Persons, Identity, and Conflict
Finally, since 2017 my research has been concerned more and more with the nature of persons and the consequences of that for understanding friendship, interpersonal conflict, silencing, responsibility, personal identity, paternalism, meaning in life, and more.
So far, this work has resulted in several papers, and I have presented parts of it at Stanford, Pittsburgh, UC-Santa Cruz, USC, the Royal Institute for Philosophy, the University of Illinois, SUNY Buffalo, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of Arizona, Dartmouth University, Colgate University, Syracuse University, UCLA, the University of Virginia, and the University of Texas.
I’ve become impassioned by this project, as it promises to draw on and illuminate my past interests while offering simple tools that are easy to translate outside of philosophy. It has also inspired my creation of the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project at USC. The next step of this research program is to bring together some of the most central ideas into a book about what philosophical theories of the self can tell us about conflict in interpersonal relationships, tentatively titled When Things Get Personal and based on the Mangoletsi-Potts lectures that I gave at Leeds University in May and June 2023.
This project has also grown into more fully developing the foundations of the interpretive theory of persons that I think underlies so many fruitful applications, and extending that theoretical framework to think about other topics in philosophy, including in aesthetics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of law. The main thread through this more foundational and extended work is developed in my book manuscript in progress, Interpretive Objects: Meaning in Language, Life, and Law, based on my Hempel Lectures delivered at Princeton University in May 2023.
Discord
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‘Conflict, Discord, and Strife.’ Unpublished paper.
In this paper I introduce the concept of discord, and show how views on which attributability interpretation is value laden can make sense of how discord can make conflict persist even between well-meaning people. See video, below.
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‘Introducing Discord.’ Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 30(4): 548-571, July 2025.
In this paper I introduce the concept of discord, show the effects both discord in its own right and the failure to recognize discord have on interpersonal relationships, and explain why discord is common.
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‘Illusions of Ill Will’.
In this paper in progress, delivered so far at Toronto and St. Andrews, I explore how the concept of illusions of ill will is helpful in order to more systematically understand how conflict can divide us unnecessarily, and why no solution to this structural problem can be perfect.
The ideas in this paper have turned into chapter three of When Things Get Personal.
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We’re all imperfect. Good relationships require seeing each other through these imperfections—distinguishing what is signal, and what is noise. But sometimes we mistake noise for signal—or worse, signal for noise. And even when we get things right, the other person can be getting them wrong. In When Things Get Personal, Mark Schroeder shows that the better we can learn to tell the difference between signal and noise in our relationships, the better we can predict and avoid everyday misunderstandings that, if left unchecked, can lead to “discord”—fundamental, sometimes chronic failures to see eye to eye that lead us to take things personally that we shouldn’t, to treat others in ways that they take personally, to abandon relationships that are worthwhile, and to stay in relationships that we’d be better off without.
Engagingly written, story-driven, and rich with powerful ideas and insights, When Things Get Personal addresses conflicts between colleagues, friends, and partners—and between parents and their children. Along the way, it explores the role discord plays in abusive relationships, in tragic coming-out stories, in political polarization, in small ongoing disagreements over things like how to load the dishwasher, and much more.
Discord gets us all into serious trouble. But unrecognized discord is even worse. When Things Get Personal teaches you to recognize the causes and symptoms of discord, allowing you to escape many of its worst effects. You will understand other people better—and maybe yourself, as well.
Particular Kinds of Conflicts
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‘Attributive Silencing.’ Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 12: 170-192, July 2022.
In this paper I elaborate on the concept of attributability or “deep self” silencing introduced by Mary Kate McGowan. I argue that this constitutes an especially important kind of silencing that is especially likely to help us to understand important social phenomena.
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‘Treating Like a Child.’ Analytic Philosophy 63: 73-89, October 2020.
In this paper I consider why paternalism is not always wrong, and whether that is better explained by the status of children or by the relationship between children and their parents. I argue for the latter thesis.
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‘Tipping Points: Abuse and Transformative Discovery.’ Free & Equal 1(1): 1-35.
In this paper I argue that the twin roles of agency and the good in good interpersonal interpretation can help us to make sense both of why it is so difficult to apply Maya Angelou’s advice that “when someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time” and why we can suddenly undergo interpretive shifts that make it look like this should have been obvious all along.
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‘Agnostic Wrongs and Pragmatic Disencroachment.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 110(3): 916-938, May 2025.
In this paper I take up the question of whether victim testimonies - and the issues raised and articulated by the slogan “Believe Women!”, in particular - constitute an especially pressing reason to worry that there are wrongs of agnosticism, as well as wrongs of belief.
Persons
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‘Persons as Things.’ Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 9: 95-115, November 2019. Forthcoming in Chinese translation in Philosophical Analysis.
This paper is a kind of extended response to Rae Langton’s article ‘Duty and Desolation.’ It’s the first paper that I wrote in this major new turn in the direction of my research.
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‘Person as an Evaluative Concept.’
So far, this paper consists merely in a Zoom talk that I gave in summer 2020. (See recording, below.)
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One of the great strengths of analytic philosophy is that by taking large problems or questions apart into smaller parts, it enables making substantial progress. But we sometimes forget to put those parts back together. This book is an exercise in putting things back together.
The book introduces and devlops the concept of an interpretive object and applies it to works of literature, words, lingiustic contexts, persons, laws, and constitutional traditions. It draws out key common threads in each of these topics and uses those threads to help them to cast light on one another, as well as provides a more rigorous foundation for the picture of persons that undergirds When Things Get Personal.
The central thesis of the book is that all and only interpretive objects are inherently meaningful, in a sense of ‘inherent’ defined in the book as well as in my paper ‘Tipping Points’.
Interpretive Objects comes out of the Hempel Lectures that I delivered at Princeton in May 2023. It is under contract to appear from Princeton University Press in fall 2027.
Narrative and Identity
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‘Why You’ll Regret Not Reading This Paper.’ Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 85: 135-186, August 2019.
This paper takes up a puzzle about the significance of anticipated regret in major life decision making, and argues that its answer turns on the importance of our narrative relation to our own lives.
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‘Narrative and Personal Identity.’ Aristotelian Society suppl volume 96(1): 209-226, June 2022.
In this paper I introduce connections between personal identity over time, in space, and in quality, and argue that what they share in common is narrative in structure.
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'Authorial Freedom.’ Forthcoming in Marusic and Schroeder, eds., Analytic Existentialism. Oxford University Press, 2024.
In this paper I lay out an extended analogy between existentialist freedom and authorship of a serial novel, and defend it against objections.
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‘The Join.’ Unpublished short story.
This short story constitutes an answer to one of Parfit’s particularly complex cases of personal identity over time.
Philosophy of Law
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Paper draft - available upon request.
This paper draws on my book Interpretive Objects to introduce the hypothesis that laws are interpretive objects and show the ways that it helps us to think about issues concerning statutory interpretation, judicial review, and respect for same-level precedent.