Making a choice to become a vampire is an illustrative example provided by Laurie Paul on the significant topic of transformational choices. To make the most informed judgment possible, one should use all of their reasoning faculties. The only way to really understand what it is like to be a vampire is to become one. Take advantage of one of life’s most unforgettable opportunities. However, it would be best if the person were careful not to make a major error. People cannot evaluate what it is like to be someone other than themselves without experiencing being that person.
There is a unique epistemic predicament that might arise when an individual must make a choice based on an experience that is completely novel to them. Most people’s daily decisions do not have them turning into vampires, but they are essentially the same. In making these important decisions, we often choose to go through situations that teach us things we could not learn any other way. Humans are well aware that this event will profoundly alter their perception of life and, maybe, the very core that distinguishes one’s identity. The argument provided by Laurie Paul is that advice can only take a person so far and that, ultimately, they have to make a choice based on a personal assessment of the available information and how it stacks up against their values.
The essence of the argument is to replace the typical decision-making process with a more impersonal approach. When making a major choice in life, it is up to humans to evaluate the available data and choose how they wish to proceed with the decision. Nevertheless, if the focus of the decision is redirected towards how it might affect oneself personally, they are no longer making an informed choice. In the end, the difficulty of choice cannot be understood without making such a decision and feeling the consequences personally.
Similar to the argument about transforming into a vampire deciding whether or not to have a family is irrational. One cannot know what it would be like to have a kid, and so cannot know whether the experience will be immensely satisfying or very irritating before actually having a child. On the contrary, she believes that being a parent fundamentally alters one’s life. Values change, and with them, one is a basic sense of identity. Because of this, people cannot make an informed decision on whether or not to have children based on our expectations of their impact on our lives.
Making an informed choice requires a valuation of the choices’ predicted value. One may calculate the anticipated utility of choice by multiplying the satisfaction gained from making that choice by the likelihood of actually experiencing that pleasure. As a result, the expected utility of the decision to change jobs is a complex function of the overall satisfaction that one will get from the new job, adjusted for the probability that the decision might be wrong, compared to the overall satisfaction of other options similarly adjusted. The trouble with life-altering events is that a person can only begin calculating outcomes like this. If making that decision alters not just personal circumstances but also one’s standards for what constitutes contentment, then there is no way of knowing whether or not making that decision will be fulfilling. Consequently, it is a huge leap into the unknown (interestingly, Martha Nussbaum has argued for similar reasons that selecting formative events is illogical). She argues that because Odysseus could not have experienced immortality, he was justified in rejecting Calypso’s gift of immortality.
he challenge with this line of thinking is that there needs to be more information regarding people’s assessments of their satisfaction with choices. That evidence shows that people need to put very little weight on their assessments. After 50 years of study, it is known that when individuals are not happy with the results of their activities, they will change their beliefs to make more sense of what they are doing. In the classic essay writing task, for example, subjects who are induced to write an essay defending a view that they are unlikely to agree with will later tend to agree with that argument. The result is a cognitive discomfort caused by considering the benefits of alternatives passed in which the favourable aspects of the choice selected are exaggerated. So, on average, the benefits of having children will fall short of the happiness parents report from that decision.
Some argue that it does not matter how individuals conclude that something is worthwhile to them. The truth is that they do like the experience. However, the benefits of this cognitive dissonance-induced shift in value perception remain very questionable. Who knows, they are just fooling themselves. This theory would explain why some individuals are happy to have children while others are not, why parents are less happy with their lives than the childless, and why parents consider their time spent caring for their children to be among the least rewarding of their lives.