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

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)

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.

Manuscripts

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 (under review)

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.