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DTSTAMP:20260609T084830
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260612T140000
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SUMMARY:Other:Dissertation Defense: Ambition
DESCRIPTION:COMMITTEE:\nSripada\, Chandra (chair)\nBuss\, Sarah\nRailton\, Peter\nLee\, Taraz (cognate\, Psychology)\nHolton\, Richard (special member\, Cambridge University)\nWong\, Hong Yu (special member\, University of Tübingen)\n\nABSTRACT:\nThis 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.\n\nChapter 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.\n\nChapter 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.\n\nChapter 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.\n\nChapter 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.
UID:148618-21904533@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/148618
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Dissertation
LOCATION:Angell Hall - 2271
CONTACT:
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