Transformative Experiences: Can Life-Changing Choices Be Both Rational and Authentic?

Author: Felipe Pereira
Categories: Ethics, Epistemology, Phenomenology and Existentialism, Philosophy of Religion
Wordcount: 997

Becoming a parent for the first time. Going to war as a newly enlisted soldier. Moving to a distant country. Having a religious conversion. Starting a new career.

These experiences are good candidates for what’s called transformative experiences—radically new experiences that significantly change who you are.^[1]

Can we rationally choose to have transformative experiences in a way that’s authentic to our own values? This essay explores that question.

1. What Are Transformative Experiences?

Transformative experiences meet two conditions:^[2]

• they substantially change your core commitments, values, and preferences;
• they’re radically unlike your previous experiences: the only way to know what it’s like to have them is to experience them yourself.^[3]

For example, for many people becoming a parent looks like a transformative experience. It significantly changes their priorities—e.g., some of them loved partying, but now prefer a quiet life. And they couldn’t anticipate what it’d be like for them to be parents, no matter how many parenting books they read.^[4]

2. Rationality and Authenticity: Two Competing Ideals?

Can it be rational to choose to have a transformative experience?

According to the standard view of what rational choices are, a choice is rational only if it’s the choice with the highest expected value of your options—i.e., on your best evidence, it’s the choice that gets the highest “score” when you multiply how much you’d value that outcome by how likely it is to result from that choice.

If the standard view is correct, however, how could it ever be rational to choose to have (or avoid) a transformative experience? You can’t know beforehand what a transformative experience is like. You can’t even know whether you’ll value the experience, since it’ll change your values.^[5] So, how can you estimate the value of the experience? If you can’t, then it’s impossible to determine whether choosing to have the experience maximizes expected value.

One response to these challenges is to seek help from people who both know you well and who have had that experience. They can give you a well-informed estimate of how much you’d value it.

But then it might seem like you’re making that choice just because someone told you to do it or because it fits their values, which would be inauthentic of you: you wouldn’t be acting on values you have developed and endorsed for yourself.^[6]

We face a trilemma, then. Either:

(A) it’s impossible to be both rational and authentic when choosing whether to have a transformative experience, or

(B) the standard view of what’s a rational choice is false, or

(C) a choice can be authentic even if it’s based on values you don’t endorse.

3. Responses

3.1. Accepting Option A: Transformative Choices Can’t Be Both Rational and Authentic, And That’s OK

Some argue that, if we try harder, we can imagine what it’s like being a parent, or an immigrant, or an astronaut. So, these aren’t really transformative experiences.^[7] Only extremely unusual experiences might be transformative. But there’s little point in lamenting the impossibility of making rational and authentic choices about experiences that practically never happen anyway.

Others argue that, while we can’t be both rational and authentic when taking a giant leap into a transformative experience, that’s not a problem because we can do it when taking small incremental steps that cumulatively result in big transformations. I can’t be both rational and authentic in choosing to become an astronaut, but I can in choosing to go to space-camp, and then to enter the spaceship simulator, and so on . . . until I’m an astronaut.^[8]

Another thought is that if making authentic choices requires never giving up control over them, authenticity is overrated. Some of the best things in life (e.g., love) are about losing control and letting other people shape your decisions.^[9]

3.2. Accepting Option B: The Standard View Is False

An alternative to the standard view of rational choices is that for a choice to be rational, we don’t need to know whether it’s the choice that maximizes expected value. It’s enough to know whether you really want to discover who you’ll become because of that choice.^[10]

Another view is that a choice can be rational if you have proleptic reasons—i.e., reasons that you don’t fully grasp—to choose it.^[11] Suppose you’ve chosen to take a music appreciation class. Your choice isn’t inauthentic: you must have cared somewhat about classical music beforehand, otherwise you wouldn’t register for the class. But you didn’t fully grasp the value of classical music: that’s precisely what you want to learn, and why it’s rational to take the class. You could rationally and authentically choose to become a parent in the same way.

3.3. Accepting Option C: Authenticity Doesn’t Require Endorsement

Maybe we should distinguish between choosing to have a transformative experience because well-informed people tell you that you will value experiencing it and choosing to do it because other people value experiencing it. While it’s inauthentic to do something just because other people value it, making choices based on the values you will endorse isn’t—even if you don’t endorse them yet.^[12]

3.4. Isn’t There a Fourth Option?

Some argue that certain aspects of being a parent are objectively meaningful, and that you can understand these aspects of parenthood beforehand, even if you can’t predict its experiential aspects.^[13] Maybe that’s enough to estimate the value of becoming a parent. If it is enough, then you can determine whether becoming one maximizes expected value, and make a rational choice accordingly—and do it authentically, guided by what you believe is objectively meaningful.^[14]

4. Conclusion

Transformative experiences raise many other difficult questions beyond whether we can rationally and authentically choose to have them:

• Can someone be held responsible for choosing to have a transformative experience if she no longer endorses the values of her pre-transformation self?^[15]
• Is it wrong to cause someone else to have a transformative experience?^[16]
• What about trying to prevent them from having one?^[17]

Be careful, though: thinking about these questions may be transformative for you.

Notes

^[1] Transformative experiences aren’t always personally transformative for the better. For example, while some people who experience war might come out of it significantly kinder, more generous persons, others might change into significantly harsher, more callous persons. (For others still, fighting in a war might not change them enough to count as a transformative experience. See footnote 4 for further discussion.)

^[2] This terminology was first introduced by Laurie Paul in her (2014) book Transformative Experiences. See also her (2015a) article, “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting.”

Paul distinguishes between two qualified senses in which an experience can be transformative—namely, by being personally transformative and epistemically transformative: “epistemically” roughly means “knowledge-related.” These two qualified senses in which an experience can be transformative correspond to the two criteria listed in section 1.

Paul then introduces a stronger, unqualified sense in which an experience can be transformative. In order to be transformative in this stronger, unqualified sense, an experience has to be both personally and epistemically transformative. This essay is concerned with transformative experiences in this stronger, unqualified sense.

^[3] When Paul (2014) introduces the idea of epistemically transformative experiences, she is concerned with the sorts of experiences that Frank Jackson brings up in his famous argument against physicalism, like seeing the color red for the first time, which change your “subjective point of view” by giving you first-hand knowledge of what it is like to have a new kind of experience. For discussion of how having an experience for the first time can seem to change what and how you know, see Tufan Kıymaz’s The Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism.

^[4] If you wouldn’t be both personally and epistemically transformed by becoming a parent, then becoming a parent wouldn’t be a transformative experience for you. Maybe other sorts of experiences would be—for example, moving to a distant country, or starting a new career, or having a religious conversion. These experiences often seem to be both epistemically and personally transformative. But it is important to note that no candidate for a transformative experience is guaranteed to be a transformative experience for everyone who experiences it.

^[5] Even if you could know beforehand whether you’ll value the experience, which values should your choice be based on—your pre-experience values or your post-experience values? A related question: should your post-experience self honor the preferences and plans of your past-experience self? For a book-length discussion of these questions, see Sullivan (2018). For discussion of the question of whether we ought to honor the past preferences of others, see Boonin (2019).

^[6] See Paul (2014, ch. 4) for a discussion of this alleged tension between authenticity and making transformative decisions on the basis of other people’s testimony.

^[7] For arguments in support of the view that we can know beforehand what it’s like to become a parent or start a new career, see Harman (2015), Chang (2015), and Dougherty et al. (2015).

^[8] Ullmann-Margalit (2006) suggests that the rational way to go about life-changing decisions is to minimize the amount of discontinuity between the way you are now and the way you will become by taking several small incremental steps that will gradually change you.

^[9] For an argument against the ideal of authenticity, in light of the value of love and losing control, see Yao (2023). See also Dover (2023) for a related discussion about how other people play a role in shaping our values and identities.

^[10] This is the ultimate solution Paul (2014) proposes to the challenge transformative experiences raise to decision theory. Paul suggests that her solution is closely associated with an existentialist way of thinking about decision-making. For an introduction of existentialism, see Addison Ellis’s Existentialism. A related “voluntaristic” solution to the problem of transformative experiences has been proposed by Chang in her (2015) paper. Chang draws a distinction between “event-based” transformations (such as becoming a parent) and “choice-based” transformation (such as the choice that starts the chain of events that leads to your becoming a parent). Choice-based transformations, she argues, involve transforming yourself as an agent by voluntarily taking on new reasons and obligations—reasons that make your decision to have a transformative experience rational.

^[11] In her (2018) book, Callard appeals to proleptic reasons in her response to the puzzle of transformative experiences.

^[12] Pettigrew (2019, pp. 154-156) argues that, as long as you’re deciding on the basis of what you will value, and not on the basis of what other people do, your choice is authentic in every way that matters. Campbell (2015) also argues that we can make authentic choices on the basis of non-experiential considerations.

^[13] For introductions to the topic of meaning in life, see Matthew Pinalto’s Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? and The Meaning of Life: What’s the Point?

^[14] For arguments to the effect that the expected value of outcomes is (or ought to be) mainly determined by what we take to be their objective value, see Kauppinen (2015) and Bykvist & Stefánsson (2017). For critical discussion of these arguments, see Villager (2023). In her reply to Kauppinen, Paul (2015b, p. 516) observes that it’s not so easy to disentangle the experiential dimension of these outcomes from their value:

Attempting to value outcomes involving friendship, love, and self-respect without including lived experiences in these states leads to a weird sort of zombification of what we are supposed to value. […] We want to value real love, and real love involves conscious experiences and emotional relationships and many other sorts of things that subjective value is designed to capture.

^[15] For discussion of this question, see Kemp (2015).

^[16] For discussion of this question, see Barnes (2015), Howard (2015), and Woollard (2020).

^[17] For discussion of this question, see Akhlaghi (2022).

References

Akhlaghi, Farbod (2022). Transformative Experience and the Right to Revelatory Autonomy. Analysis (1):1-10.

Barnes, Elizabeth (2015). Social Identities and Transformative Experience. Res Philosophica 92 (2):171-187.

Boonin, David (2019). Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm. Oxford University Press.

Bykvist, Krister & Stefánsson, H. Orri (2017). Epistemic Transformation and Rational Choice. Economics and Philosophy 33 (1):125-138.

Callard, Agnes (2018). Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. Oxford University Press.

Campbell, John (2015). L. A. Paul’s Transformative Experience. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3):787-793.

Chang, Ruth (2015). Transformative Choices. Res Philosophica 92 (2):237-282.

Dougherty, Tom; Horowitz, Sophie & Sliwa, Paulina (2015). Expecting the Unexpected. Res Philosophica 92 (2):301-321.

Dover, Daniela (2023). Identity and Influence. Synthese 202 (5):1-24.

Harman, Elizabeth (2015). Transformative Experiences and Reliance on Moral Testimony. Res Philosophica 92 (2):323-339.

Howard, Dana Sarah (2015). Transforming Others: On the Limits of ‘You’ll Be Glad I Did It’ Reasoning. Res Philosophica 92 (2):341-370.

Kauppinen, Antti (2015). What’s So Great about Experience? Res Philosophica 92 (2):371-388.

Kemp, Ryan (2015). The Self-Transformation Puzzle: On the Possibility of Radical Self-Transformation. Res Philosophica 92 (2):389-417.

Paul, Laurie A. (2014). Transformative Experience. Oxford University Press.

Paul, Laurie A. (2015a). What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting. Res Philosophica 92 (2):1-23.

Paul, Laurie A. (2015b). Transformative Choice: Discussion and Replies. Res Philosophica 92 (2):473-545.

Pettigrew, Richard (2019). Choosing for Changing Selves. Oxford University Press.

Sullivan, Meghan (2018). Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence. Oxford University Press.

Ullmann-Margalit, Edna (2006). Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 58:157-172.

Villiger, Daniel (2023). Rational Transformative Decision-Making. Synthese 201 (3):1-20.

Woollard, Fiona (2020). Mother Knows Best: Pregnancy, Applied Ethics, and Epistemically Transformative Experiences. Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (1):155-171.

Yao, Vida (2023). Eros and Anxiety. Synthese 202 (200):1-20.

Related Essays

Ecstatic Experiences: The Philosophy of ‘Losing Yourself’ by Matthew Sanderson

The Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism by Tufan Kıymaz

Existentialism by Addison Ellis

Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? by Matthew Pinalto

The Meaning of Life: What’s the Point? by Matthew Pinalto

Happiness: What Is It To Be Happy? by Kiki Berk

Modal Epistemology: Knowledge of Possibility & Necessity by Bob Fischer

Phenomenology: Describing Experiences From a First-Person Perspective by Matthew Sanderson

PDF Download

Download this essay in PDF.

About the Author

Felipe Pereira is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. His current research interests are in ethics and moral psychology. He is co-author of “The (Un)desirability of Immortality” in Philosophy Compass and “Non-Repeatable Hedonism Is False” in Ergo, both written with Travis Timmerman. felipe-pereira.weebly.com

Follow 1000-Word Philosophy on Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, Twitter / X, Threads, and LinkedIn, and subscribe to receive email notifications of new essays at 1000WordPhilosophy.com.