## 1. Varieties of Transformative Experience



Transformative experiences permeate our everyday lives--at least
if we're to believe the growing literature that has sprung up
around this topic. To fully appreciate its significance, this section
offers a brief, non-exhaustive sampling of various purported cases of
transformative experience. It's up to the reader to determine
whether these examples qualify as transformative in the sense of the
strict definition offered above. But perhaps more important than
whether each of these qualifies, is the fact that considering whether
they do raises important issues that help us better understand the
myriad dimensions of our own lives.


### 1.1 Parenthood



Parenthood is Paul's paradigm case of transformation (2014,
2015a). Prior to having a child, one cannot anticipate what it will be
like to become a parent. Further, having a child changes the parent in
a personally transformative way. Core preferences and life goals are
often reshaped around a new priority: the child. The way the new
parent sees the world and perceives terror and joy shifts. Zadie Smith
(2013 [2018]) eloquently puts the previously unknown complexity of
having a child thusly:



> 
> 
> Occasionally the child, too, is a pleasure, though mostly she is a
> joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all but
> rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have
> come to recognize as joy and now must find some way to live with
> daily. This is a new problem. (Smith 2013 [2018, 331])
> 
> 
> 



And of course, the transformation associated with parenthood is not
restricted to one's first biological child. It extends to
adopted children, and even can extend beyond humans to feline, canine,
and other beings who depend on us and with whom we can bond.


### 1.2 Sense Modality and Sensory Experiences



Children who grow up in the United States rather than Australia
generally don't experience the distinctive taste of vegemite.
People born with color blindness don't see certain colors.
Tasting vegemite and seeing color for the first time are radically new
sensory experiences with distinctive phenomenal characters, and
probably only involve epistemic transformation. Some people experience
even more radical changes when they gain or lose a sense modality.
Someone who has always been sighted or hearing cannot appreciate what
it is like to be blind or deaf. Likewise, people who have always been
blind or deaf cannot appreciate what it is like to be sighted or
hearing. In addition to not knowing what gaining or losing a sense
modality might be like, one cannot anticipate how that gain or loss
might personally change them and the way they navigate the world. The
fact that most of society is structured to accommodate sighted and
hearing people increases the difference between a change in sense
modality. And of course, appreciating the transformative nature of
gaining a sense modality carries practical implications since many
people are in a position to decide for themselves or others whether to
gain a sense modality via surgical interventions.


### 1.3 Love and Relationships



Love has the power to transform us little by little. In fact, this
incremental change is one of the fascinating features of love when put
in the context of transformative experience (see Paul 2014). Smiling
at a new acquaintance is not transformative, nor is grabbing coffee
with them. Once you've had coffee, eating dinner together is not
transformative either. On and on each step goes. Yet, by the end of
things, when you look back at a relationship that's decades
long, you realize that you could not have imagined what it would be
like to bond with another person in such an intimate way. The way you
approached life, the preferences and life projects you developed, and
the way love's rose-tinted glasses filtered the way you see the
world have radically changed you. On the flip side, ending this sort
of relationship is also wildly transformative, especially if
you've formed a sense of identity that revolves around your
beloved. Furthermore, because it's not clear that reason ever
requires that you love someone in a romantic way, it's difficult
to explain how choosing love or rejecting it could be done rationally.
Thus, opening oneself up to love or boldly ending it invites
transformation and raises questions about whether doing so could ever
be defended rationally.


### 1.4 Social Identity



All of us inhabit a place in society that's determined in part
by race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religion, country of
origin, education, socioeconomic status, political affiliation, and
much more. Due to contingent but very real injustices, our place in
society shapes our experiences. Sometimes, it's possible to
change our place in society (McKinnon 2015 discusses gender
transitions and Barnes 2015 offers the fictional case of Pip from
*Great Expectations*), and when we do so, that change is
transformative. But the way in which these social changes are
transformative underlines some troubling features these social divides
have created. First, just as, for instance, Pip, cannot explain to his
past self what social elevation is like, it is generally extremely
difficult for people in one social group to communicate what it is
like to be a member of that group to someone who is outside of it.
This partially explains the phenomenon of situated knowledge and also
gives rise to the possibility of testimonial epistemic injustice (see,
e.g., Fricker 2007). Hermeneutical issues also arise. People's
self-conceptions aren't developed in a vacuum, and shared norms
and concepts contribute to the way in which one's
self-conception can develop, thus influencing the ways in which one
can transform. For instance, "brave inspiration" is a
readily available self-conception for disabled people while
"thriving person in an unconventional body" is
not--and this is an unjust state of affairs (Barnes 2015). Social
identities and structures contribute an ethically rich dimension to
the conversation on transformative experience.


### 1.5 Tragedy



Unfortunately, life also contains tragedies. The trauma of war leaves
veterans and civilians physically and emotionally scarred in ways that
can change their outlook on life forever. We aren't morally
perfect, and often fail in extremely regrettable ways. To top it all
off, people die, sometimes after extended periods of pain and
suffering. Experiences of negative valence are often epistemically
surprising. There's no way to predict what the death of a close
loved one will feel like, even if the death is anticipated.
Life's tragedies also have the capacity to change who we are.
Sometimes, this change can happen for the better. Cashman and Cushman
(2020) suggest that although we don't want to intentionally
morally fail, moral failure can often teach incredibly valuable
lessons and change how we act for the better. When it comes to death,
dying creates a chasm of understanding between those who are dying and
those who are not. Chung (2017
 [Other Internet Resources]),
 a philosopher who wrote about his impending death, tells of the chasm
that death opens up between those who are dying and those who are not.
Truly acknowledging that one is dying changes your priorities and the
way you experience the world in a way that can't be explained to
someone who isn't dying. The same holds for someone forced to
witness their beloved slowly fade away. Thompson (2020) offers an
insightful meta-point, arguing that dying is an "ultimate"
transformation because it forces us to adopt a perspective of our life
as a whole that allows us to reconsider which of our prior experiences
truly were transformative.


### 1.6 Ideology



Our beliefs shape who we are, and changes to our core beliefs have the
potential to transform us. For instance, De Cruz (2018) and Chan
(2016, 2019) argue that religious conversions are transformative. The
mission statements of universities appear to acknowledge and strive
for transformation among students (Paul & Quiggin 2020).
Schwenkler (2020) and Stump (2020) both investigate the nuances of
opening oneself up to ideological conversion in light of the potential
for doxastic and philosophical transformation, respectively.
Crucially, when ideological difference are too great, people lose the
ability to adopt the perspective of others. This applies both
intrapersonally, such as when we look back at our past selves and
marvel at how we believed in Santa Claus, and interpersonally, which
leads to the sort of breakdown we see in hyper-polarized political
contexts. Speaking of politics, holding office or participating in
politics in some deep way might also be transformative, both because
they involve encountering people with different perspectives and also
because they require representing them in a meaningful way (see Allen
2017). It's tempting to think that changes in belief are merely
epistemically transformative since they clearly change our epistemic
states. But in the New Testament (Acts 9), Saul's conversion on
the road to Damascus into the Apostle Paul isn't just a change
in beliefs, it's a deeper change that completely alters the way
he lives his life. The scales falling off his eyes does not merely
signify seeing the truth; it also represents a change to who he
is.


### 1.7 Art and Fiction



Paul (2014) opens *Transformative Experience* with thought
experiment about transforming into glamorous, slightly murderous,
creatures of the night: vampires. Obviously, none of us actually face
this choice. However, rhetorically, thinking about turning into a
fictional creature helps motivate the idea that doing so would be both
epistemically and personally transformative. After all, who can say
for sure what becoming a vampire would really be like or how it would
change a person? Furthermore, this case reveals something further
about the connection between fiction, art, and transformative
experience. It could be that art is transformative--or at least
quasi-transformative--because it helps us understand things that
we have not (or cannot) experience (Aumann 2022). Furthermore, art and
fiction might be transformative from the perspective of the creator as
well as the audience. For instance, the expression of oneself through
art may be a transformative experience (Riggle 2020). Finally, art
clearly involves our imaginations, and imagination may provide a way
to gain knowledge about what a transformative is like prior to
experiencing it. (More on this in
 SS2.)


## 2. Epistemology: Can We Know What It's Like?



Epistemically transformative experiences are experiences where one
cannot know what they are like before having them. In the paradigm
case of parenthood, the experience of becoming a parent for the first
time has "an epistemically unique phenomenal character"
(Paul 2015a, 157). One cannot know what these are experiences are like
prior to having them.



Prior work, such as Jackson (1986), provides support for this
epistemic claim. Jackson's "What Mary Didn't
Know" invites us to engage in a thought experiment about Mary, a
person who has lived in a black and white room her entire life. Prior
to encountering color, can Mary know what it is like to see the color
red? Does it matter whether Mary is a color scientist who has studied
the physics of color and read extensive testimonies about what the
color red is like? Jackson's objective--to show that
physicalism is false because it cannot give us knowledge of
qualia--applies to transformative experience as well. In general,
experiential, or "what it's like", knowledge cannot
be obtained prior to experience. Thus, what transformative experiences
are like cannot be known without having the relevant experience.



Many philosophers reject the claim that one cannot know what
transformative experiences are like prior to having them. These
rejections tend to center upon one of two strategies. First, one might
turn to paradigm cases such parenthood and offer reasons to believe
that one can in fact know quite a lot about what it's like to be
a parent prior to becoming one. For instance, Harman (2015) argues
that caring for a significantly younger sibling in a quasi-paternal
way or witnessing a close friend or family member become a parent
provides at least *some* evidence regarding what becoming a
parent is like. Krishnamurthy (2015, 180) offers a similar suggestion,
arguing that "we can on the basis of experiences of similar
types know what it is like to have a child". For instance,
babysitting or raising a cat shares common elements with parenting.
Knowing what these elements are like allows one to know something
about what being a parent is like.



Sharadin (2015) offers a variation of this type of strategy that
focuses on non-phenomenal elements of parenthood. For instance,
becoming a parent typically involves things like financial and sleep
deprivation, and we can *know that* becoming a parent typically
involves these things. Plausibly, there is a supervenience relation
between these non-phenomenal elements and an agent's phenomenal
experience of them. Further, many people, such as philosophy graduate
students, are intimately familiar with the phenomenal experience of
financial and sleep deprivation. By building upon the non-phenomenal
elements that parenthood shares with other experiences a person has
had, that person can develop an idea of what parenthood is like prior
to actually experiencing parenthood.



Some empirical research work focusing on how people model uncertainty
suggests that people do in fact attempt to use this first strategy of
building on what one knows to figure out what one does not know.
Zimmerman and Ullman (2020, 73) model epistemic uncertainty and
purportedly demonstrate that "people can make informed decisions
about trying unfamiliar things". For instance, suppose that
someone encounters an unfamiliar yellow grape. Though they
wouldn't know what the yellow grape is like, they might appeal
to their knowledge of what green and red grapes are like to form a
judgment about what the yellow grape might be like. At the very least,
it seems like they are justified in believing that the yellow grape
will not wildly diverge from their other grape experiences. Based on
this information, they can rationally choose to try the yellow grape.
Even if they are completely unfamiliar with grapes, they might use
their knowledge of other fruits to form an informed decision. In
general, novel experiences fall into a taxonomy of the types of
experiences one might have, and agents can use the next closest
experiences to project what the novel one might be like.



Even if this strategy is successful, it's unclear that it shows
that we can know what transformative experiences are like prior to
having them. Recall that transformative experiences are supposed to
have "unique phenomenal character" (Paul 2015a, 157). If one
knows enough about what the experience is like, then it's not in
fact transformative. For instance, Paul (2015b) responds to
Harman's case by suggesting that through having similar enough
experiences, Harman might in fact have known what becoming a parent is
like. Thus, becoming a parent for the first time would not have been
transformative because the relevant transformative experience already
occurred earlier. Whether a type of experience is transformative may
be agent-relative. Furthermore, while this strategy is promising, some
cases may still elude it. For instance, when it comes to gaining or
losing a sense modality, it really does seem that the pre-transformed
person cannot have any relevantly similar experiences.



The second strategy does not deny that we often don't know what
transformative experiences are like. Rather, it locates our
experiential ignorance in a lack of imagination rather than an in
principle difference in types of knowledge (i.e., propositional and
experiential knowledge). Kind (2020), for instance, argues that the
difference between projecting what transformative and
non-transformative experiences amounts to a difference of degree
rather than kind. Plausibly, it's possible to imagine what
it's like to babysit for the first time. Further, imagining what
it's like to be a first-time babysitter might be easier than
imagining what it's like to become first-time parent. For
someone with a sufficiently good imagination--and our imaginative
abilities do also come in degrees--one can gradually scale up
from the babysitting experience to the experience of becoming a
parent. It may even be that we can augment our imaginations through
aids such as art and thus approximate what foreign experiences are
like (see Aumann 2022). The effectiveness of artistic aids as well as
the understanding gained from them also plausibly admit of degrees.
Thus, the imagination strategy can explain why it's easier to
figure out what some experiences are like than others, and why this
can vary from individual to individual. Since paradigm transformative
experiences tend to be among the most difficult to imagine, positing
distinct "what it's like" knowledge is tempting.
However, the difficulty in imagining what paradigm transformative
experiences are like merely generates the *appearance* of a
distinct kind of knowledge. The upshot is that in principle, we can
know what a transformative experience is like prior to experiencing
it.



Arpaly (2020) offers a wrinkle on the imagination strategy, blaming
our "crappy" imaginations for our inability to project
what transformative experiences are like. Sometimes, what an
experience is like is opaque because the "devilish
details" of the experience simply haven't occurred to us.
For example, most people have not considered that if a giraffe were to
drink coffee, the coffee would cold by the time it reaches the
giraffe's stomach. Other times, we overestimate our ability to
imagine things, and our overconfidence prevents us from accepting
testimony or other evidence that would be illuminating. These cases
can be tragic, such as when a depressed person's family
doesn't believe their reports of depression. The failure to
correctly imagine what things would be like thus causes it to
*appear* as if our lack of experience is the problem, since
experience would quickly correct this misimpression. Crucially, there
is nothing special about the "what it's like"
quality of these experiences. Though we are ignorant, we are not in
principle ignorant and could theoretically figure out what the
transformative experience would be like.



Like the first strategy, this second one is most vulnerable when it
comes to extreme transformations in experience such as gaining or
losing a sense modality. One might also wonder whether the second
strategy significantly undermines the core epistemic claim: that one
cannot know what transformative experiences are like prior to having
them. Even if there is no in principle difference propositional and
"what it's like" knowledge, it does seem like
imagination-based responses do acknowledge that some experiences elude
our imaginative abilities.



Finally, Moss (2018) offers an interestingly different defense of the
claim that we cannot know what a transformative experience is like
prior to having it. Moss argues that we often have
"probabilistic knowledge". For instance, suppose that 50%
of the people who experience childbirth report that the experience is
miraculous. Based on that, it seems reasonable to conclude that there
is a 50% chance that experiencing childbirth is miraculous. While an
individual can't know that the experience will be miraculous for
them, it does seem that they can know that there's a 50% chance
that the experience will be miraculous for them. But crucially, before
one knows that probabilistic claim, one must know that they
aren't exceptional. For instance, suppose it turns out that of
the people who decline epidurals, only 10% of them report that the
childbirth experience is miraculous. If one is going to decline an
epidural, then they do not know that there's a 50% chance the
experience will be miraculous since they are part of a
group--what Moss (2018, 173) calls "an alternative reference
class"--for whom the probability does not apply.
Furthermore, those who can't rule out that they are in the
alternative reference class (in this case, perhaps those who are
unsure of whether they will have an epidural) also lack probabilistic
knowledge. Plausibly in the case of parenthood and other
transformative experiences, probabilistic claims can be formed based
on testimony gathered from those who have had the experience. However,
it could be that among those giving the testimony, there is
significant variance that's based on whether individuals belong
to an alternative reference class. Given the nature of transformative
experience, it may be unobvious whether a particular individual has a
trait that places them into an alternative reference class. Thus, even
if there's ample data regarding how likely it is to have a
particular parenting experience, that won't result in
probabilistic knowledge of what it's like to be a parent. This
defense also works even if it turns out that there isn't a
distinctive "what it's like" knowledge and our
imaginations can sometimes help us understand what foreign experiences
are like.


## 3. Metaphysics: Can I Become Someone New?



Personally transformative experiences are ones that change who an
agent is. Certainly, there are epistemic elements associated with
personal transformation: agents may not know *how* an
experience will personally transform them and they won't know
*what it's like* to be transformed. There might also be
*de se* knowledge, or self-locating knowledge of the kind that
occurs when one knows who or where one is within a world (see Lewis
1979). Significantly for the context of transformative experience,
*de se* knowledge can apply to a temporal part of a person, so
it's possible that someone who undergoes a transformative
experience will "locate" themselves as being the person
who results from the transformation, while their earlier self would
have lacked this *de se* knowledge since they may not have
taken the future, radically transformed person to be themselves. In
any case, many of the considerations in the previous section apply to
these epistemic elements. However, personal transformation also
introduces interesting metaphysical issues, and this section focuses
upon those.



Paul describes the situation as being one that "radically
changes what it is like to be you, perhaps by replacing your core
preferences with very different ones" (Paul 2015a, 156). Life goals,
core preferences, or the way one experiences the world may constitute
part of the change that occurs. Ullmann-Margalit (2006, 159) adds that
because our beliefs and desires shape the core of who we are, changes
to them turn us into a "different person". There's
also a terrifying sense of finality since these personal
transformations are "irrevocable" (Ullman-Margalit 2006, 160) or at least potentially
irrevocable. This picture painted by Paul and Ullmann-Margalit is
sometimes characterized as a "Replacement Model" (see
Lambert & Schwenkler 2020b, SS 5) because the agent contemplating
undergoing transformation ends up "replaced" by the
transformed person. There's supposed to be a literal sense in
which the pre-transformation agent ceases to exist.



Spelling out the sense in which the agent no longer exists is tricky.
Focusing on core features is one natural way to explain the difference
between the pre-transformed agent and future transformed person.
Perhaps when enough core features are lost, the pre-transformed agent
ceases to exist. (In essentialist language, perhaps some of these core
features are essential, or such that the agent cannot survive the loss
of them.) There's an open question regarding which of our
features count as core in this way, and some empirical studies suggest
that we at least do regard some our features as being essential in
this way. Molouki, Chen, Urminsky, and Bartels (2020) have done
empirical work to see whether people exhibit semi-uniform views about
which features are central to their selves. Their findings support
earlier work by Strohminger and Nichols (2014) suggesting that
features concerning morality (e.g., character traits) and personality
are taken to be most central. Changes that are perceived as most
drastic involve morality and personality, as well as features that are
taken to be causally central. For instance, if someone takes
"being a philosopher" to be causally central to how they
navigate the world, then they tend to regard losing that feature as a
drastic change. Valence and desires also matter: people take negative
and undesired change to be more drastic. The explanation for
asymmetric valence and desire perceptions rests upon the fact that
people project their future selves to undergo positive development, so
negative and undesired changes lie outside their self-conception.
These finding cohere with many of the sorts of personal
transformations that constitute personal transformations.



A second sort of claim that's frequently made is that the
pre-transformed agent cannot identify first-personally with the future
transformed person, and vice versa. For instance, Velleman (1996)
draws a distinction between imagining what Napoleon saw when looking
out at Austerlitz and imagining oneself as Napoleon looking out at
Austerlitz. The latter removes all first-personal traces of the
imaginer (and is likely impossible to do). Paul (2017) makes a similar
claim when distinguishing between affective and cognitive empathy. The
former involves projecting our current selves into potential future
scenarios, like if I imagine what it will be for me (a childless
person) to have a child. It's akin to the way we empathize with
others. The latter is much richer, and it involves experiencing the
potential future from the perspective of the future, rather than
current self. To cognitively empathize with my future self who has a
child, I would have to put myself into the first-personal experience
of that person who now has the preferences and perspective of a
parent. According to Paul, I lack the ability to cognitively empathize
with my future parent self because that self is too unrelated to my
current self. In general, we are not able to empathize with our
distant future selves, even if those selves haven't undergone a
dramatic transformation. If Velleman and Paul are right, then the
severing of the first-personal perspective and empathy that occurs
after transformation is one way in which the pre-transformed agent
ceases to exist.



Finally, it's helpful to take a step back and consider the ways
in which the future-transformed person is a different person. Suppose
that losing central features and a disconnect in first-personal
perspective are sufficient for replacing the pre-transformed agent
with a new person. How do we explain the connection between the future
and past person? On the replacement theory, transformative change
results in a new person. Can we coherently say that the
pre-transformed person has *become* the new person? Or does
transformation annihilate and replace them?



The trick to explaining how one can become someone new without being
annihilated involves articulating two different senses of
"sameness": one in which the past and future persons are
the same and one in which they are not. For instance, Glazier (2020)
notes that the type of explanation demanded mirrors a debate about
whether *contingentism* is a coherent view. On contingentism,
it's possible that I (or anyone else) could be someone else.
Philosophers who champion the necessity of identity tend to reject
this claim as straightforwardly absurd. To explain how their account
is coherent, the contingentist must identify two senses in which
identity claims are necessary. Glazier's suggestion rests on the
claim that that no one's perspective is impossible. Roughly,
there's a *proprial*, or perspectival, sense in which a
claim like "I am Fred" is necessary. It's necessary
from "I's" perspective that they are Fred because
from their perspective the world is centered upon both the
"I" and "Fred". However, it's possible
that the world could have centered on someone else, say Georgia. In
that case, there's a non-proprial sense in which "I"
should have been Georgia. This latter, non-proprial sense in which
"I should have been Georgia" generates the contingency of
identity.



Chan (2019) offers a different account on which the past and future
persons might be the same *metaphysically* speaking, but
different in terms of their *practical identities*. These
practical identities are characterized by the traits that are changed
in personal transformation: core preferences, life goals, ways of
navigating the world, continuity of first-personal identity, and the
like. Importantly, these traits form the person's self, or at
least the self that's relevant for considerations of
self-interest. This explains why ordinary decision-making procedures
have difficulty when it comes to transformative experiences. (More on
this in the next section.) Furthermore, distinguishing between
metaphysical and practical senses of sameness explains the (practical)
sense in which the person becomes someone new and the (metaphysical)
sense in which they endure and are not annihilated.


## 4. Decision Theory: Is It Rational to Choose Transformative Experiences?



Transformative experiences present several challenges for traditional
models of decision theory. First, the epistemically transformative
component of the transformative experience involves a lack of
"what it's like" knowledge. Purportedly, this in
turn involves a type of uncertainty that is different from the type of
uncertainty decision theory is designed to handle. Second, the
personally transformative component means that the post-transformation
person may be extremely different from the pre-transformed person.
Their preferences may radically change in unpredictable ways, and
decision procedures must find a way to accommodate these changing
preferences. Third, the personal transformation may be so extreme that
the pre-transformed person considering whether to undergo the
transformative experience can't make the decision in the
straightforwardly self-interested way that's presupposed in
standard decision-making models. Any of these challenges make using
decision-making procedures impossible in the case of transformative
experience. And if that's the case, then it looks like one
can't rationally choose to undergo a transformative
experience--the choice is either arational or irrational. Given
that so many of our momentous choices in life involve potentially
transformative outcomes, it would be disturbing if we discovered that
these choices could not be made rationally.


### 4.1 "What It's Like" Uncertainty



Standard decision models take probabilities and values as inputs and
produce expected values as outputs. For instance, suppose ESPN's
outcome predictor projects the Kansas City Chiefs as having a 50%
chance to win the Super Bowl, yet the moneyline, which is based on
betting activity, is +105 (meaning that if you bet $100 on them and
they win, you receive $105 in winning plus your initial $100 wager).
By weighting the possible outcomes with their corresponding
probabilities, we can calculate the expected value of betting $100 on
the Chiefs:

 
\[ .5(105) + .5 (-100) = 2.5 \]


If one uses a decision procedure where one maximizes expected value,
it's rational to bet on the Chiefs since betting $100 has an
expected value of $2.50 while not betting has an expected value of 0
since there are no gains or losses. There are other decision
procedures one might use as well. For instance, one might prefer a
*maximin* procedure, in which one chooses the option with the
best worst outcome. Since the worst outcome of betting on the Chiefs
is losing money and the worst outcome of not betting is neither
gaining nor losing money, not betting is the best worst outcome. Thus,
a maximin procedure would recommend not betting. Crucially for our
purposes, it doesn't matter *which* decision procedure
one utilizes. Rather, what matters is that values and probabilities
(or at least possibilities) are required for any decision procedure to
operate.



On the first challenge for decision theory, transformative experiences
are epistemically transformative, and agents do not know what the
experience will be like. What an experience is like determines the
value associated with the experience. At the most basic level, part of
what an experience is like involves the pain or pleasure of the
experience. Pain detracts from the value of the experience while
pleasure enhances it. More complex components of what the experience
is like also affect the value of the experience. While some other
factors--such as moral or social ones--may affect the value
of the experience, what the experience itself is like clearly plays a
large role in determining value. Without knowing what the experience
is like, agents can't reliably project its value. If the value
of the experience is not known, then the value of any outcome
involving transformative experiences also remains unknown. Thus, an
agent choosing between options that may involve transformative
experience cannot use standard decision procedures since those
procedures require values as inputs.



This purported challenge is highly contested. Recall from
 SS2
 that many philosopher reject the claim that experiences like
parenthood are epistemically transformative (e.g., Harman,
Krishnamurthy, etc.). Denying that the experiences are epistemically
transformative means that agents can know *something* about
what the experiences are like prior to having them. For instance, the
testimony of parents or the non-phenomenal elements of the experience
might provide some sense of what becoming a parent is like. If
that's right, then perhaps at least rough values can be used in
a decision procedure.



Alternatively, one might grant that we can't know anything about
what transformative experiences are like. Nevertheless, one might
still be able to use standard decision procedures since we may know
about the values associated with the experience even if we don't
know what the experience is like. For instance, Dougherty, Horowitz,
and Sliwa (2015) invite us to consider a mystery box. Everyone who
looks into the mystery box has a positive experience, though they
cannot describe what the experience is like. On the basis of this
information--that the value associated with the box is always
positive--one can rationally choose to look in the box without
knowing what that will be like.



Similarly, knowing the valence of outcomes can often provide rational
grounds on which to make a decision even if what the outcome is like
is unknown. Pascal's Wager offers one such scenario: the
infinite positive value of eternal happiness swamps any finite value.
Thus, one is rationally justified--or perhaps even
required!--to try to believe in God. McKinnon (2015) offers the
opposite sort of case by inviting us to consider an individual
considering transitioning. Prior to transitioning, many trans people
suffer from severe depression and are at risk of suicide. Even if they
do not know exactly what it will be like to transition, the
alternative is sufficiently horrible, and thus the decision to
transition can be rational.



Paul (2015b) suggests that all these responses miss the mark. First,
people who choose transformative experience purely on the basis of
values without knowing what the experience will be like are not
choosing on the basis of what the experience is like. Of course, it
can often be appropriate to make choices without considering what the
outcomes will be like--cases involving moral stakes are one such
scenario. However, in many paradigm cases such as parenthood, agents
often do envision what their future lives will be like and base their
decisions, at least partially, on that vision. Second, Paul emphasizes
the importance of the values being *subjective*, or assigned by
the agent. Because decisions involving transformative experience are
personally significant, agents need to make the choice
*authentically*. On Paul's account, authenticity requires
that the agents themselves ascribe value to the experience. (More on
authenticity in
 SS5.)
 Thus, testimony from others about the values they've ascribed
to an experience won't help an agent choose authentically for
themselves.


### 4.2 Future Preference Uncertainty



Suppose that the approximate values of associated with outcomes can be
known. The second challenge for standard decision theory procedures
arises from the fact that transformative experiences have the
potential to be personally transformative. Since personal
transformation can involve extreme preference changes, the way
outcomes are valued might not remain stable from before and after the
transformation. For instance, a prospective parent might not value
sleep, but once they become a parent confronted with a screaming
infant that needs to be fed every few hours throughout the night, the
way they value sleep may drastically shift. The values of outcomes
used as inputs typically correspond to the preferences of the
pre-transformed agent making the decision. If those preferences will
shift unpredictably post-transformation, then knowing the values
associated with the outcomes still may not be enough to allow an agent
to make a rational decision.



In some sense, the challenge of changing preferences blends two
familiar problems. First, preferences change over time. For instance,
people with the means to save for retirement must balance their
current preferences with what they believe will be their future ones.
An extreme saver's later self may look back and wish their
earlier self had spent more on vacations. Transformative experiences
add a further wrinkle by making the future preferences unknown.
Second, changing preferences present a diachronic problem in which
past, present, and future preferences must be balanced against each
other. Presumably, this balancing involves aggregating all of these
preferences, as well as deciding how to weigh them. For instance, many
people are near-biased, and tend to weigh the preferences of their
current and near-future selves far heavier than the preferences of
their distant-future selves. The preferences of past selves rarely
receive any attention at all. (Parfit [1984] has a series of thought
experiments generating the intuition that it's better for pain
to be in the past, even if past pain is more severe than future pain.
Sullivan [2018] and Boonin [2019] offer uncommonly held dissenting
views: the former argues for temporal neutrality, or not engaging in
any temporal discounting of the past or distant future, while the
latter argues that the past preferences--even those belonging to
people who are no longer alive--matter.)



Pettigrew (2019) offers a sophisticated account that has two
components aimed at tackling both of these problems. The first, aimed
at the uncertainty surrounding *what* the future preferences
will be, bears similarity to responses to the challenge of assigning
values given the "what it's like" uncertainty.
Basically, just as we can gather information about how people value
transformative experiences, we can gather information about how
people's preferences change after undergoing transformative
experiences. In an oversimplified example, if it turned out that 95%
of new parents would prefer to be childless again, then given that one
chooses to have a child, there would be a 95% chance that their future
self would have the childless preference while there'd be a 5%
chance that their future self would have a child-full preference.
Then, just as decision procedures weigh the values of potential
outcomes by their likelihood when we make decisions, they could
include weighted preferences.



The second component, aimed at tackling the diachronic aspect of
changing preferences, introduces a weighted general value function
that aggregates the "local" value functions that
correspond to the past, present, and future selves that make up the
entire life of the agent. Further, the way in which the local value
functions are aggregated can incorporate differences in the ways in
which local selves handle probability assignments, decision
procedures, and the weighing of, e.g., past versus future preferences.
Aggregating the local value functions thus begins to resemble a social
choice problem. Agents faced with choosing for changing selves ought
to maximize the general value function, which aggregates the local
value functions accounting for each temporally located local self.



Paul (2022) points out that Pettigrew's account is vulnerable in
two ways. First, the type of solution proposed by Pettigrew likens
future selves to third parties. As noted, the weighted general value
function closely resembles functions that aggregate individual
preferences to group ones in social contexts. But it seems
inappropriate to treat our future selves as third persons instead of
fully integrated selves--and this is precisely the thrust of the
problem that transformative experience presents! Second, it assumes
that meaningful intrapersonal comparisons can be made. There's
some empirical work, especially regarding how people with disabilities
judge their own welfare, that suggests these comparisons are difficult
to make. Pettigrew (2019, SS 8.6) attempts to address this issue with his
"matching intervals solution", which attempts to scale
the different utility functions to each other. Briggs (2015) offers a
prudence-inspired alternative that rests on privileging a
person's actual preferences (as opposed to their counterfactual
preferences) without privileging their present preferences (as opposed
to privileging present over future ones). Though success of any of
these intrapersonal comparisons is an open question, there is
widespread agreement that they are necessary to explain how future
preferences can matter.


### 4.3 Self Uncertainty



Finally, the personally transformative aspect of transformative
experiences creates the possibility of future selves who are so
different from their pre-transformed selves that neither the earlier
nor later selves regards the other as being "the same"
person. As Ullmann-Margalit (2006, 158) puts it, "big"
decisions are "core-affecting" and "transform one's
future self in a significant way" such that one emerges from the
situation a different person. As we saw in
 SS3,
 spelling out the exact sense of in which one can become a different
person is tricky. However, examples illustrate how one might regard a
temporally related self as a different person, and shed light on the
exact nature of the problem for standard decision-making
procedures.



Parfit (1984, 326) tells the story of a young Russian who holds his
socialist ideals close to his heart. The young Russian also happens
descend from the aristocracy, and stands to inherit a fortune when his
relatives die. He realizes that when this happens, he may lose his
socialist ideals. His instructions to his wife--"if I lose
these ideals, I want you to think that I cease to
exist"--reveals that he regards that potential future self
as a different person. This type of example reinforces Paul's
(2017) claim that we cannot first-personally project into futures that
are too distant or different. Agents who fully appreciate the
personally transformative element of transformative experiences
realize that these experiences may potentially transform them into
someone different. Thus, from the perspective of the agent deciding
whether to undergo a transformative experience, they must treat
outcomes involving transformation as ones in which they may no longer
exist.



The possibility of non-existence (or something regarded as equivalent
to non-existence) means that even if an agent knows all the fact about
value and future preferences, they cannot use standard decision-making
procedures in a straightforward way--at least not if
they're self-interested. After all, even if a future transformed
self would be incredibly happy and live a good, meaningful life, that
doesn't help the agent contemplating transformation if that
future transformed self is not them in the relevant sense. Chan (2019)
makes exactly this point in the context of Pascal's Wager. The
infinite happiness of the believer doesn't benefit the
non-believer precisely because becoming transformed by faith would
change them into a different person (which in turn undermines the
Wager's appeal to self-interest). This point is closely related
to the challenge raised by Paul for Pettigrew's view in the
previous subsection
 (SS4.2).
 The future self is alien, and though there might be some decision
procedure by which to make a rational decision to bring about that
future self, that procedure is not the one related to the sense of
self-interested that is under discussion.



A response to this challenge requires choosing in a way that bridges
the gap between the pre-transformed agent and the future transformed
self. Given the nature of transformative experience, it's
difficult to see how this could occur precisely since the
pre-transformed agent lacks the ability to connect in the right way to
the future transformed self. That connection goes beyond knowing the
relevant values, probabilities, and value functions. It gets at the
agent's ability to choose authentically, to which
 SS5
 turns.


### 4.4 Reasonable, Not Rational



Finally, it's worth considering the possibility that rational
choice is simply not possible when it comes to transformative
experience. Ullmann-Margalit and Morgenbesser (1977) discuss
"picking," which is characterized by indifference between
alternatives, such as when one pick's between cans of the same flavor
of Cambell's soup. By stipulation, picking can't appeal to values,
preferences, or the sense of rationality discussed above--those
things undertermine which alternative is optimal, which gives rise to
the indifference in the first place. Importantly for Ullmann-Margalit
and Morgenbesser, picking extends beyond trivial "Cambell's soup"
choices to bigger ones, including transformative experiences. Even our
values and preferences themselves (assuming we have control over
them) may be subject to picking, since it's would be circular
to appeal to them in order to explain why we hold them. Thus,
many of our major life decisions, including potentially transformative
ones, are subject to picking, rather than rational choice.



Continuing this line of thought, Ullmann-Margalit (2006) suggests that
rather than focusing on acting rational in the sense of
"optimizing" (as one does with standard
decision-procedures), one ought to focus on "acting
reasonably". For instance, transformation involves both
discontinuity in one's life as well as a point of no return. A
*reasonable* way of navigating choices that involve these two
features involves attempting to minimize those features. For instance,
a person contemplating a transformative decision like marriage might
try to ease into it by first moving in with their potential spouse.
Doing so minimizes the discontinuity and gives them an out, which
makes the decision revocable. If Ullmann-Margalit is correct in
suggesting that one might be able to build up to a transformative
experience little by little, this raises an extremely interesting
question for transformations that unfold gradually over time. Is it
possible that each incremental step can be made rationally while a
giant leap to transformation cannot be made rationally?


## 5. Existentialism: Choosing Authentically



Investigating decisions involving transformative experiences magnifies
an existential problem as well. Recall from
 SS4
 that many of the strategies for making rational transformative
decisions fail to also preserve authenticity. When transformation is
on the table, who we are is at stake. And the choice of who we are is
more fundamental than the other types of decisions we make. Who we are
provides the framework from which we make other choices, so a choice
that could change who we are is a choice between frameworks that
itself lacks a framework from which to deliberate. As Ullmann-Margalit
puts it:



> 
> 
> At bottom, we make our most fundamental choices of the canons of
> morality, logic and rationality in total freedom and without appeal to
> reasons. They embody acts that this literature variously describes as
> nihilist, absurd, or leaps (of faith). (2006: 172)
> 
> 
> 



On the flip side, what "this literature" does permit is
authentic choice. For instance, deciding to transform without
appealing to reason (perhaps because one cannot appeal to reason)
coheres well to the Sartrean idea that persons do not antecedently
have a particular *telos*. Rather, we are free to be our
authentic selves precisely because are unconstrained and can choose
who we want to be.



On this existentialist gloss, authenticity stands in tension with
rationality when it comes to transformative experiences. On the one
hand, we want to be able to rationally defend our big decisions to
have a child, marry a particular person, or commit to a vocation. But
on the other, these are the types of decisions that we also want to
make authentically, and that doesn't seem possible if
we're merely following what a decision procedure recommends. In
fact, empirical research suggests that people do care deeply about
authenticity. Furthermore, people approach decisions perceived to
involve authenticity differently from more ordinary ones. Oktar and
Lombrozo (2022) gave subjects vignettes in which deciding based on
"deliberation" (which was akin to standard decision
making) conflicted with deciding based on intuition. For instance, one
scenario involved picking between two people with whom to pursue a
romantic relationship. One person is a better "on paper"
match, and it's stipulated that you believe the method that
determines them as such is accurate. The other person is one with whom
you vibe with better in that sort of intangible, gut-feeling sort of
way. Subjects leaned strongly toward pursuing a relationship with the
latter person (the "intuition" choice) instead of the
former (the "deliberation" choice). They also perceived
this case as one that involves authenticity. In fact, when a choice
was perceived to involve authenticity, subjects favored
intuition-based decisions over deliberation-based ones. The preference
of for intuition over deliberation raises the question of whether
there are non-deliberative (in the sense of standard decision-making)
procedures that can help us choose in transformative decisions in a
way that preserves authenticity.



In fact, there are accounts that purport to preserve authenticity
*while also* preserving rationality. Paul (2014) favors
choosing on the basis of revelation. According to Paul, the decision
should be reframed as one that asks whether the agent wants to
discover what life will be like and who the agent will become,
post-transformation. Essentially, the agent chooses transformation for
its own sake. In doing so, the agent chooses rationally by choosing in
accordance with the preference for discovery. The agent also chooses
authentically by choosing based on the desire to know what the
experience will be like for *them* and who *they* will
become once transformed. The problem is that choosing based on
revelation does not always seem appropriate given the import of many
transformative experience. For instance, many transformative
experiences involve other people, such as becoming a parent or
marrying someone. Choosing these experiences on the basis of
revelation fails to capture concern for the resulting child or the
future spouse. Paul might respond that this objection to revelation is
a moral one, and that a similar objection could be levied if the
choice were made on the basis of self-interest. Thus, the objection
might not count specifically against revelation. However,
there's a second worry, which is that revelation doesn't
help in cases where the decision lies between two transformative
outcomes as opposed to a decision between the status quo and one
transformative outcome.



Callard (2018) picks up on this last worry and points out that
revelation for its own sake lacks a mechanism for valuing different
revelations differently. Instead, Callard favors an account based on
*aspiration* and *proleptic* reasons. For Callard,
proleptic reasons are provisional ones aimed at a good to which one
aspires but may only have an "inchoate, anticipatory, and
indirect grasp". For instance, someone who aspires to be a wine
connoisseur initially lacks any conception of what they are trying to
appreciate or experience when they take a sip of wine. Importantly,
proleptic reasons allow the aspirant to act rationally when they start
the process even though they lack knowledge of what the end goal is
like. Interestingly, these types of cases typically lack the sharp
discontinuity that are associated with paradigm transformative
experiences like parenthood. In fact, Callard suggests that parenthood
is not as discontinuous as assumed because potential parents often
dedicate a lot of mental energy to the decision and learning all they
can about parenthood. What appears to be a climactic
"let's go for it" is "embedded in a longer
transformative journey" (Callard 2018, 63). Putting all of this together,
transformative decisions can be made rationally via proleptic reasons
and are authentic since they result from intentional deliberation
about who the agent hopes to become.



Chang (2015) offers an interestingly different way of approaching
transformative decision making. Chang starts by distinguishing between
*event-based* and *choice-based* transformations. The
former are the type that fit how transformative experiences are
typically described. They involve experiences that are downstream from
the choice--like becoming a parent--that transform the
agent. The latter is where Chang's interest lies. Choice-based
transformation is one in which "the making of the choice itself
transforms you" (Chang 2015, 240). Here, Chang has in mind cases in which one
invokes voluntarist reasons when making a decision. Voluntarist
reasons are reasons generated by the will that--on Chang's
account--are appropriate when all other existing reasons
underdetermine what an agent ought to do. (Chang favors an account in
which the will strengthens an existing reasons, but there are other
voluntarists like Korsgaard (1996) who hold that the will can create
reasons *ex nihilo*.) Crucially, in willing a voluntarist
reason, one simultaneously reveals themself to be the type of person
for whom that choice is rational. This type of account also appears to
preserve authenticity (since what could be more authentic than
one's own will) and rationality (since adding the voluntarist
reason to the mix tips the scales in favor of the choice that's
been made). Of course, voluntarist accounts are somewhat
controversial, so Chang's account of how to make transformative
choices would inherit all the worries that voluntarism does.



Alhough these accounts--Paul's, Callard's, or
Chang's--all face worries, it is worth noting that
if any of them work, then there is a way to preserve both authenticity
and rationality *even while respecting the original challenge of
transformative experience to standard decision making procedures*.
None require knowing what the experience will be like or who will come
out the other end. Nevertheless, one can still rationally and
authentically plunge into the unknown.


## 6. Applied Ethics: In Light of Transformation, How Should We Treat Others?



Transformative experiences also demand that we revisit how we treat
others in light of the fact that they potentially may undergo
transformative experiences. As seen in
 SS1,
 transformation may arise in many contexts, far too many to attempt to
tackle here. Instead, this section will focus on three types of
contexts in which the issue of how we should treat others given the
possibility of transformation might arise: when we choose for others,
when we make long-term decisions involving others, and when we create
environments that (dis)favor transformation.


### 6.1 Choosing for Others



Plausibly, it's wrong to interfere with the autonomy of others,
especially when it comes to important personal decisions. As Akhlaghi
(2022, 7) points out, interference is even less defensible when
others are choosing to undergo transformative experiences because
there is a



> 
> 
> moral duty not to interfere with the autonomous self-making of others,
> through their choosing to undergo transformative experience to
> discover who they will become.
> 
> 
> 



However, people often find themselves in situations in which they need
to make decisions on behalf of others that may lead to transformative
experiences. In fact, those who take the leap and become parents then
find themselves in a position to make transformative decisions on
behalf of their children. For instance, some parents of deaf children
must decide whether to get cochlear implants for their child. Ideally,
children receive these implants when they are extremely young, usually
before the age of three. The early age at which the decision must be
made forces parents to choose on behalf of their children. In addition
to being a choice that affects how their children will perceive and
navigate the world, the choice carries incredibly significant social
consequences. Deaf communities offer distinctive goods that hearing
communities cannot, and vice versa. Furthermore, as disability
advocates point out, the difference between being deaf and non-deaf is
"mere-difference" rather than "bad-difference"
(see, e.g., Barnes 2014). This offers a further reason to believe that
the decision to give a child a cochlear implant is a transformative
one that must be made on the basis of the child's future
experiences as deaf or hearing as opposed to on the basis of
value.



Put this way, parental choices, especially significant ones like
deciding whether to get a child a cochlear implant, also resemble the
non-identity problem. Parfit (1984) raises the non-identity problem as
a puzzle for decisions that affect *who* will exist in the
future. For instance, suppose a potential parent is choosing between
implanting one of two embryos, and chooses one that has a genetic
defect that causes monthly migraines that the other embryo lacks.
Given that there are no other relevant differences between the two
embryos, it appears that the parent has done something wrong by
bringing into existence a person who will have a lower level of
welfare than the other person who could have existed instead. However,
it's not obvious *who* the potential parent has harmed.
Assuming the migraine-inflicted person prefers existing to never
having existed, they have not been harmed since the alternative is
non-existence. If that's right, then perhaps the parents have
done nothing wrong since no one has been harmed.



Similarly, the personally transformative aspect of transformative
experiences affects who exists after undergoing the experience.
Receiving a cochlear implant and growing up in a hearing community
will transform the child into a radically different person from who
the child would be if they did not receive an implant and grew up in a
deaf community. The person who develops won't have grounds to
complain since wishing their parents had chosen otherwise would be
like wishing they did not exist. But even if one does not believe that
the cochlear implant is an existence-affecting decision point, the
fact that the two potential futures are so foreign to each other means
that a person situated in one of those futures cannot project what it
would be like to have had the other life. If the earlier points about
projecting value are correct, the person who has grown up in the deaf
community cannot assign a subjective value to the alternate life in
which they had the cochlear implant, and vice versa. Without those
value assignments, it doesn't appear that either person can
claim that they would have been better off in the alternate scenario.
Thus, whether the person receives the cochlear implant or not,
articulating how that transformation harmed them will be challenging.
Perhaps the parent can choose either option without harming or
wronging anyone. The situation is also similar from the perspective of
the parents and their preferences, for they will have grown to love
their child and the particular person into whom they have
developed.



Philosophers diverge on how parents should choose in these cases.
(See, e.g., Harman (2015) for an interesting discussion on when
"I'll be glad I did it" reasoning is appropriate.)
However, there's a more interesting lesson to be drawn from
these types of cases. Recall from
 SS4.1
 and
 SS4.2
 that Paul objects to certain types of decision-making strategies
because they treat future selves as if they were third persons rather
than integrated parts of the same self. These cases show that even in
the third person case, standard decision-making procedures are not
particularly helpful. Transformative experiences still create major
challenges for decision-making.



At the other end of life, decisions must sometimes be made for people
post-transformation. People suffering from dementia or
Alzheimer's transform in myriad ways, and their preferences
often diverge from the preferences of their earlier selves. Sometimes,
these preferences regard end of life care. Since the person with
dementia or Alzheimer's is not considered legally competent to
change their advanced directives, others must make important medical
decisions on their behalf. These people must decide whether to respect
the preferences of the past self, or the current one. In some ways,
this a questions about the weight that ought to be assigned to past
preferences, and we might resolve in the way Pettigrew (2019) suggests
by constructing a general value function that aggregates the past and
current preferences. However, if the personal transformation is taken
seriously, the current self is a different person. Binding them to the
preferences of the past self is akin to binding them to the
preferences of another person.


### 6.2 Long Term Decisions



In addition to transforming in the early and late stages of life,
people transform throughout their lives, either via momentous
"big" changes or via an accumulation of
"small" changes. Long-term decisions must factor the
potential for transformative change into account. For instance, Lackey
(2020) and Chan (2020) independently address this issue in the context
of punishment. Lackey's argument demands that those with the
power to issue long-term punishments, like judges, must consider the
possibility of transformative change. Plausibly, punishment should be
sensitive to the relevant evidence available at that time. We know
that people change, often in transformative ways, and imprisonment
seems like exactly the type of experience that would be
transformative. Issuing strict, long-term prison sentences--such
as life sentences without the possibility of parole--screens off
the possibility of taking relevant future evidence into account. Thus,
recognizing the possibility of transformation offers a powerful
argument for sentencing reform.



Extended partnerships also provide another context in which
transformative changes need to be accounted for when making long term
decisions. For instance, marriage vows typically involve some type of
life-long pledge. And, as anyone familiar with married people knows,
people change in ways that disrupt the marriage. In a way, identifying
these changes as transformative makes sense of an already common
phenomenon. But it also raises a further question: how can one
felicitously make a life-long promise to someone knowing that both
they and their partner may transform in a way involving a radical
shift of preferences and life goals? The centrality of transformation
to this decision is doubled because the marriage itself is often
transformative. It's true that transformations connected with
relationships tend to involve incremental changes because the
relationship develops incrementally. But these incremental changes can
lead people away from each other and won't be noticeable until
the larger schism develops due to their incremental nature.



These long-term decisions involving others suggest that the normative
questions transformative experiences raise go beyond self-interested
decision making. Furthermore, some of the proposed ways of making
transformative decisions have interesting implications for these types
of cases. For instance, Ullmann-Margalit suggests that there simply is
not a rational way to make transformative decisions. Applying that to
these cases gives the radical result that decision to marry or
sentence someone to prison cannot be made rationally!
Ullmann-Margalit's further suggestion that perhaps these
decisions can be made reasonably also has interesting implications.
She suggests that minimizing the discontinuity of a big decision and
backing off the point of no return might help, and includes moving in
before marriage as one such way to ease reasonably into a big decision
like marriage. The application for the prison case is even more
interesting, for it suggests that life in prison should not be such a
radical departure from life outside of it, and that there must be
meaningful short term possibilities for parole.


### 6.3 Transformative Environments



Finally, special attention must be paid to our social environments
since they shape the way in which members of society may transform.
Education provides the most obvious instance of this. Fights over
parental rights to control their children's educations are so
contentious precisely because early experiences shape who children
grow up to become. Even higher education is taken to have a
transformative goal (see Paul & Quiggin 2020). College students
are typically in their early twenties--the last age at which
people tend to undergo radical change before developing fairly stable
preferences and goals that tend to endure through most of adulthood.
In addition, the transformative environment of education shapes more
than the individual students who experience it. Students go on to
become members of society who in turn create an environment that will
shape those who come after them. Morton (2021) points out that this
tends to have a self-reinforcing effect because elite institutions
like the Ivy League schools disproportionately influence social
policy. Even if students enter these institutions without the goal of
maintaining the status quo of the elite, by the time they graduate,
they can be transformed into members of the elite who are now invested
in safeguarding the interests of their newfound group. This, in turn,
shapes social policies that reinforce which transformative experiences
are most readily available to members of society.



This idea that social policies can shape individual choices and
preferences creates both an opportunity and a responsibility to
reconsider which policies ought to be adopted in light of the
potential for transformative experience. For instance, Pettigrew
(2023) examines the concept of *nudging* introduced by Thaler
and Sunstein (2008). In a nutshell, nudging is a sort of intervention
that pushes people toward making a particular choice while leaving
open the possibility that they choose otherwise. Opt-out retirement
programs offer a paradigm case of nudging since they increase the
likelihood that people will put money away for retirement while still
allowing people the ability to opt-out. Thaler and Sunstein label
nudging policies as "libertarian paternalism" because
while these interventions look paternalistic, they purportedly help
people make the decision that their future idealized selves will deem
to be best "as judged by themselves" (Thaler and Sunstein 2008, 4). Of course, if the
decisions are transformative, or incremental parts of multiple
decisions that become transformative, simply looking at the judgment
of the future self does not seem appropriate at all! (And Pettigrew
makes precisely this argument before proposing a modification to the
"as judged by themselves" test that's based on his
weighted general value function.)



There are at least two bigger-picture issues that come out of this
discussion of nudging people, potentially toward transformation.
First, the norms regarding nudging people toward potential
transformation requires further examination. Most policies, nudging or
otherwise, exhibit some degree of interventionism. In addition to
which transformations might be preferable for society as a whole,
there's also the question of whether we should adopt policies
that maximize individual autonomy. Second, we might wonder why nudging
works in the first place, and if it really does work for
transformative experiences. Recall that part of the nature of
transformative experiences is that one cannot know what they will be
like or how they will change prior to having the experience. Nudging,
on the other hand, only works if these things are somewhat
predictable. Of course, unpredictability with respect to an individual
is compatible with predictability with respect to overall social
trends. But, if nudging really works, it does lend credence to the
idea certain elements of transformative experience are predictable and
perhaps strengthens the case of those from
 SS4
 who believe that one can make rational choices with respect to
transformative experiences.



Finally, we've structured our society in many unfortunate ways.
This goes beyond the discrimination that people suffer on the basis of
race, sex, ability, socioeconomic status, and the like. More subtle
conceptual structures shape and limit the way we form our
self-identities. These injustices are obviously bad in themselves, and
they also interact with transformative experience in a way that
furthers the injustice. Barnes (2015) argues that one's
"self-conception and self-identity aren't developed in
cultural isolation" and that "social norms and structures
make certain ways of interpreting or thinking about ourselves readily
available" (185). For example, society makes it easy for women
to "re-shape their self-conception to cohere with the image of a
dutiful, submissive wife" (186). Similarly, "brave
inspiration" is a readily available self-conception for disabled
people while "thriving person in an unconventional body"
is not (185-186). These states of affairs are bad for women and
disabled people. Since personal transformation involves changes to
one's self-conception, society plays an outsized role in the
types of transformations that are available to us.