Religious Experience, Voluntarist Reasons, and the Transformative Experience Puzzle

Res Philosophica 93 (1):269-287 (2016)
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Abstract

Transformative experiences are epistemically and personally transformative: prior to having the experience, agents cannot predict the value of the experience and cannot anticipate how it will change their core values and preferences. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that these experiences pose a puzzle for standard decision-making procedures because values cannot be assigned to outcomes involving transformative experience. Responding philosophers are quick to point out that decision procedures are built to handle uncertainty, including the uncertainty generated by transformative experience. My paper enters here and contributes two points. First, religious experiences are transformative experiences that are especially resistant to these responses. Second, a procedure that appeals to voluntarist reasons—reasons arising from an act of the will—can allow an agent to rationally decide to undergo or avoid an outcome involving transformative experience. Combining these two points results in some interesting implications with respect to practical aspects of religion.

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Rebecca Chan
San Jose State University

Citations of this work

Transformed By Faith.Rebecca Chan - 2019 - Faith and Philosophy 36 (1):4-32.

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References found in this work

The sources of normativity.Christine M. Korsgaard - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Onora O'Neill.
Transformative Experience.Laurie Ann Paul - 2014 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting'.L. A. Paul - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):1-23.
Grounding practical normativity: going hybrid.Ruth Chang - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 164 (1):163-187.
Transformative Experience and Decision Theory.Richard Pettigrew - 2015 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3):766-774.

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