Should you become a parent? Should you change your career? Decisions such as these change the directions of our lives in irreversible ways. However, it is not just your life that’s changing, it is your self. When making decisions, while facing an unknowable future, we should bear in mind who we are now and who we want to become, writes L. A. Paul.
Imagine yourself in the following situation: you and your partner are trying to decide whether it’s time to start a family. In particular, you are trying to decide whether you’d like to have a baby. Your financial situation and physical health make the decision to become a parent largely up to what you choose—you have the necessary resources, so it’s about what you want your future lives to be like. This is a paradigmatic “big decision”: the stakes are high, and the choice is irreversible in the sense that, once you’ve had the child, you can’t undo its existence. Even if you give your child up for adoption, you’ve still become a biological parent.
There are many ways to approach a big decision like this, and, if you have any uncertainty about what you’d prefer, you’ll want to think carefully about what you value in order to make the best choice for yourself (and your partner).
Model-based reasoning, where you think about each way you could act, building out the likely consequences of each possible action, and then evaluate and compare these consequences, is the natural way to approach this high-stakes deliberative task. To deliberate, you assess your possibilities to compare them and create (or discover) your preferences. If you can accurately assess the expected value of each act you might perform and compare these values, then when you choose the act that maximizes your expected value, you are choosing rationally.
If you can accurately assess the expected value of each act you might perform and compare these values, then when you choose the act that maximizes your expected value, you are choosing rationally.
The trouble is, for many people, becoming a parent is transformative (Paul 2014, Paul 2015b). because it can transform you both epistemically and personally. If an experience is epistemically transformative, it is an experience that you need to actually undergo in order to know what it is like. If an experience is personally transformative, it changes you in ways that change some of your deepest preferences. A truly transformative experience, like having your first child, is both. When you actually hold your new-born in your arms, you can have an experience like no other, and this can change you in ways that shift some of your deepest preferences.
Issue 96, 15th June 2021
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