With your puberty example, I expect I would have passed up the pill at the time and remained asexual. Whether that would have been the right choice is a lot harder to figure out...
Jeff—these examples, of whether to pass through puberty, and whether to become a parent, raise some profound issues (a la Derek Parfit) about the continuity of personal identity. They’re basically about decisions about whether to become a new person, and they’re basically irreversible. So, yes, it’s very hard to know whether such a profound change is ‘the right choice’… because it’s a choice that basically extinguishes the person making the choice, and creates a new person who’s stuck with the choice.
Which can sound very scary, or very liberating and transformative, depending on one’s risk tolerance.
With your puberty example, I expect I would have passed up the pill at the time and remained asexual. Whether that would have been the right choice is a lot harder to figure out...
Jeff—these examples, of whether to pass through puberty, and whether to become a parent, raise some profound issues (a la Derek Parfit) about the continuity of personal identity. They’re basically about decisions about whether to become a new person, and they’re basically irreversible. So, yes, it’s very hard to know whether such a profound change is ‘the right choice’… because it’s a choice that basically extinguishes the person making the choice, and creates a new person who’s stuck with the choice.
Which can sound very scary, or very liberating and transformative, depending on one’s risk tolerance.