One central component of our lives is making choices. While some choices are insignificant or mundane, such as what film to watch or what to have for supper (sorry film buffs and culinary experts), some carry much greater significance. These would typically include decisions about where to move abroad, whether to get married, start a new career, have children, rekindle with someone who betrayed your trust, and so on. Now some such decisions, even though significant or agonizing at the time, do not have a lasting impact on us. That decision about whether to leave your old job and take up the new position that unexpectedly came up might have given you a lot of grief at the time, but, once you decided to go for it, your life went back quickly to normal, leaving you largely unaffected by this change on a more personal level.
However, there are choices we make that shake us to the core and fundamentally transform our personality and preferences concerning what we like and what it is that we want in our lives. These are often those very choices for which we receive most praise or blame in our lives, depending on how they turn out or what our intentions were. Certain cultures place especially high value on personal transformations and the process of taking control of your life and ‘making yourself’. But here is the puzzle. When we take a closer look at such transformations, and decisions to make these transformations, it seems we may not control these transformations after all – at least not to a degree that would warrant our being held morally responsible for them. This runs contrary to how we are ordinarily tempted to think of these transformations and, further, has significant ramifications for considerations about moral responsibility.
General Scepticism
Before I explain how the puzzle regarding transformations arises, let me briefly address a more general strand of scepticism about control and moral responsibility for our choices and actions. To think that we might have less than a firm grip on what we do is hardly a new idea. One prominent argument for this conclusion is made by Galen Strawson (Reference Strawson1994), who dubs it the ‘Basic Argument’. The idea, roughly, is that every decision we make is necessarily a reflection of who we are. Our decisions are results of our character and our preferences. So far so good – why would we want that to be different, anyway? The problem is, however, that who we are originally is inevitably a result of two things, and two things only: our genetics and our upbringing (or nature and nurture as some might want to put it). But we control neither our genetics nor our upbringing. It's not up to me whether I am tall or short. Similarly, it was not up to me how I was brought up and what values and preferences I was instilled with. Because of this, we may argue, I am not in control of who I am and the person I've become (as I lack control over the factors that ‘made’ me). If we further assume, as so-called volitionists do, that moral responsibility requires control, it follows that we are not responsible for who we are. What's more, given that what we do, in the sense of the choices we make and actions we perform, is a reflection or a function of who we are, we are not then morally responsible for those either. We can't be magically responsible for what we do if we are not responsible for who we are, or so Galen Strawson argues.
There are things we may try to say in response to this kind of far-reaching scepticism. For instance, we might think that we can still control (and therefore be responsible for) what we do even though we lack control over who we are (as long as certain other conditions are met). Maybe we can make room for an immaterial soul or reject the mainstream volitionist view in favour of non-volitionism on which responsibility does not require control. Most relevant to our topic, we might think that us being a product of genes and upbringing still leaves us with relevant kinds of control with regard to shaping ourselves in response to these factors. Perhaps, that is, who we are can be up to us – we can control our transformations.
Transformative Experiences
What do I mean by transformations? I am referring to what Laurie Paul calls transformative experiences (Reference Paul2014). Paul explains that a transformative experience is an experience that's very new for the person who has this experience and something which significantly changes the person. A transformative experience is something that is thus both epistemically and personally transformative. Having an epistemically transformative experience means that you learn something new that you did not know, and even could not have known, before you had that very experience. Eating marmite for the first time can be epistemically transformative because I learn what marmite tastes like and could not have known this beforehand. Maybe I had some idea what it might be like before I had my first meal of marmite on toast, but I didn't really know prior to this (especially since describing marmite's taste does not usually go beyond ‘salty’, and all of us marmite-eaters know that barely captures the taste). A personally transformative experience dramatically changes you as a person: it changes what you value, how you are, and how you see yourself. Suppose you decide to help out in a local animal shelter, not because you particularly care about animals, but because you simply want to try something new. Further imagine that this choice leads to a complete overhaul of your values and priorities as you fully dedicate yourself to animal welfare. In such a case, you've been personally transformed.
A transformative experience requires that you both learn something new and significantly change as a person. Choosing to volunteer in the shelter would lead to a transformative experience (as opposed to being merely personally transformative), if, besides a significant shift in your values, you learn something completely new as well (perhaps what it's like to care so deeply for animals). The marmite experience could in theory be transformative too if, apart from learning what it tastes like, you also dedicate your life to helping make more marmite and refuse to eat anything that does not have at least a smidge of marmite on it (as a result of your dramatic value change). I admit that this is somewhat far-fetched, but certainly not impossible. Going back to the examples of significant choices that we started with, such as moving abroad or getting married, all of these can be transformative experiences as long as they are both personally and epistemically transformative.
The Puzzle
In my view, we do not control our transformations to any great extent. You might wonder why this is. After all, it seems that many of us make decisions to undergo transformations freely, often with significant deliberation and weighing of the pros and cons preceding these decisions. At least typically, such choices are not made for us by other people and they are not a result of some knee-jerk reflex that bypasses our agential control. To understand the worry, it is helpful to distinguish between (a) choices to have (or that lead to) transformative experiences, (b) character traits and values that one forms or acquires as a result of making transformative choices, and (c) actions that result from having made transformative choices (and undergoing transformative experiences). Below, I first tackle (a), then consider (b) and (c) together.
Transformative Choices
As the old saying goes, knowledge is power. The more we know, the better we can decide and thus control both the choice we make and the outcome of that choice. In other words, making good choices and having control over choices are inextricably linked. If I make a severely underinformed choice, I may retain some control over it (I make the choice intentionally or on purpose) but, in other important aspects, I lack control over it. Suppose that I am choosing between two jobs and I know very little about each one of them. When I do make my choice, it won't be a good choice. It may happen to have some good consequences for me, but not because these consequences were under my control. The quality of my decision-making process is bad and not something to be recommended (as it's unlikely to yield reliably good results for the decision-maker). In essence, my choice lacks some important aspects of what makes a choice a good one, such as its expressing wisdom or reflecting a proper understanding of the options. Since it won't be a good choice in this regard, there is an important sense in which I can't be said to control this choice.
Imagine a more extreme version of this scenario where you are handed two envelopes, simply marked A and B, both of which contain the details of two job offers. However, you do not know anything about these options beyond their being labelled A and B. Without opening the envelopes, you choose B. Even though you intentionally chose that very option (and it might turn out to have good consequences for you), having made the choice in the dark takes away many of the good qualities a decision-making process might boast, making the quality of your choice subpar and thus less than ideally controlled. This becomes even clearer when you compare such a scenario with a case in which someone has an extremely good (perhaps even perfect) understanding of both options involved. That decision-making process and choice have qualities lacking in the other two scenarios (my choice of jobs and yours), which in turn make for a better, better-informed, and more controlled choice.
The trouble with transformative choices is that we necessarily lack information inherent to a good-decision making process. Put bluntly, transformative choices are, by their nature, underinformed. This is because the information relevant to the transformative choice is not available to the person until after they make that choice and undergo a transformative experience. Specifically, before you make a transformative choice, you do not know, and so cannot base your choice on, those kinds of reasons which can be recognized only when one knows what it's like to have undergone the transformative experience in question.
Let me unpack this a little. Assume that becoming a parent can indeed be a transformative experience, and so choosing to become a parent would be a transformative choice. One will not be able to base one's choice to be a parent on those reasons for or against having this experience, which can only be had after one has already become a parent and one knows what it is like to have that experience. But those reasons will be very important, if not the most important reasons relevant to this choice. This makes the choice to become a parent informationally undernourished. Whether one finds parenthood joyful and an overall very positive experience, or, on the contrary, an experience viewed through a largely negative lens, is not something one can factor into one's decision-making prior to having the experience. Sure, one can make educated guesses based on the testimony of other people and what one reads, but none of this will reveal how the particular transformative experience will be for oneself. But how it will be for a person if they become a parent, what the experience will be like for them, is an important thing to know. Yet, in the case of transformative experiences, no one ever knows. Thus, as one decides to become a parent, one may be ignorant of strong reasons for or against making this choice.
You might think that you have enough information to make a good choice in such situations because you know yourself and what you value. Isn't that sufficient for making a good, informed choice? Not in the case of choosing to undergo transformative experiences, which, as discussed above, radically change core values and preferences. At best, you are working with what will become outdated information once you have actually had the relevant experience, since your values will change as a result of that very experience. If that's the case, your current, pre-transformative values and preferences do not count as good enough information on which to base your choice. In other words, as one's values and preferences change radically in and through transformative experience, certain reasons and considerations for which one may have made the transformative choice in the first place will no longer be relevant after undergoing the experience.
Transformative Actions and Transformative Character
We lack certain important types of control, then, over our transformative choices. Control worries also apply to the actions that we perform as a result of having a transformative experience and to the character traits we acquire through such experiences. This is because both are lucky, which is not obviously compatible with our having control over them. Luck is antithetical to control: if an action is (largely) lucky, there is an important element of control missing. If an action is (largely) controlled, then it is not lucky in any significant manner. I do not control rolling a seven in a game of craps; it's merely lucky whether I do. On the other hand, typing these words out, and having them appear as I want them to, is a matter of skill and control rather than luck. In important respects, what our characters and our actions will be like after transformative experiences is more akin to our rolling dice than our typing things on a computer. We roll the dice and see how things turn out.
Why would that be the case? Recall that a transformative choice results in a person's having radically new values. But what these values will be is a matter of luck: we cannot know beforehand what values we gain and, in turn, how our character is moulded as a result. When we make a transformative choice to do something – to become a parent, to move abroad, or to start volunteer work – how that decision pans out regarding what kind of person we become is lucky. It is simply part of the essence of transformative experiences that a person who undergoes one gains new values and traits, the nature of which she cannot foresee. And because such things are unforeseeable, they are out of the agent's control and, from her perspective, a matter of chance. People do not foresee what it's going to be like, for them, to be a parent, to live abroad, or to volunteer. Therefore, they do not foresee how they are going value these experiences (positively, negatively, etc.) and so how these experiences are going to shape them until after the fact. This is why the nature of one's transformation (of one's values and character) is out of one's control in this important respect.
Similar arguments apply to the actions that result from transformative decisions – how one acts as a parent, a migrant living in a foreign country, or a volunteer at an animal shelter. Going back to Galen Strawson's argument, it seems relatively uncontroversial that what we do is a result of who we are; our actions are functions of our character and our values. If we cannot foresee what our post-transformative experience character will be, we cannot foresee how we are going to act based on our newly acquired traits and values. It's then not just a matter of luck which person we become, understood as which values and traits we have after having the transformative experience, but also how we act as a result of these values. Since you didn't know what it will be like to start volunteering for a shelter, and how this is going to shift your character, you also didn't know how you were going to act as a result of your transformation.
(It is worth mentioning that some transformative experiences are not chosen by us. Whether it is happily falling in love or falling seriously ill, some events change us to the core and teach us new things without us intentionally taking any steps towards these changes. Such cases might present an even bigger hurdle for keeping moral responsibility since there are additional elements of control missing in those kinds of cases.)
Implications
Let me conclude with some considerations about why this matters. It seems that certain reactive attitudes, whether towards other people or towards ourselves, such as blame, praise, resentment, anger, gratitude, and so on, are only fitting if we have enough control over what we do. While you might be angry and blame me if I step on your foot after someone shoved me and I lost my balance, it would be inappropriate. I did not intend to hurt you and I was not in control of (not) losing my balance. On the other hand, if I deliberately choose to kick you, you might, aside from questioning the nature of our friendship, be appropriately annoyed and blame me for hurting you. If our transformative choices, or the actions and character changes that follow from them, are not under our control in an appropriate way, it is perhaps not fitting to dish out praise and blame for them.
There's certainly a tension between where the arguments might lead us and what we want to do – it seems so very natural to give credit to people who significantly transform for the better and clean up their act, or to blame those whose (bad) decisions warp their character. However, if responsibility and attendant attitudes require a substantial amount of control, our choices to have transformative experiences and what follows as a result of those may not pass muster. If we want to salvage moral responsibility for transformative experiences and transformations that ensue, we need to show how the type of control that we do have in transformative experiences guarantees at least some form or degree of moral responsibility. Perhaps the puzzle of transformation is not unsolvable, but it is something we need to reckon with if we wish to protect our ordinary practices of assigning blame and praise.
Finally, consider again Strawson's challenge – how can we be responsible for anything we do if what we do is a result of who we are, and who we are is not up to us? We may have held out hope that one way of responding to this sceptical worry is that who we are is up to us. That is, we may have insisted upon the common notion that we can purposefully and knowingly shape our values and traits. One thing our discussion of transformation has brought out, however, is that we cannot do such a thing (for further discussion, see Herdova Reference Herdova2020). Either the transformations we undergo are not the result of our choices, or, if they are, they are the result of choices we make entirely in the dark and thus over which we have little genuine control. If, as I have argued, we lack responsibility for our transformations, we may also lack responsibility for our actions. If we cannot choose who we are, we cannot be blamed for how we act. For some, this may be a comfort. For others, it will be quite the opposite.
