Transformative Experience: Replies to Pettigrew, Barnes and Campbell

L.A. Paul has written an important book. In it she presents an innovative combination of a Sartrean conception of choice as authenticity with a Bayesian conception of choice as expected value maximization to serve as the basis for a unified normative decision theory. The challenge that motivates her account is to explain how to decide rationally in a special class of life-changing decisions, transformative decisions, which she defines and analyses. Paul’s main argument is an argument for the following conditional claim: In our current state of empirical knowledge, if we want to be able to apply expected value theory to transformative decisions, which for Paul is a necessary condition for understanding ourselves as choosing rationally in such cases, we must understand our decisions as depending primarily on what she calls the value of revelation. I am going to question some of the steps of her argument, but none of my criticisms is intended to cast doubt on the importance of her contribution – not only to our understanding of rational choice, but also to our understanding of informed consent, and the philosophy of disability. Paul’s book is primarily an extended exploration of only one of the factors in rational choice, which she refers to as first personal choosing (124). Choosing is first personal when it is based on the subjective value of one’s experiences – that is, ‘the values of what it is like to have the experiences or of what it is like to be in these experiential states’ (11). Because this sounds like a hedonistic theory of value, Paul repeatedly reminds the reader that, as she uses the term, subjective value is the value of veridical or, as she says, lived experience (11–12) and she insists that the subjective value of experience includes other cognitive elements in addition to its qualitative phenomenological character (27). Thus, Paul clearly excludes a purely hedonistic theory of value. The importance of first-personal choosing is the Sartrean element in her account. Paul is not claiming that all rational considerations are first personal or that all value is subjective in her sense. She allows for both a first personal perspective and a third personal perspective on choice. The third personal perspective includes objective values, such as moral values, and objective, scientific evidence about what experiences are like (125). Her position is simply that, given our current empirical evidence, some cases are not rationally decidable from the third personal perspective alone; in some decisions, rational deliberation crucially depends on the first personal evaluation of