Farbod Akhlaghi (Christ's College, University of Cambridge), "Transformative Experience and the Right to Revelatory Autonomy"

Analysis, 2022

By Farbod Akhlaghi

Have you ever found yourself with a friend, sibling, or romantic partner who faced a life-changing, transformative choice? Perhaps becoming a parent, changing career, getting married, going to war – perhaps even doing something that would put their relationship with you at risk of ending?

If you are anything like me, you likely agonised over how it would be permissible to act with respect to that person’s choice. You may have wondered, for example, whether it would be permissible to try to stop them from making some decision. But what exactly is morally at stake when we consider directly interfering in another’s transformative choice?

In trying to navigate such treacherous waters, one compass to consult would be the philosophical literature on transformative experience. After all, since at least Edna Ullmann-Margalit and L.A. Paul’s important work, philosophers have come to realise just how deep and difficult the questions such experiences raise are.

Transformative experiences, the story goes, are both epistemically and personally transformative. You can only know what it is like for you to have such an experience by doing so. And doing so changes who you are, in at least the sense of your core preferences and values. Questions regarding how to make a rational transformative choice are now familiar. They are due to the difficulty in knowing what the experience would be like for you, the change in who you are, and the unclarity of whose utilities matter in such a decision.

But the transformative experience literature is relatively silent over the kind of case with which we began. There is little engagement with general questions about, for example, what is morally at stake when we face transformative choices, how that relates to the permissibility of attempted prevention or lesser interference in transformative choice-making, or how those issues relate to the nature of special relationships.

There is an explanation for this. For such work is almost always pursued from the first-person. How do I make a rational transformative choice? But, as we’ve noted, it is often not us who face transformative choices but those to whom we stand in special relationships. Once we notice this, a second shift immediately occurs: there are a host of ethical questions that arise regarding how we can interact with those who face transformative choices. The standard debates over decision theory and transformative choice leave these untouched. 

Of course, there has been important work on some ethical questions that transformative experience raises. For example, Dana Howard’s work on surrogate decision-making, Fiona Woollard’s on the normative import of the transformative experience of pregnancy, and Elizabeth Barnes’ on transformation and social justice. But the interpersonal ethical situations like those above are largely unaddressed by these, as is any more general story about what makes these experiences ethically significant.

In ‘Transformative Experience and the Right to Revelatory Autonomy’, I ask: under what conditions, if any, is it permissible to try to stop someone we stand in a special relationship to from making a transformative choice? I argue that some initially plausible answers, adapted from reflection on interfering in choices more generally, fail precisely because they concern transformative experience.

Instead, I argue that we should recognise a defeasible right to what I call revelatory autonomy. This is not just a right to autonomy as such. Rather, it is a right to come to learn who we will become, and how our lives will go, through making a transformative choice. This right generates a plausible answer to my question: we are permitted to try to stop someone from making a transformative choice if and only if their right to revelatory autonomy is outweighed by competing moral considerations. Obvious cases of outweighing are where respecting said right would require permitting a grave moral wrong, such as not stopping a friend from going on a killing spree to learn what it would be like to do so. Harder cases, of course, are those we began with.

But why think that making such decisions autonomously morally matters? In brief, because of the value of what I call ‘self-authorship’ and ‘self-making’. To explain, reflect upon some major decisions in your life: choosing a career, getting married, becoming a parent. Here are two ways that reflection could go.

First you might think that, regardless of how things went, at least you made these decisions for yourself. In situations where a transformative choice, and thus a choice to change who you are, was under your control, you ensured that it was you who made that choice. As a result, you can see yourself as yourself – a self that you have become through, when it could have been, a transformative choice you made.  

Imagine, instead, that you look back and realise that you did not make these decisions for yourself. Perhaps you were unduly influenced by others, and you now recognise that such influence prevented you from making the decision in a way that you justifiably feel ownership of. For this reason, you may come to feel alienated from the person that you have become. Because in situations where it could have been, who you have become is not the product of a transformative choice that you made.

I suggest that something has gone morally wrong in the second case. One thing that has gone wrong is that your right to revelatory autonomy was not respected by whoever came to unduly influence you. And the reason why this was a moral wrong, I submit, is that autonomously making transformative choices when facing them – deciding for ourselves to learn who we will become – gives us a degree of self-authorship.

‘Self-authorship’ or ‘self-making’ can be read in many ways. One is the alleged moral significance of choosing in accordance with one’s core preferences and values. That is what some mean by ‘authentically choosing’. But that is not what I mean. By ‘self-authorship’, I mean exercising a degree of causal control that we often associate with attributions of praise and blame. This would be a degree of causal control, not necessarily over who we become, but over choosing to learn who we will become through a choice we make. Some degree of self-authorship so-read is crucial for us and others to see ourselves as ourselves – selves we have become at least partly through transformative choices we have made. It is the value of autonomously self-making that grounds the right to revelatory autonomy.

To my surprise, the paper received substantial media attention: at least 75 national and international pieces, in venues such as The Guardian, The Times, Times Higher Education, and others. I was delighted to see such interest in what I think are important questions, which prompted an op-ed from myself in response. One recurring issue was what my views entail about advice-giving in transformative contexts, where I was repeatedly read as suggesting that it is immoral to give advice to our loved ones in such cases.

The matter is complicated, but my views only entail that whatever advice is given, and how it is given, respects the other’s right to revelatory autonomy. In practice, much solicited, and potentially some unsolicited, advice will meet this condition. Still, solicited or unsolicited advice may fail to do so, if, say, one pretends that they know for certain what this decision will be like for the other person, or offers advice too forcefully or too early in someone’s deliberative process. Some advice can even help a person to look back on a decision and rightly feel that they made it themselves. For example, helping them see the transformative nature of a choice, trying to ensure that they do not allow others to unduly influence them, that they take such decisions seriously, or that they are as factually informed as possible.  

Getting such advice-giving right is not easy. But I see no reason to expect that responsible advice-giving in transformative contexts would be. There is much more to say, and I cannot do so here, but we should be wary of drawing quick inferences about the impermissibility of advice-giving from the right to revelatory autonomy.

Many more questions remain. Just how strong is the right to revelatory autonomy? What, exactly, is the moral value of self-authorship, on mine or other readings? What is the relationship between what is morally at stake in transformative choice-making and friendship, family, and love? What is the status of solicited and unsolicited advice-giving in transformative contexts? In what ways might we think that we can be morally responsible for who we become through transformative choice-making? What might reflection on the ethics of transformative choice-making teach us about interpersonal value in general?

In short, even if you think I am wrong about what is morally at stake in the interpersonal ethics of transformative experience, I hope you agree that there is much important work to be done. I’ve raised some questions and started us down one path; I am much more excited about where we may end up. I suspect that, when we get there, that itself will be a most positive transformative experience.

Dr Farbod Akhlaghi

Junior Research Fellow | Christ’s College, Cambridge

Visiting Research Fellow | Trinity College, Dublin