Death

Death is the ultimate transformative experience. “Death” here means not the state of being dead but rather the whole process of dying, culminating in the end of a person’s life. Death is “epistemically transformative,” because you cannot know what it is like to die until you experience dying, and this experience can enable you to understand things in a new way. Death is “personally transformative,” because it changes how you experience yourself in ways that you cannot fully grasp before these changes happen. At the same time, death is unlike any other transformative experience. It is final, all-encompassing, and has fundamental significance. Its power to reveal new truths about your self and your life is exceptional. It offers prospective and retrospective perspectives that differ from those of any other experience. This chapter examines death by describing its unique characteristics as the ultimate transformative experience. The practical benefit of this perspective is to suggest new philosophical resources for physicians, hospice workers, policy-makers, and family members who care for dying loved ones.

Punishment and Transformation

This chapter argues that the possibility of transformations and transformative experiences shows that strict, long-term punishments are epistemically irrational. Since the rationality of punishment must be sensitive to the mental states of the person being punished, including their mental states after the time of the punishable act, the possibility of radical changes makes it irrational to punish a person in a way that precludes considering future evidence about these changes. Since strict, long-term punishments, such as sentences of natural life without the possibility of parole, do just this, such punishments always run afoul of the demands of epistemic rationality.

Learning from Moral Failure

Pedagogical environments are often designed to minimize the chance of people acting wrongly; surely this is a sensible approach. But could it ever be useful to design pedagogical environments to permit, or even encourage, moral failure? If so, what are the circumstances where moral failure can be beneficial? What types of moral failure are helpful for learning, and by what mechanisms? This chapter considers the possibility that moral failure can be an especially effective tool in fostering learning. It also considers the obvious costs and potential risks of allowing or fostering moral failure. It concludes by suggesting research directions that would help to establish whether, when, and how moral pedagogy might be facilitated by letting students learn from moral failure.

How Personal Theories of the Self Shape Beliefs about Personal Continuity and Transformative Experience

This chapter summarizes experimental work exploring how individual beliefs about the personally disruptive character of transformative experiences are influenced by intuitive theories of what a self fundamentally is, at the current moment and over time. Judgments of disrupted personal identity are influenced by views of the causal centrality of a transformed trait to a person’s self-concept, with changes in more central features perceived as more disruptive to self-continuity. Furthermore, the type of change matters: unexpected or undesirable changes to personal features are viewed as more disruptive to self-continuity than changes that are consistent with a person’s expected developmental trajectory. The degree to which an individual considers a particular personal change to be disruptive will affect how he or she makes decisions about, reacts to, and copes with this experience.

Transformative Activities

This chapter reads Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend as a narrative of personal transformation through a process of active learning. In transformative activity, not only the onset but the entire process of personal transformation depends on the person’s active involvement in learning what she does, and thereby transforming herself into the person she becomes. The protagonists of Ferrante’s novel illustrate how transformative activity may take place through the aspiration to transcend the subjective confines of one’s present life–– and they do so by competing fiercely against one another. Competition can be an engine of large-scale transformation, because the goal of besting another person can serve as a proximate target for one’s transformative energies.

Who Will I Become?

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.

Models of Transformative Decision-Making

Deciding to undergo a transformative experience present unique challenges for a reasonable decision-maker, and for any attempt to give a formal account of how people can make such decisions. This chapter focuses on the challenges of novelty and change. It develops a normative hierarchical model for decision-making over novel objects, and show how it captures the commonsense intuition that we can rationally decide to try a new experience, but also that such decisions can be graded in difficulty. It then presents a framework for how people can think about big decisions that will affect their core beliefs, desires, and ultimately themselves, by modeling this as a decision process of choosing between different selves. Empirical evidence is used to refine different sub-models of this meta-reasoning process, including the asymmetric treatment of current and future utilities, the difference between future utilities and future beliefs, and a distance function between selves that is separate from considerations of future happiness.

Being Someone Else

It is a fact about me that I am Martin Glazier; a corresponding fact obtains in your case. Contingentism is the view that such facts are contingent. This chapter argues that contingentism is, if not true, then at least not absurd. The best defense of the view appeals to the principle that the way the world is from someone else’s perspective is a possible way for the world to be. The notion of perspective here is metaphysical rather than epistemic: the way the world is from one’s perspective is not a matter of how one takes the world to be. It is argued that by distinguishing two forms of metaphysical modality, the contingentist may insist that one’s identity, though metaphysically contingent, is also no accident.

Editors’ Introduction

Phenomena of transformative change raise questions concerning the rationality of potentially life-altering decisions and the nature of any change that would radically alter a person’s psychological perspective. These questions are especially pressing when we consider the demand that personally transformative choices be made on a basis that is subjectively accessible to the agent. If the consequence of such a choice is that the agent becomes someone altogether different, then how can she anticipate this possible future, and what is the nature of her subjective concern for the person she might become? This chapter surveys the work of L. A. Paul and Edna Ullmann-Margalit on these topics, and makes the case for the need for further models of transformative change that depart from the assumptions of the extant literature.

Either/Or: Subjectivity, Objectivity and Value

This chapter argues that the apprehension of value is necessarily subjective, i.e. tied directly to experience rather than to processes of conceptual abstraction. Because of this, a proper appreciation of value depends on relating to the world through a distinctively contemplative stance that is different from the stance of conceptual thought. This contemplative attitude of attentive subjectivity is one that we bring to bear in the appreciation of literature, music, and art. It is because of the primacy of subjectivity in the apprehension of value that personally transformative choices cannot be approached through the rubric of rational decision theory.