Who Will I Become?
Keyword(s):
This chapter argues that life-changing experiences like having a child are hard to evaluate within standard models of rational decision-making, given the extent of the change they bring about in our preferences and the subjective inaccessibility of the phenomena that they center on. This is not a barrier that can be overcome by relying on testimony from others who have undergone changes of the sort in question. In making a transformative choice a person must navigate between alternative understandings of who she is—and the upshot of transformative change is to have one’s current self replaced with a different one.