The Vampire Problem

In philosopher L.A. Paul’s book Transformative Experience, she presents a hypothetical that’s become known as the “Vampire Problem,” which illustrates the difficulty of making decisions when truly transformational possibilities are on offer.

The gist of the hypothetical is this: if you have the option to become a vampire, and you know that you could do so without hurting anyone else, and you know you would gain what amounts to superpowers post-transformation (and all of your friends have already become vampires and are having a blast), would you do so?

This is a tricky question in part because there’s no way to know with any certainty what it is like to be a vampire, experientially, beforehand. And to make this change you would have to give up (forever) your innate humanness, including the “powers” of a human (like being able to go outside in full sunlight), but would also face unknowns like what life is like through the lens of a vampire compared to living as a human.

This is a decision, then, that could fundamentally change every aspect of your life, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, but beyond secondhand evidence that might be misleading or illusory, you don’t have any way of knowing which way things will go (maybe your now-vampire friends are lying when they say being a vampire is great, or maybe their innate natures have changed to such a degree that they love being vampires now, but their prior selves—which are gone forever—would be horrified by what they’ve become).