Philosophers on making difficult life decisions

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

What does philosophy have to say about difficult life decisions? Recently, there has been quite some interest in what philosophers have to say on this; for example, Ruth Chang’s TED talk on how to make hard choices has had over 3,5 million views. And recently, the new book by L.A. Paul, Transformative Experience, has been making quite a splash in the American mainstream media, with references in venues such as the New Yorker and the New York Times. A transformative experience is one that so fundamentally changes the person who undergoes it that she acquires a new self altogether, because she is transformed in a profound way. (See here for the shorter, article version of this idea.) The quintessential transformative experience for Paul is becoming a parent, and other examples include the death of a loved one, emigrating to a new country, among others.

One of the upshots of this conception of transformative experience is that, for many of the most important decisions in life, we simply have no way of evaluating the pros and cons of each side because we have no idea of what we’re getting into. As put by the influential journalist David Brooks in the New York Times,

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 idea is that your current self is not in a position to rationally evaluate the pros and cons of a particular decision, say to become a parent, because if you decide to become a parent and then in fact become a parent, your preferences will change quite radically. The one who will experience the pros and cons of your choice to become a parent is your future self, who is fundamentally different from your current self precisely in virtue of having undergone the experience, in particular in terms of preferences and values (and these changes are generally quite unpredictable). So your current self cannot possibly know what it will be like to be a parent from the perspective of your future self, which is the one that matters for the purposes of this decision.

Now, this idea goes against some of the most entrenched tenets of rational choice theory, and in particular expected utility theory: the ‘rational choice’ is the one most likely to bring greater advantage with the least investment. There is a simple formula that captures the gist of this idea: if i is a possible outcome of the choice, Pr(i) the probability of outcome i, and U(i) is the utility of outcome i (how advantageous or disadvantageous it is for you), then the expected utility of the choice is:

(This is a simplified version of the framework, but it is good enough for my purposes here.) But of course, this assumes that we can estimate probabilities, establish utilities, and map all possible outcomes of a given choice. Can we? Questions can be raised for each of these components, but Paul’s concept of transformative experience challenges in particular the possibility of estimating the expected utility of a certain outcome for your future self, post-outcome. It is your present self who does the estimation, but it is your future self who will have to deal with the outcome. After having undergone a transformative experience, your utilities associated with the outcome will likely be very different from the utilities your current self assigns to it, because your preferences will likely have been transformed by the – indeed – transformative experience.

Richard Pettigrew, a fan of expected utility theory himself, has further developed the challenges to rational choice theory and expected utility theory posed by Paul’s notion of transformative experience in his commentary on her book (available here). He believes that the framework can be reformulated so as to accommodate the challenges, but recognizes that ultimately, Paul’s 'existentialist' perspective may not be reconcilable with the conception of decision making underlying rational choice theory.

Other worries and objections to Paul’s analysis have been put forward. One can for example raise concerns as to what counts as a transformative experience (as I’ve done here). The extreme cases are clear, such as the paradigmatic example of becoming a parent, and it is also clear that me having a cup of tea this morning as I do every morning does not seem to qualify as transformative in any obvious way. But how does one draw the line? Is there a line to be drawn, or is it a continuum?

Another worry pertains to her claim that we literally cannot know what it will be like to undergo a transformative experience before doing it. One may object: can’t we just look around and see what happened to people who have undergone similar experiences before, and draw some, even if tentative, conclusions? Perhaps talk to a close friend who has recently become a parent? Statistical data on the effects of becoming a parent? As it so happens, there have been a number of recent studies claiming that becoming a parent will mostly likely make you quite unhappy…

And on this, I want to close with a brief comment on the new rule that ‘generously’ allows for FIVE DAYS of parental leave for fathers (or co-mothers) of a newborn, recently implemented in the Netherlands (an increase from the TWO DAYS up to now…). As pointed out by Ingrid Robeyns at Bij Nader Inzien as well as elsewhere, this is beyond the pale: there is overwhelming evidence showing that paternal leave of at least a month is a very high predictor of positive parenting experiences for both mothers AND fathers – and of course for the children involved. It is also correlated with lower rates of divorce. And so, the Dutch decision to accord no more than five days of parental leave to fathers is deeply regrettable, and likely to perpetuate well-known gender imbalances in the Dutch labor market (women tend to work part-time while men continue to work full time, with the predictable consequence that women rarely end up in leadership positions). The lack of decent paternal leave is also likely to continue giving rise to a lot of domestic unhappiness, as I (sadly) know from personal experience.

And so, if you are considering becoming a parent, one thing  you can be sure of, transformative experience or not, is that you’d better look for a place with generous policies for parental leave for both mothers and fathers. Your future self will thank you profusely.