I spend a lot of time thinking about ambition: what it means to make an effort, how tasks become difficult, and what we can reasonably demand of ourselves and other 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 work on generalizing insights about control and intelligence from computational neuroscience to other fields. For example, I am interested in what concept of intelligence underlies AI and how that translates into AI capabilities to interact with the real world. Many people are very worried about AI becoming uncontrollably powerful as it grows more intelligent: to understand if that is true, we need to understand what it means for AI to become more intelligent.

Besides these projects, I have an interest in applied questions in PPE and bioethics, particularly as they pertain to the ethics of healthcare. 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.

Research

Difficulty. MIND (forthcoming). Winner of the 2024 Cornwell Prize.

What is difficulty? Despite being invoked in numerous normative debates, the nature of difficulty remains poorly understood. Various accounts, tailored to different explanatory contexts, have recently been proposed in different philosophical discussions. I criticize these accounts. I then provide an alternative, empirically informed account of difficulty in terms of cognitive demand. This account captures both empirical phenomena and folk intuitions regarding difficulty. I further argue that it generalises well, explaining many other facets of difficulty. I conclude by showcasing the broad applicability of this account by examining a set of normative debates that invoke difficulty. I demonstrate that understanding difficulty in terms of cognitive demand facilitates progress on pressing questions in the study of moral responsibility, achievement, the value of difficult actions, and moral demandingness.

The Cognitive Control Account of Effort. Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming)

At first glance, the type of effort required to solve a chess puzzle and run a marathon seems fundamentally different. I argue they’re not. I present a novel account of effort in which all effort is explained through the lens of a domain-general psychological mechanism, cognitive control. I outline how effort choice and execution take place, emphasizing the role of cognitive control, a mental process by which all effort—mental and bodily— is made. I present four arguments that convergently provide strong support for the cognitive control account. Additionally, I examine the implications of this unified theory of effort for philosophical discussions in ethics, philosophy of mind, and action theory.

Moral Burnout. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (forthcoming)

What happens when our moral ambitions become too difficult to follow? I examine real-life cases of moral burnout, which is prevalent among health- and care workers. Individuals with Moral Burnout become so preoccupied with their moral shortcomings that they lose the motivation to act on their moral judgments. I introduce the phenomenon of Moral Burnout and show it to be a potent counterexample to Judgment Internalism. I then explore its practical ramifications for agents trying to strike a balance between moral ambition and personal flourishing.

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

Here, I argue that popular counterfactual action theories run into fatal counterexamples and provide an alternative. Counterfactual action theories consider movements agentially controlled 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 this coauthored paper, we examine laypeople’s intuition regarding “Mary the Scientist”: a popular thought experiment regarding physicalism about consciousness. Some philosophers argue that our intuitions about this thought experiment are flawed due to excessive exposure to philosophical ideas and suggest that laypeople's perspectives are more reliable. Philosophers then disagreed on what verdict laypeople would give, but no one got around to asking them. We conducted a study on a large, representative sample to determine their opinions.

Why Were There no Human Challenge Trials for COVID-19 Vaccines? Applications of Public Choice Theory to Public Policy (2025, eds. Meehan, Lemke, and Aligica, Bloomington Press)

This article provides a public policy analysis concerning the viability of Human Challenge Trials (HCT) for the COVID-19 vaccine. I estimate that such trials would have sped up vaccine development by at least 3 months and saved thousands of lives. Experts and volunteers urgently called for HCT during the pandemic. I argue that they were ignored not for valid ethical reasons, but because of problematic incentive structures for healthcare regulators.

The German translation of the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale: validation and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the observations. PLOS ONE (forthcoming, coauthored: Ambrasė, Hendrickx, Grahlow, Wong & Derntl)

How Utilitarian do laypeople lean? A standard measure of this uses the willingness of participants to sacrifice a human life in a trolley case as an indication of utilitarian sympathies. That’s a bad measure: an alternative measure, the OUS, does better by including questions about whether people would be willing to help others impartially. We translated this improved measure so that German researchers could use it, and validated our translation. We then used the translated version to answer the question of whether laypeople became more sympathetic to Utilitarianism during the COVID-19 panedmic - by and large, they didn’t.

Manuscripts

The Dilemma of Meaningful Work (under review)

In which I explore the question of why finding one’s work meaningful is associated with lower burnout risk while those in the most meaningful jobs burn out at roughly double the rate than the working population, even after adjusting for hours worked. I propose a novel account of burnout risk as it pertains to the meaningfulness of work and suggest solutions that reduce burnout risk without diminishing the meaningfulness of work.