It’s an otherwise ordinary day. You’re just tucking in to this week’s New Statesman when there’s a knock at the door. It’s none other than Count Dracula: hairy hands, talons, fangs, the works. He has an interesting offer. Put down your New Statesman, run away with him, give up being human, and become a vampire.
There are many benefits to the role, he explains. You’ll have fantastic vision. You’ll be able to smell a bacon-and-blood sandwich a mile away. You’ll stay young forever. True, the coffin you’ll sleep in will be a bit scratchy and claustrophobic, you’ll need to avoid sunlight and you’ll develop an intense aversion to garlic, but the positives greatly outweigh the negatives. And don’t just take Dracula’s word for it – he can introduce you to a dozen of his vampire mates who’ll all testify to the benefits of joining the undead.
Would you do it? As you consider it, a difficulty becomes apparent: life as a vampire is hard to imagine. It might even be impossible. For decision theory – the science of asking what you want, how much you want it and whether you’ll get it – this creates a puzzle.
In 2015, an American philosopher, Laurie Paul, wrote an article, “What you can’t expect when you’re expecting”, which was later enlarged into a book, Transformative Experience. A transformative experience is one so life-changing that there is something about it which is unknowable until actually experienced. Paul cites many examples: going to war, moving abroad, religious conversion.
The paradigmatic example is parenthood. Deciding whether to become a parent is unlike most decisions because, from the perspective of the childless, the highs and lows of being a parent are virtually inconceivable. You can’t really make an informed decision about becoming a parent because you can’t really know what it is like in advance.
Contrast this with choosing a biscuit. In front of you are a Jaffa Cake, a custard cream and a chocolate Hobnob. You’ve tasted them all before and so you choose the Hobnob, knowing it to be your favourite. Now let’s add a complication: perhaps you’ve never tasted a Hobnob. You can still make an informed choice: a trusted friend who eats a lot of biscuits assures you that it is the crème de la crème of cookies.
There are, of course, friends or books that can tell you about parenthood. They can tell you about the broken nights, the dribble, vomit and poo. Most, certainly not all, will rhapsodise about how fulfilling parenthood can be, as well as the powerful bond of love between parent and child. But here’s the snag: a transformative experience is, as it says on the cookie tin, transformative. It changes the “you” in the questions decision theory asks into a different person.
In a biscuit-based decision there is a clear subject, the person making the decision, and an object, the Hobnob. But in a transformative experience, the choice is between what kind of “you” you want to be: the childless “you” or the parent “you”. These two subjects are in some deep sense incomparable. Decision theory suggests a rational choice is one made in accordance with my preferences. But if the transformation means I cannot know what some outcome will be like for me – because I will be a different me having made the decision – then how can I rationally choose?
As the Trinity College Dublin philosopher Farbod Akhlaghi puts it, this leads us to the question: “Whose preferences matter – those of your present or those of your (possibly unknowable) future self?”
One way to think about the choice to, say, become a parent, is that it involves a leap of faith. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard held that something similar occurs when one embraces a religious life – a choice that can’t be based on reason. The Israeli thinker Edna Ullmann-Margalit called such decisions arational.
Akhlaghi has argued that this creates delicate ethical issues concerning how we can interact with the transformative choice-making of our nearest and dearest. Consider advice-giving. “Should I get married to X?” your best friend asks. Perhaps you yourself are married. Perhaps you are well acquainted with the flaws and virtues of X. So there may be useful things you can say to your friend. But with transformative experiences, there is no going back – and it is vital, Akhlaghi says, that any potentially transformative decision a person takes is one over which they exercised a degree of control.
Do you take up Dracula’s offer? Other vampires may say it’s great, but the things that might make you miserable about being a vampire – the diet of blood, the inability to use a mirror – are to them inevitable, even beneficial. Beware of advice that comes from one side of a transformative experience, and try to decide what to do for yourself in a way that somehow reconciles who you are now with who you will be in the future.
[See also: Thought experiment 3: The Gettier Problem]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break