold empathy gaps are a pervasive phenomena wherein one’s predictions about others tend to skew ‘in the direction’ of one’s own current visceral states. For instance, when one predicts how hungry someone else is, one’s prediction will tend to reflect one’s own current hunger state. These gaps also obtain intrapersonally, when one attempts to predict what one oneself would do at a different time. In this paper, we do three things: We draw on empirical evidence to argue that so-called hot-cold (...)
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  8. (1 other version)Transformative Experience and the Right to Revelatory Autonomy.Farbod Akhlaghi - 2022 - Analysis (1):1-10.
    Sometimes it is not us but those to whom we stand in special relations that face transformative choices: our friends, family, or beloved. A focus upon first-personal rational choice and agency has left crucial ethical questions regarding what we owe to those who face transformative choices largely unexplored. In this paper, I ask: under what conditions, if any, is it morally permissible to interfere with to try to prevent another from making a transformative choice? Some seemingly plausible answers to this (...)
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  9. Transformative experiences and the equivocation objection.Yuri Cath - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-22.
    Paul (2014, 2015a) argues that one cannot rationally decide whether to have a transformative experience by trying to form judgments, in advance, about (i) what it would feel like to have that experience, and (ii) the subjective value of having such an experience. The problem is if you haven’t had the experience then you cannot know what it is like, and you need to know what it is like to assess its value. However, in earlier work I argued that ‘what (...)
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  10. Transformative Choices and the Specter of Regret.Dana Howard - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (1):72-91.
    When people are making certain medical decisions – especially potentially transformative ones – the specter of regret may color their choices. In this paper, I ask: can predicting that we will regret a decision in the future serve any justificatory role in our present decision-making? And if so, what role? While there are many pitfalls to such reasoning, I ultimately conclude that considering future retrospective emotions like regret in our decisionmaking can be both rational and authentic. Rather than indicating that (...)
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  11. Transformative Experience, Awareness Growth, and the Limits of Rational Planning.Katie Steele & H. Orri Stefánsson - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):939-948.
    Laurie Paul argues that, when it comes to many of your most significant life-changing decisions, the principles of rational choice are silent. That is because, in these cases, you anticipate that one of your choice options would yield a transformative experience. We argue that such decisions are best seen as ones in which you anticipate awareness growth. You do not merely lack knowledge about which possible outcome will arise from a transformative option; you lack knowledge about what are the possible (...)
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  12. Transformative Experience and the Problem of Religious Disagreement.Joshua Blanchard & Laurie Paul - 2021 - In Matthew A. Benton & Jonathan L. Kvanvig (eds.), Religious Disagreement and Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 127-141.
    Peer disagreement presents religious believers, agnostics, and skeptics alike with an epistemological problem: how can confidence in any religious claims (including their negations) be epistemically justified? There seem to be rational, well-informed adherents among a variety of mutually incompatible religious and non-religious perspectives, and so the problem of disagreement arises acutely in the religious domain. In this paper, we show that the transformative nature of religious experience and identity poses more than just this traditional, epistemic problem of conflicting religious beliefs. (...)
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  13. What is it Like to Have a Crappy Imagination?Nomy Arpaly - 2020 - In John Schwenkler & Enoch Lambert (eds.), Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change. Oxford University Press. pp. 122-133.
    I argue that when it comes to understanding other people, humans have a problem that involves a combination of poor imagination and excessive trust in this imagination. Often, the problem has to do with what I call "runaway simulation" - clinging to the assumption that another person resembles you despite glaring counter-evidence. I then argue that the same type of problem appears intra-personally, as we fail miserably to imagine potential and future selves. Finally, I argue that this fact goes a (...)
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  14. Transformative Experience in Skepticism. The External Standpoint and the Finitude of the Human Condition.Rico Gutschmidt - 2020 - Philosophy 95 (4):395-417.
    According to its quietist readings, skepticism can be dissolved by demonstrating that the notion of ‘absolute objectivity’ is confused. The dissolution of this confusion is supposed to lead us to acquiesce in our finite and plain everyday life without being bothered anymore about the supposed need for objective knowledge. In contrast, I want to propose a transformative reading of skepticism according to which the philosophical practice of skepticism can be ‘epistemically transformative’. To this end, I will transpose L.A. Paul's notion (...)
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  15. Whose Preferences?L. A. Paul - 2020 - American Journal of Bioethics 20 (8):65-66.
    Commentary on Walsh, E. 2020. Cognitive transformation, dementia, and the moral weight of advance directives. The American Journal of Bioethics. 20(8): 54–64.
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  16. Transformative experience and the knowledge norms for action: Moss on Paul’s challenge to decision theory.Richard Pettigrew - 2020 - In John Schwenkler & Enoch Lambert (eds.), Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change. Oxford University Press.
    to appear in Lambert, E. and J. Schwenkler (eds.) Transformative Experience (OUP) -/- L. A. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that the possibility of epistemically transformative experiences poses serious and novel problems for the orthodox theory of rational choice, namely, expected utility theory — I call her argument the Utility Ignorance Objection. In a pair of earlier papers, I responded to Paul’s challenge (Pettigrew 2015, 2016), and a number of other philosophers have responded in similar ways (Dougherty, et al. 2015, Harman (...)
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  17. Mother Knows Best: Pregnancy, Applied Ethics, and Epistemically Transformative Experiences.Fiona Woollard - 2020 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (1):155-171.
    L.A. Paul argues that interesting issues for rational choice theory are raised by epistemically transformative experiences: experiences which provide access to knowledge that could not be known without the experience. Consideration of the epistemic effects of pregnancy has important implications for our understanding of epistemically transformative experiences and for debate about the ethics of abortion and applied ethics more generally. Pregnancy is epistemically transformative both in Paul’s narrow sense and in a wider sense: those who have not been pregnant face (...)
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  18. Knowing What It is Like and Testimony.Yuri Cath - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):105-120.
    It is often said that ‘what it is like’-knowledge cannot be acquired by consulting testimony or reading books [Lewis 1998; Paul 2014; 2015a]. However, people also routinely consult books like What It Is Like to Go to War [Marlantes 2014], and countless ‘what it is like’ articles and youtube videos, in the apparent hope of gaining knowledge about what it is like to have experiences they have not had themselves. This article examines this puzzle and tries to solve it by (...)
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  19. Suffering and Transformative Experience.Ian James Kidd & Havi Carel - 2019 - In Michael S. Brady, David Bain & Jennifer Corns (eds.), Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity. London: Routledge. pp. 165-179.
    In this chapter we suggest that many experiences of suffering can be further illuminated as forms of transformative experience, using the term coined by L.A. Paul. Such suffering experiences arise from the vulnerability, dependence, and affliction intrinsic to the human condition. Such features can create a variety of positively, negatively, and ambivalently valanced forms of epistemically and personally transformative experiences, as we detail here. We argue that the productive element of suffering experiences can be articulated as transformative, although suffering experiences (...)
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  20. Choosing for Changing Selves.Richard Pettigrew - 2019 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    What we value, like, endorse, want, and prefer changes over the course of our lives. Richard Pettigrew presents a theory of rational decision making for agents who recognise that their values will change over time and whose decisions will affect those future times.
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  21. How to rationally approach life's transformative experiences.Marcus Arvan - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (8):1199-1218.
    In a widely discussed forthcoming article, “What you can't expect when you're expecting,” L. A. Paul challenges culturally and philosophically traditional views about how to rationally make major life-decisions, most specifically the decision of whether to have children. The present paper argues that because major life-decisions are transformative, the only rational way to approach them is to become resilient people: people who do not “over-plan” their lives or expect their lives to play out “according to plan”—people who understand that beyond (...)
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  22. Social Identities and Transformative Experience.Elizabeth Barnes - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):171-187.
    In this paper, I argue that whether, how, and to what extent an experience is transformative is often highly contingent. I then further argue that sometimes social conditions are a major factor in whether a certain type of experience is often or typically transformative. Sometimes social conditions make it easy for a type of experience to be transformative, and sometimes they make it hard for a type of experience to be transformative. This, I claim, can sometimes be a matter of (...)
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  23. Transformative Choices.Ruth Chang - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):237-282.
    This paper proposes a way to understand transformative choices, choices that change ‘who you are.’ First, it distinguishes two broad models of transformative choice: 1) ‘event-based’ transformative choices in which some event—perhaps an experience—downstream from a choice transforms you, and 2) ‘choice-based’ transformative choices in which the choice itself—and not something downstream from the choice—transforms you. Transformative choices are of interest primarily because they purport to pose a challenge to standard approaches to rational choice. An examination of the event-based transformative (...)
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  24. Expecting the Unexpected.Tom Dougherty, Sophie Horowitz & Paulina Sliwa - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):301-321.
    In an influential paper, L. A. Paul argues that one cannot rationally decide whether to have children. In particular, she argues that such a decision is intractable for standard decision theory. Paul's central argument in this paper rests on the claim that becoming a parent is ``epistemically transformative''---prior to becoming a parent, it is impossible to know what being a parent is like. Paul argues that because parenting is epistemically transformative, one cannot estimate the values of the various outcomes of (...)
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  25. What's So Great about Experience?Antti Kauppinen - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):371-388.
    Suppose that our life choices result in unpredictable experiences, as L.A. Paul has recently argued. What does this mean for the possibility of rational prudential choice? Not as much as Paul thinks. First, what’s valuable about experience is its broadly hedonic quality, and empirical studies suggest we tend to significantly overestimate the impact of our choices in this respect. Second, contrary to what Paul suggests, the value of finding out what an outcome is like for us does not suffice to (...)
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  26. What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting'.L. A. Paul - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):1-23.
    It seems natural to choose whether to have a child by reflecting on what it would be like to actually have a child. I argue that this natural approach fails. If you choose to become a parent, and your choice is based on projections about what you think it would be like for you to have a child, your choice is not rational. If you choose to remain childless, and your choice is based upon projections about what you think it (...)
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  27. Transformative Experience and Decision Theory.Richard Pettigrew - 2015 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3):766-774.
    This paper is part of a book symposium for L. A. Paul (2014) Transformative Experience (OUP).
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  28. How You Can Reasonably Form Expectations When You're Expecting.Nathaniel Sharadin - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):1-12.
    L.A. Paul has argued that an ordinary, natural way of making a decision -- by reflecting on the phenomenal character of the experiences one will have as a result of that decision -- cannot yield rational decision in certain cases. Paul's argument turns on the (in principle) epistemically inaccessible phenomenal character of certain experiences. In this paper I argue that, even granting Paul a range of assumptions, her argument doesn't work to establish its conclusion. This is because, as I argue, (...)
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  29. Epistemically Transformative Experience.Jane Friedman - manuscript
    A discussion of L.A. Paul's 'Transformative Experience' from an Author Meets Critics session at the 2015 Pacific APA.
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