Agnes Callard is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and author of Aspiration (OUP, 2018) and On Anger (Boston Review, 2020) and Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life (Norton, 2025).

This talk is an attempt to articulate conformism as a thick ethical concept--which is to say, as something more than, "the word we use for forms of cooperation that we don't like."  I argue that the best way to do so is to see conformism not as a problem for the individual--that she is failing to be authentic or to be true to herself or to be intrinsically motivated--but rather as a problem for the group to which she belongs.  Conformism is a bad equilibrium: the group has settled on a worse form of interaction than some alternative that is, or could be, available to them. The danger we are pointing to in accusing someone of conformism is that they stand to direct us away from the possibility of aspirationally improving the terms on which we relate to one another.