Aug 25, 2015
Let's say you had the chance
to become a vampire. With one magical bite you would gain immortality,
superhuman strength and a life of glamorous intensity. Your friends who have
undergone the transformation say the experience is incredible. They drink
animal blood, not human blood, and say everything about their new existence
provides them with fun, companionship and meaning.
Would you do it? Would you
consent to receive the life-altering bite, even knowing that once changed you
could never go back?
The difficulty of the choice
is that you'd have to use your human self and preferences to try to guess
whether you'd enjoy having a vampire self and preferences. Becoming a vampire
is transformational. You would literally become a different self. How can you
possibly know what it would feel like to be this different version of you or
whether you would like it?
In her book
"Transformative Experience," L. A. Paul, a philosophy professor at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says life is filled with
decisions that are a bit like this. Life is filled with forks in the road in
which you end up changing who you are and what you want.
People who have a child
suddenly become different. Joining the military is another transformational
experience. So are marrying, changing careers, immigrating, switching
religions.
In each of these cases the
current you is trying to make an important decision, without having the chance
to know what it will feel like to be the future you.
Paul's point is that we're
fundamentally ignorant about many of the biggest choices of our lives and that
it's not possible to make purely rational decisions. "You shouldn't
fool yourself," she writes. "You have no idea what you are
getting into."
The decision to have a child is
the purest version of this choice. On average, people who have a child suffer a
loss of reported well-being. They're more exhausted and report lower life
satisfaction. And yet few parents can imagine going back and being their old
pre-parental selves. Parents are like self-fulfilled vampires. Their rich new
lives would have seemed incomprehensible to their old childless selves.
So how do you make
transformational decisions? You have to ask the right questions, Paul argues.
Don't ask, Will I like parenting? You can't know. Instead, acknowledge that
you, like all people, are born with an intense desire to know. Ask, Do I have a
profound desire to discover what it would be like to be this new me, to
experience this new mode of living?
As she puts it, "The best
response to this situation is to choose based on whether we want to discover
who we'll become."
Live life as a series of
revelations.
Personally, I think Paul's
description of the problem is ingenious but her solution is incomplete. Would
you really trust yourself to raise and nurture a child simply on the basis of
self-revelation? Curiosity is too thin, relativistic and ephemeral.
I'd say to really make these
decisions well you need to step outside the modern conception of ourselves
as cognitive creatures who are most sophisticated when we rely on rationality.
The most reliable
decision-making guides are more "primitive." We're historical
creatures. We have inherited certain life scripts from evolution and culture,
and there's often a lot of wisdom in following those life scripts. We're social
creatures. Often we undertake big transformational challenges not because it
fulfills our desires, but because it is good for our kind.
We're mystical creatures.
Often when people make a transformational choice they feel it less as a choice
and more as a calling. They feel there was something that destined them to be
with this spouse or in that vocation.
Most important, we're moral
creatures. When faced with a transformational choice the weakest question
may be, What do I desire? Our desires change all the time. The strongest
questions may be: Which path will make me a better person? Will joining the
military give me more courage? Will becoming a parent make me more capable of
selfless love?
Our moral intuitions are more
durable than our desires, based on a universal standard of right and wrong. The
person who shoots for virtue will more reliably be happy with her new self, and
will at least have a nice quality to help her cope with whatever comes.
Which
brings us to the core social point. These days we think of a lot of decisions
as if they were shopping choices. When we're shopping for something, we act as
autonomous creatures who are looking for the product that will produce the most
pleasure or utility. But choosing to have a child or selecting a spouse, faith
or life course is not like that. It's probably safer to ask "What do I
admire?" than "What do I want?"
