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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.

This chapter develops the central ideas involved in transformative decision-making, defining epistemically transformative experiences, personally transformative experiences, and subjective values, and showing how we can’t straightforwardly apply standard decision-theoretic models for ignorance to epistemically transformative cases. The chapter develops an account of how transformative experience connects to discussions of phenomenal character and “what it’s like” from the philosophy of mind, and describes the structure of a new decision-theoretic problem of preference evolution as the result of experience. The closing material argues that for any case where we see an important role for subjective deliberation, deep questions about the structure and rationality of making transformative choices arises.

This chapter explores the connection between transformative experience and adaptive preferences, or preferences resulting from the fact that a given option was the best available from within a limited set. Employing the concept of transformative experience can help us to see how a person’s adaptive preferences can be genuinely beneficial for her, and thus to see such a person as a competent judge of her own good. This insight is used to develop an account of adaptive preference with the potential to provide guidance about whether or not to allow ourselves and others to undergo transformative experiences.

Chapter 6 considers how peer disagreement over religion presents an epistemological problem: How can confidence in any religious claims including their negations be epistemically justified? Here, it is shown that the transformative nature of religious experience poses a further problem: to transition between religious belief and skepticism is not just to adopt a different set of beliefs, but to transform into a different version of oneself. It is argued that this intensifies the problem of pluralism by adding a new dimension to religious disagreement, for we can lack epistemic and affective access to our potential religious, agnostic, or skeptical selves. Yet, access to these selves seems to be required for the purposes of decision-making that is to be both rational and authentic. Finally, the chapter reflects on the relationship between the transformative problem and what it shows about the epistemic status of religious conversion and deconversion, in which one disagrees with one’s own transformed self.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter considers the use of imagination in transformative decision-making. While there may be some cases where an experience is so qualitatively different from those one has had that it is impossible to imagine what it would be like, in the majority of cases it is possible to adequately grasp the character of unfamiliar experience by means of imaginative scaffolding. There are people who develop extraordinary imaginative abilities, calling into question the reliability of prima facie judgments about what can be done via imagination. This means that there is no in-principle barrier to using imagination to project oneself into a subjectively transformed possible future and making rational choices on that basis.

The hope that art could be personally or socially transformational is an important part of art history and contemporary art practice. In the twentieth century, it shaped a movement away from traditional media in an effort to make social life a medium. Artists imagined and created participatory situations designed to facilitate potentially transformative expression in those who engaged with the works. This chapter develops the concept of “transformative expression,” and illustrates how it informs a diverse range of such works. Understanding these artworks in this way raises two interesting questions, one about the nature of aesthetic value and the other about the nature of action. Answers to these questions lie in understanding the social and aesthetic character of our capacity to distance ourselves from our commitments and act in the expressive, playful, spontaneous, or imaginative ways that participatory art invites.

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.

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.

This chapter discusses how we should think about experiences that threaten to radically transform our understanding of the world. While it can be rational to treat the “doxastically transformative” potential of an experience as a reason to choose against it, such a decision must be based in something more than the fact that this experience would alter one’s current beliefs. It only in light of knowledge of how things are that a person can choose rationally against transformative processes that would destroy this knowledge.

In this chapter, Jeff Sebo and L.A. Paul investigate the phenomenon of experiences that transform the experiencer, either epistemically, personally, or both. The possibility of such experiences, Sebo and Paul argue, frequently complicates the practice of rational decision-making. First, in transformative cases in which your own experience is a relevant part of the outcome to be evaluated, one cannot make well-evidenced predictions of the value of the outcome at the time of decision. Second, in cases in which one foresees that one’s preferences would change following the decision, there are issues about whether rational decision-making should be based only on one’s ex ante preferences, or should also incorporate some element of deference to foreseen future preferences. While these issues arise quite generally, Paul and Sebo suggest that they are especially pressing in the context of effective altruism.

In this chapter, Richard Pettigrew continues his defense of the Fine-Graining Response to L. A. Paul’s critique of decision theory, arguing that it meets a new challenge from Sarah Moss’s probabilistic knowledge framework. The strategy of the Fine-Graining Response is to treat uncertainty about one’s post-transformation preferences just like decision theory standardly treats uncertainty about the world. After reviewing the dialectic between himself and Paul, Pettigrew examines Moss’s argument that the potential for transformation blocks the kind of probabilistic knowledge she claims is necessary for rational decision. He distinguishes ways in which Moss’s argument both comports with and diverges from Paul’s. Finally, he defends the possibility of forming the kinds of justified credences needed for the Fine-Graining Response, and that this is sufficient for rational choices regarding transformation.

Drawing together the metaphysics of counterfactuals with empirical work on intuitive judgments, this chapter discusses the nature of counterfactual reasoning about self-involving possibilities. It argues that when a person reasons about her self-involving possibilities, especially far-fetched possibilities, this reasoning may be supported by an underlying “self simulator,” a kind of mental engine with an approximate understanding of who she is, which enables her to learn about her preferences and make intuitive judgments and predictions about her self-involving possibilities. On this view, through observing or simulating their own choices, people understand themselves through a process similar to that by which they understand other people. In this way, they learn about their own beliefs and desires. The argument is informed by empirical data from surveys where lay people and philosophers decided what action they would take in vignettes involving a potentially transformative decision.

This chapter introduces the problem of transformative choice using the example of choosing to become a vampire. The example illustrates the problems with decision-making involving transformative choices, which arise for any choice you face that involves having a radically new experience that also substantially changes your personal preferences.

This chapter develops and defends two probabilistic knowledge norms of action. The first is a knowledge norm for reasons, namely that you may treat a probabilistic content as a reason for action if and only if you know it. This norm can help explain intuitive judgments about rational action. It can also help us rethink alleged instances of pragmatic encroachment often cited as challenges for existing knowledge norms of action. The second norm defended in this chapter is a knowledge norm for decisions. According to this norm, an action is permissible for you if and only if it is considered permissible for an agent with imprecise credences whose beliefs exactly match your probabilistic knowledge. This norm provides a precise interpretation of the controversial view that standard decision theory cannot guide decisions about transformative experiences, where this interpretation succeeds in answering a wide range of recent objections to this view.