COMMITTEE:
Sripada, Chandra (chair)
Buss, Sarah
Railton, Peter
Lee, Taraz (cognate, Psychology)
Holton, Richard (special member, Cambridge University)
Wong, Hong Yu (special member, University of Tübingen)
ABSTRACT:
This dissertation develops an empirically informed account of four phenomena central to ambitious agency: control, effort, difficulty, and burnout. I argue that they share a common theoretical core in the psychological architecture of cognitive control.
Chapter 1 argues for a causal account of agentially controlled action against Frankfurt-style capacity views, which hold that agents control a movement iff they have the capacity to intervene in it. I show this to be insufficient. Agents can typically intervene in passive breathing, yet passive breathing is not action. Agential control, I suggest, instead consists in the ubiquitous, small-scale causal interventions an agent makes as a movement unfolds.
Chapter 2 develops a unified theory of effort. Mental effort (solving a chess puzzle) and bodily effort (running a marathon) seem fundamentally different, and the philosophical literature is divided over whether effort is one phenomenon or many. I argue that all effort is the goal-directed deployment of cognitive control, and that bodily effort is cognitive control causing central motor commands. Four convergent arguments support this view: subtraction cases, the structure of effort choice, the relation between control and failure, and the reduction of effort in learning.
Chapter 3 offers an account of difficulty in terms of cognitive demand: the higher-order processing capacity a task requires of an agent in their circumstances, given an appropriate means of execution. This account uniquely explains why difficulty decreases with learning, captures the context-sensitivity of difficulty talk, and extends naturally from mental to physical difficulty. I apply it to debates over moral responsibility, achievement, the value of difficult action, and moral demandingness.
Chapter 4 turns to what happens when ambitious moral agents face unsustainable demands. Drawing on an empirical literature in nursing science and psychiatry, I introduce Moral Burnout: a chronic stress condition in which agents who repeatedly fail to act successfully in accordance with their moral judgments lose the motivation to act on those judgments. Moral Burnout is a more potent counterexample to judgment internalism than psychopathy or depression, because it leaves both the capacity for moral judgment and general motivational capacities intact.
Sripada, Chandra (chair)
Buss, Sarah
Railton, Peter
Lee, Taraz (cognate, Psychology)
Holton, Richard (special member, Cambridge University)
Wong, Hong Yu (special member, University of Tübingen)
ABSTRACT:
This dissertation develops an empirically informed account of four phenomena central to ambitious agency: control, effort, difficulty, and burnout. I argue that they share a common theoretical core in the psychological architecture of cognitive control.
Chapter 1 argues for a causal account of agentially controlled action against Frankfurt-style capacity views, which hold that agents control a movement iff they have the capacity to intervene in it. I show this to be insufficient. Agents can typically intervene in passive breathing, yet passive breathing is not action. Agential control, I suggest, instead consists in the ubiquitous, small-scale causal interventions an agent makes as a movement unfolds.
Chapter 2 develops a unified theory of effort. Mental effort (solving a chess puzzle) and bodily effort (running a marathon) seem fundamentally different, and the philosophical literature is divided over whether effort is one phenomenon or many. I argue that all effort is the goal-directed deployment of cognitive control, and that bodily effort is cognitive control causing central motor commands. Four convergent arguments support this view: subtraction cases, the structure of effort choice, the relation between control and failure, and the reduction of effort in learning.
Chapter 3 offers an account of difficulty in terms of cognitive demand: the higher-order processing capacity a task requires of an agent in their circumstances, given an appropriate means of execution. This account uniquely explains why difficulty decreases with learning, captures the context-sensitivity of difficulty talk, and extends naturally from mental to physical difficulty. I apply it to debates over moral responsibility, achievement, the value of difficult action, and moral demandingness.
Chapter 4 turns to what happens when ambitious moral agents face unsustainable demands. Drawing on an empirical literature in nursing science and psychiatry, I introduce Moral Burnout: a chronic stress condition in which agents who repeatedly fail to act successfully in accordance with their moral judgments lose the motivation to act on those judgments. Moral Burnout is a more potent counterexample to judgment internalism than psychopathy or depression, because it leaves both the capacity for moral judgment and general motivational capacities intact.
Explore Similar Events
-
Loading Similar Events...
