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 (...) to explain why decisions involving ‘sharky’ outcomes are an exception to the rule. However, her putative explanation has been criticized by Campbell and Mosquera (2020). In this paper, I offer a different solution to this problem. Roughly, I argue that transformative experiences give rise a problem for rational decision-making only if the decision can lead to satisfying some of our (new) core preferences, but can also frustrate other (new) core preferences. I also argue that agents can partially project what traumatic transformative experiences are like. (shrink)

Some experiences are transformative in that it is impossible to imagine experiencing them until one experiences them. It has been argued that pregnancy and parenthood are like that, and that therefore one cannot make a rational decision whether to become a mother. I argue that pregnancy and parenthood are not like that; but that if even if they are, a woman can still make a rational decision by relying on testimony about the value of these experiences. I then discuss an (...) objection that such testimony will be unreliable because parents will reflect on their being glad that their children exist, and will not realize that it’s reasonable to be glad their children exist even if the parents’ lives are thereby worse. I argue that despite this possible route to unreliable testimony, in general it is reasonable to rely on others’ testimony about the value of their lives. (shrink)

In “What you can’t expect when you’re expecting,” I argue that, if you don’t know what it’s like to be a parent, you cannot make this decision rationally—at least, not if your decision is based on what you think it would be like for you to become a parent. My argument hinges on the idea that becoming a parent is a transformative experience. This unique type of experience often transforms people in a deep and personal sense, and in the process, (...) changes their preferences. In section 1, I will explain transformative experience in terms of radical first-personal epistemic and self change. In section 2, I’ll explain the notion of subjective value that I use to develop the decision problem. In section 3, I will discuss the way we ordinarily combine our introspective assessments with testimony and evidence. In section 4, I will discuss the problems for rational decision-making. In section 5, I will explore the problem of first-personally transformed future selves. In section 6, I will engage with the main themes and arguments and ideas of the authors of the papers contributed to this volume. (shrink)

Epistemology should take seriously the possibility of rationally evaluable changes in conceptual resources. Epistemic decision theory compares belief states in terms of epistemic value. But it's standardly restricted to belief states that don't differ in their conceptual resources. I argue that epistemic decision theory should be generalized to make belief states with differing concepts comparable. I characterize some possible constraints on epistemic utility functions. Traditionally, the epistemic utility of a total belief state has been understood as a function of the (...) epistemic utility of individual (partial) beliefs. The most natural ways of generalizing this account generate a kind of repugnant conclusion. I characterize some possible alternatives, reflecting different epistemic norms. (shrink)

In the recent literature on episodic memory, there has been increasing recognition of the need to provide an account of its adaptive function. In this context, it is sometimes argued that episodic memory is critical for certain forms of decision making about the future. We criticize existing accounts that try to give episodic memory a role in decision making, before giving a novel such account of our own. This turns on the thought of a link between episodic memory and the (...) emotion of regret. We discuss how both experienced and anticipated regret can have a distinctive influence on decision making, and argue that the ability to recollect past events in episodic memory underpins the capacity to engage in the sophisticated types of mental time travel recruited in experiencing and anticipating regret. (shrink)

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, (...) the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on epistemically accessible facts about its non-phenomenal character plus what the deciding agent is like. Because there are principles that link the non-phenomenal character of experiences (together with what a particular agent is like) to the phenomenal character of experiences, agents can reasonably form expectations about the valence of the phenomenal character of the experiences that they are deciding whether to undergo. These reasonable expectations are, I argue, enough to make the ordinary, natural way of making a decision yield rational decision. (shrink)

A sensibility is, on a rough first pass, an emotional orientation to the world. It shapes how things appear to us, evaluatively speaking. By transfiguring things’ evaluative appearances, a change in sensibility can profoundly alter one’s overall experience of the world. I argue that some forms of sensibility change entail (1) risking one’s knowledge of what experiences imbued with one’s prior sensibility were like, and (2) surrendering one’s grasp on the intelligibility of one’s prior emotional apprehensions. These costs have consequences (...) for Laurie Paul’s ‘problem of transformative experience.’ Paul has argued that when we are poised to become someone new, our inexperience generates problems for authentic choice about our own futures. By reckoning with the epistemic losses involved in sensibility change, I show that this problem must not be confined to novel transformations. Prior experience does not guarantee the knowledge or understanding necessary for choosing authentically (in Paul’s sense). If the problem Paul highlights is indeed a problem _at all,_ then, it is a still more pervasive and intractable one than it has been taken to be. (shrink)

According to L. A. Paul (2014), transformative experiences pose a challenge for decision theory, as their subjective value is not epistemically accessible. However, several authors propose that the subjective values of options are often irrelevant to their ranking; in many cases, all we need for rational transformative decision-making are the known non-subjective values. This stance is in conflict with Paul’s argument that the subjective value can always swamp the non-subjective value. The approach presented in this paper takes Paul’s argument into (...) account and shows how potential swamping can be controlled given that one desires the transformative outcome: If one knows from previous decisions that desired transformative outcomes are associated with positive subjective value and if, in addition, testimony confirms this association for the current decision situation, one can infer that a desired outcome’s expected subjective value has a positive valence. Accordingly, one can rationally choose the desired transformative option if its non-subjective value is no lower than the overall value of any other option. (shrink)

Unchosen transformative experiences—transformative experiences that are imposed upon an agent by external circumstances—present a fundamental problem for agency: how does one act intentionally in circumstances that transform oneself as an agent, and that disrupt one’s core projects, cares, or goals? Drawing from William James’s analysis of conversion and Matthew Ratcliffe’s account of grief, I give a phenomenological analysis of transformative experiences as involving the restructuring of systems of practical meaning. On this analysis, an agent’s experience of the world is structured (...) by practically significant possibilities that form organized systems on the basis of the agent’s projects and relationships. Transformative experiences involve shifts to systems of possibility, that is, changes to habitual meanings and to how an agent’s projects are situated in relation to one another. I employ the enactivist notion of sense-making to analyze how an agent rebuilds the meaning structures disrupted by a transformative experience. In an unchosen transformative experience, an agent adjusts to a significant disruption through a process of sense-making in precarious conditions. By establishing new patterns of bodily and social interaction with the world, one alters the practical meanings of one’s surroundings, and thereby reconstitutes oneself as an intentional agent. (shrink)

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 (...) 2015) — I call our argument the Fine-Graining Response. Paul has her own reply to this response, which we might call the Authenticity Reply. But Sarah Moss has recently offered an alternative reply to the Fine-Graining Response on Paul’s behalf (Moss 2017) — we’ll call it the No Knowledge Reply. This appeals to the knowledge norm of action, together with Moss’ novel and intriguing account of probabilistic knowledge. In this paper, I consider Moss’ reply and argue that it fails. I argue first that it fails as a reply made on Paul’s behalf, since it forces us to abandon many of the features of Paul’s challenge that make it distinctive and with which Paul herself is particularly concerned. Then I argue that it fails as a reply independent of its fidelity to Paul’s intentions. (shrink)

L. A. Paul has recently argued that the epistemically transformative nature of certain experiences makes it impossible to rationally decide whether to have the experience or not. We start by explaining why, contrary to what Paul claims, epistemically transformative experiences do not pose a general problem for the possibility of rational choice. However, we show there is a particular type of agent for whom the problem identified by Paul does arise. With this agent in mind, we examine Paul’s own suggestion (...) for how to approach a transformative decision problem, namely, that one should decide based on whether one would like to come to know the experience in question, and we conclude that Paul’s suggestion is no solution for this particular agent. In other words, Paul’s solution does not work for the only type of agent for whom the problem she has identified arises. (shrink)

We often find ourselves in situations where it is up to us to make decisions on behalf of others. How can we determine whether such decisions are morally justified, especially if those decisions may change who it is these others end up becoming? In this paper, I will evaluate one plausible kind of justification that may tempt us: we may want to justify our decision by appealing to the likelihood that the other person will be glad we made that specific (...) choice down the line. Although it is tempting, I ultimately argue that we should reject this sort of appeal as a plausible justification for the moral permissibility of our vicarious decisions. This is because the decisions that we make on behalf of another may affect the interests and values that that person will hold in the future. As I will show, this complicates the justificatory relationship between present decisions and future attitudes, since the latter can depend on the former. This is not to say that the predicted future attitudes of others can play no significant role in justifying our decisions on others’ behalf. Rather, appealing to the future attitudes in our moral justifications may play an important role in our practical thinking but only when we consider the future attitudes of all relevant possible futures. (shrink)

Unchosen transformative experiences—transformative experiences that are imposed upon an agent by external circumstances—present a fundamental problem for agency: how does one act intentionally in circumstances that transform oneself as an agent, and that disrupt one’s core projects, cares, or goals? Drawing from William James’s analysis of conversion and Matthew Ratcliffe’s account of grief, I give a phenomenological analysis of transformative experiences as involving the restructuring of systems of practical meaning. On this analysis, an agent’s experience of the world is structured (...) by practically significant possibilities that form organized systems on the basis of the agent’s projects and relationships. Transformative experiences involve shifts to systems of possibility, that is, changes to habitual meanings and to how an agent’s projects are situated in relation to one another. I employ the enactivist notion of sense-making to analyze how an agent rebuilds the meaning structures disrupted by a transformative experience. In an unchosen transformative experience, an agent adjusts to a significant disruption through a process of sense-making in precarious conditions. By establishing new patterns of bodily and social interaction with the world, one alters the practical meanings of one’s surroundings, and thereby reconstitutes oneself as an intentional agent. (shrink)

According to Paul (Transformative experience, 1st edn, Oxford University Press, 2014), transformative experiences pose a challenge to decision theory since their value cannot be anticipated. Building on Pettigrew’s (in: Lambert, Schwenkler (eds) Becoming someone new: essays on transformative experience, choice, and change, Oxford University Press, pp 100–121, 2020) redescription, this paper presents a new approach to how and when transformative decisions can nevertheless be made rationally. Thanks to fundamental higher-order facts that apply to any kind of experience, an agent always (...) at least knows the general shape of the utility space. This in combination with the knowledge about the non-transformative alternative in the choice set can enable rational decision-making despite the presence of a transformative experience. For example, this paper’s approach provides novel arguments for why gender transition (cf. McKinnon in Res Philosophica 92(2):419–440, 2015) or staying childfree (cf. Barnes in Philos Phenomenol Res 91(3):775–786, 2015) can be rational. (shrink)

The article explores the relation between personal identity and life-changing decisions such as the decision for a certain career or the decision to become a parent. According to L.A. Paul, decisions of this kind involve “transformative experiences”, to the effect that - at the time we make a choice - we simply don’t know what it is like for us to experience the future situation. Importantly, she claims that some new experiences may be “personally transformative” by which she means that (...) one may become a “new kind of person” having a different subjective perspective and “identity”. The article discusses this understanding of a transformed future self. It will be argued that different notions of identity can be distinguished with respect to Paul’s claim: the notion of identity in the sense of a personality as well as the notion of numerical identity in the sense of sameness. By distinguishing these two notions it will become more clear how a future experience may indeed qualify as “personally transformative”. Moreover, it will be shown that the notion of a self-understanding of persons helps to further clarify the kind of change at issue. (shrink)

According to L. A. Paul, the subjective value of an outcome is normally assessed by running a cognitive model of what it would be like if that outcome were to occur. However, cognitive models, along with the expectations in which they result, are unreliable for application to transformative experiences because we cannot know what it would be like for an outcome to occur if we have never experienced it before. This paper argues that despite their unreliability, expectations are still important (...) in the case of chosen and unchosen transformative experiences because expectations about an outcome can systematically influence the very experience of that outcome. More precisely, empirical research shows that affective experiences tend to assimilate to affective expectations. In turn, more positive affective experiences lead, ceteris paribus, to higher subjective value. Therefore, rational agents confronting transformative outcomes should form or cultivate positive/optimistic affective expectations since, all else being equal, that maximizes subjective value. (shrink)

On the standard Paulian definition of epistemically transformative experiences (ETE), we can’t know what an ETE is like before we have it. ETEs are new kinds of experiences and, importantly, can’t be imagined—this is why they have a unique ability to teach us what a particular experience is like. Contra Paul, some philosophers (Sharadin, 2015; Wilkenfeld, 2016; Ismael, 2019; Kind, 2020; Daoust, 2021; Cath, 2022) have argued that transformative experiences can be imagined. A neglected consequence of this argument is that (...) if transformative experiences can in fact be imagined, then it is unclear how they could be epistemically transformative. What do they teach us if we can imagine what they’re like in advance? I will argue not only that imaginable experiences can be transformative, but that experiences of a kind which an agent is experientially acquainted with can also be transformative. This latter kind of transformative experiences, which I will call familiar transformative experiences, are transformative not because the agent learns what a new kind of experience is like—by definition, they are not new kinds of experiences—but because the transformativeness of the experience is brought out by features of the agent experiencing them. Epistemic transformation in these cases may be explained by facts about the agent’s perspective and social environment, which allow them to appreciate elements of the experience they did not previously. (shrink)

In the last seven years, philosophers have discussed the topic of transformative experiences. In this paper, we contribute to a crucial issue that is currently under-researched: transformative experiences' influence on cognitive modelling. We argue that cognitive modelling can be operationalized as affective forecasting, and we compare transformative and non-transformative experiences with respect to the ability of affective forecasting. Our finding is that decision-makers’ performance in cognitively modelling transformative experiences does not systematically differ from decision-makers’ performance in cognitively modelling non-transformative experiences. (...) This claim stands in strict opposition to L.A. Paul’s main argument. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.

How should an agent act under normative uncertainty? We might extend the orthodox theory of rational choice to the case of uncertainty between competing normative theories. But this requires that the values assigned by different normative theories be comparable. This paper defends a strategy for avoiding the need for intertheoretic value comparisons: instead of comparing competing moral theories, I argue that values can be represented in terms of a de dicto specification of value. I provide a decision theory for de (...) dicto values that generalises expected utility theory, and I compare the proposal with alternative strategies for avoiding the problem of intertheoretic comparisons. (shrink)

Transformative experiences are epistemically and personally transformative: prior to having the experience, agents cannot predict the value of the experience and cannot anticipate how it will change their core values and preferences. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that these experiences pose a puzzle for standard decision-making procedures because values cannot be assigned to outcomes involving transformative experience. Responding philosophers are quick to point out that decision procedures are built to handle uncertainty, including the uncertainty generated by transformative experience. My paper enters (...) here and contributes two points. First, religious experiences are transformative experiences that are especially resistant to these responses. Second, a procedure that appeals to voluntarist reasons—reasons arising from an act of the will—can allow an agent to rationally decide to undergo or avoid an outcome involving transformative experience. Combining these two points results in some interesting implications with respect to practical aspects of religion. (shrink)

Appealing to self-interest is a common way of justifying the rationality of religious faith. For instance, Pascal’s wager relies upon the expected value of choosing the life of faith being infinite. Similarly, many contemporary arguments for the rationality of faith turn on whether it is better for an agent to have faith rather than lack it. In this paper, I argue, contra Pascal, that considerations of self-interest do not make choosing faith rational because they fail to take into account the (...) way the self is transformed by faith. (shrink)

When is it rational to undergo cognitive enhancement? In the case of what I’ll call massive cognitive enhancement, my answer is never. The reason is that one must base one’s decision to undergo massive cognitive enhancement on what I’ll call either phenomenal or non-phenomenal outcomes. If the former, the choice is not rational because massive cognitive enhancements are transformative and, I’ll argue with Paul (2015), transformative experiences cannot be chosen rationally. If the latter, the choice is not rational because it (...) ought to be based at least partly on phenomenal outcomes. This argument, however, leaves open the idea that it may nonetheless be rational to choose massive cognitive enhancement for others—for example, one’s children. The article explores this possibility, arguing that choosing enhancement for others can be rational or moral, but not both. (shrink)

L.A. Paul argues that “transformative experiences” challenge our hopes to live up to an ideal that she believes is upheld within western, wealthy cultures. If these experiences reveal information to us about the world and ourselves that is in principle unavailable to us before we undergo them, it seems that there is no hope for us to be rational, authentic and autonomous masters of our own lives. Supposing that Paul is right about this, how concerned should we be? Here, I (...) challenge the ideal of "rational mastery" that guides Paul’s project, and which must be granted in order to motivate the philosophical challenge purportedly generated by experiences that drastically change who we are and what we know. (shrink)

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 (...) outcomes. We show how principles of rational choice can be extended to cases of anticipated awareness growth. (shrink)

Much of the human enhancement literature focuses on the ethical, social, and political challenges we are likely to face in the future. I will focus instead on whether we can make decisions to modify ourselves that are known to be likely to satisfy our preferences. It seems plausible to suppose that, if a subject is deciding whether to select a reasonably safe and morally unproblematic enhancement, the decision will be an easy one. The subject will simply figure out her preferences (...) and decide accordingly. The problem, however, is that there is substantial evidence that we are not very good at predicting what will satisfy our preferences. This is a general problem that applies to many different types of decisions, but I argue that there are additional complications when it comes to making decisions about enhancing ourselves. These arise not only for people interested in selecting enhancements but also for people who choose to abstain. (shrink)

The end of a long-term romantic relationship ranks among the most stressful and momentous events in life. Thus, the decision of whether to break up with someone whom one has been with for many years should generally be made very carefully. Unfortunately, decision theory is often thought to be unable to provide rational guidance in such high-stake life choices due to the outcomes’ presumed transformative character. The present paper shows how agents can rationally decide whether to leave their romantic partner (...) even if the decision is transformative. It does so by using a novel five-level account of transformative decision-making, which can also be used for other key life choices, and which is the first to integrate in a systematic way several approaches for making (certain types of) transformative decisions that have been proposed in recent years. (shrink)

Ignorance is said to be the most widely accepted explanation of what makes choices hard (Chang 2017). But despite its apparent popularity, the debate on hard choices has been dominated by tetrachotomist (e.g., “parity”) and vagueness views. In fact, there is no elaborate ignorance account of hard choices. This article closes this research gap. In so doing, it connects the debate on hard choices with that on transformative experiences (Paul 2014). More precisely, an option’s transformative character can prevent us from (...) epistemically accessing its expected value, promoting ignorance of how to rank the options. Methods of achieving an advance assessment of transformative experiences such as fine-graining, consulting testimony, and using higher-order facts can sometimes evade this epistemic blockade, but not always. Therefore, in cases where these methods fail, a choice can be hard because of our ignorance. The prominent hard choice between two careers could be such a case. (shrink)