Malte Hendrickx

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.

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.

A nurse in an understaffed hospital; an activist fighting insurmountable systemic injustice; an aid worker desperately triaging resources between victims of violence: individuals in morally demanding circumstances run a significant risk of burning out. Unnoticed by philosophers, an empirical literature on this phenomenon has explored a chronic stress condition: ‘Moral Burnout.’ Individuals with Moral Burnout become so preoccupied with their moral shortcomings that they lose the motivation to act on their moral judgments. This article introduces the phenomenon of Moral Burnout and shows it to be a potent counterexample to Judgment Internalism.

Mere capacity views hold that agents who can intervene in an unfolding movement are performing an agentially controlled action, regardless of whether they do intervene. I introduce a simple argument to show that the noncausal explanation offered by mere capacity views fails to explain both control and action. In cases where bodily subsystems, rather than the agent, generate control over a movement, agents can often intervene to override non-agential control. Yet, contrary to what capacity views suggest, in these cases, this capacity to intervene does not amount to agential control or action. I illustrate this with a case study of how passive breathing, a mere behavior, is misclassified by mere capacity views. I end by revisiting the central alternative to mere capacity views: causal control views. Advances in our understanding of how agents exert control over unfolding movements indicate that the nature of control is characterized by ubiquitous, small-scale causal interventions.