Currently, I spend most of my time thinking about effort, difficulty, and how much moral theories can reasonably demand of people. My research aims to use our best available science to update and inform our philosophical concepts, and ultimately, improve our moral decision-making.

I also have an interest in applied questions in PPE. I use methods from rational choice theory, public choice theory, and psychology to understand how policy failures arise, and how we can model their cost.

Peer-Reviewed Research

Agentially Controlled Action: Causal, not Counterfactual. Philosophical Studies (2023)

In which I argue that popular counterfactual action theories run into fatal counterexamples, and provide an alternative. Counterfactual action theories consider movements actions if the agent can intervene in them as they unfold, regardless of whether the agent actually does intervene. But many mere behaviors, such as passive breathing or blinking, offer such an option for intervention. The cases show that the counterfactual possibility of intervention is irrelevant to the movement’s action status; it is whether the agent causally intervenes that matters. I use a case study of breathing to illustrate the bite of the counterexample. I then provide an empirically informed alternative: a causal account of action that rests upon the ubiquitous deployment of cognitive control by the agent as the movement unfolds.

Who Knows What Mary Knew? Philosophical Psychology (2022, coauthored: Gregory, Hendrickx, Turner)

In which Daniel, Cameron, and I try to adjudicate a disagreement between philosophers about what intuitions “the folk” have about a thought experiment by going out and asking the folk. “Mary the Scientist” is a popular thought experiment purporting to show that an agent who knows all physical facts about e.g. color perception, but has never experienced a color, does not know all the facts about color perception. When first experiencing such a color, they learn something new; if this were true, non-physical facts would be required to explain e.g. color perception. Some philosophers believe that our intuitions about this thought experiment are flawed by reading too much philosophy, and recommend laypeople should be more reliable. Philosophers then disagreed on what verdict laypeople would give, but no one got around to asking them. We ran a study on a large, representative sample to find out what they would say: largely, they believe that Mary the Scientist learns something new.

Manuscripts

Why were there no Human Challenge Trials for Covid 19? (forthcoming, edited volume)

In which I argue that Human Challenge Trials, which would have sped up vaccine development by at least 3 months and saved thousands of lives, were ignored because of problematic incentive structures for healthcare regulators.

Difficulty (under review, winner of the 2024 Cornwell Prize)

In which I argue that difficulty is best understood in terms of how much of our cognitive control capacity is bound by a task, and illustrate how that simple proposal advances our understanding of difficulty’s role in ethics.

Mental-Effort First: A Unified Account

In which I argue that both bodily and mental efforts are instantiated by a common psychological mechanism, and that this unifying mechanism has vast implications for our understanding of effort, ethics and action.

Drafts

Moral Demandingness and Cognitive Cost

In which I argue that the focus on agential welfare cost in the moral demandingness debates neglects the crucial factor of cognitive cost.

Moral Burnout

In which I argue that philosophers have neglected real-life cases that illustrate the consequence of excessive moral demands: moral burnout, which is prevalent among health- and care workers.