Alicia M. Wach
University Vienna
In this talk, I argue that holding conflicting sets of norms does not necessarily mean a pathological breakdown of agency for group agents, rather, they can retain agency despite persistent and structural incoherence. I thereby challenge the popular coherence condition for agency in groups.
In ordinary discourse, practice and theory, states, corporations and NGOs are treated as group agents who act, decide and bear responsibility. Yet, they generate conflicting norms through their own structuring. Publicly endorsed norms, e.g. equality guidelines, coexist alongside contradicting informal norms attributable to the group, undermining guiding principles. I call these underlying dynamics implicit programming, building on List & Pettit (2011) and Rachar (2024). It describes tacit norms and habits which ‘program’ for certain outcomes without explicit endorsement and reveal that groups can “hold” norms they never officially adopt.
I then challenge the near-consensus assumption in contemporary literature on collective ethics that internal coherence is a necessary feature of rationality and a prerequisite of agency. Instead, I show how this assumption both misrepresents the operation of real institutions and weakens our ontological accounts by excluding precisely those complex agents that shape modern political and economic life. The talk will illustrate how such groups remain functional and intact agents that are ambiguous, while able to respond to reason or to control actions.
The talk makes two novel contributions: First, it reconceptualizes programming in an implicit form as a cultivation of certain habits and norms. Second, it highlights that recent responsibility-focused approaches by de Haan & Collins (2024) neglect internally generated interference. This reveals a structural gap in current accounts.
The talk argues why the coherence condition is overstated and stresses the need for a non-ideal account of agency.
Chair: tba
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SOPhiA 2026 