Deciding Whether to Start a Family: A Case Study Scenario

What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting

This assignment is based on Case Study Scenario.Please read through the piece and answer the 2 questions in the weekly response clearly and thoughtfully.

Paul, “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting”

You have no children. However, you have reached a point in your life when you are personally, financially and physically able to have a child. You sit down and think about whether you want to have a child of your very own. You discuss it with your partner and contemplate your options, carefully reflecting on the choice by assessing what you think it would be like for you to have a child of your very own and comparing this to what you think it would be like to remain childless. After careful consideration, you choose one of these options:

The way you went about making your choice seems perfectly apt. It follows the cultural norms of our society, where couples are encouraged to think carefully and clearly about what they want before deciding that they want to start a family. Many prospective parents decide to have a baby because they have a deep desire to have children based on the (perhaps inarticulate) sense that having a child will help them to live a fuller, happier, and somehow more complete life.

While many people recognize that an individual’s choice to have a child has important external implications, the decision is thought to necessarily involve an intimate, personal component, and so it is a decision that is best made from the personal standpoints of prospective parents. Guides for prospective parents often suggest that people ask themselves if having a baby will enhance an already happy life, and encourage prospective parents to reflect on, for example, how they see themselves in five and ten years’ time, whether they feel ready to care for and nurture the human being they’ve created, whether they think they’d be a happy and content mother (or father), whether having a baby of their own would make life more meaningful, whether they are ready for the tradeoffs that come with being a parent, whether they desire to continue with their current career plans or other personal projects, and so on. 

A Normative Model When we make a choice to do something, we make a decision: we consider various things we might do and then choose to do one of them, and decision theory provides the best account of rational decision-making. Ideal agents in ideal circumstances make choices rationally by conforming to the models of an idealized decision theory. To make a choice rationally, we first determine the possible outcomes of each act we might perform. After we have the space of possible outcomes, we determine the value (or utility) of each outcome, and determine the probability of each outcome’s occurring given the performance of the act. We then calculate the expected value of each outcome by multiplying the value of the outcome by its probability, and choose to perform the act with the outcome or outcomes with the highest overall expected value.

What Experience Teaches All of this might seem perfectly straightforward and unexceptionable. But there is a problem lurking beneath the surface. To see it, begin by reflecting 6 L. A. Paul on an interesting fact about “what it’s like” knowledge, such as knowledge of what it’s like to see red. The interesting fact is that this sort of knowledge, that is, knowing what it’s like, can (practically speaking) only be had via experience. Frank Jackson developed a famous thought experiment to make this point. His example features black-and-white Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist, who is locked in a colorless cell from birth.

Mary has never experienced color. Now, she knows all the facts in a complete physics (and other sciences), including all the causal and relational facts and functional roles consequent on knowing these facts, and including all the scientific facts about light, the human eye’s response to light with wavelengths between 600 and 800 nanometers and any relevant neuroscience. Yet, when she has her first experience of red, she learns something new: she learns what it is like to see red.

1. Present one passage that you thought was confusing and do not understand fully. Explain what you find confusing about the passage.

2. Present one question you have upon reading the piece: confusions, clarifications, conceptual questions, or any other criticisms you might have concerning the arguments in the piece, audio lectures, and so on.