Welcome to FEAR 2026

The Third International Workshop on Formal Ethical Agents and Robots (FEAR) will be held on 3 November 2026 with co-located tutorial scheduled for 2 November 2026 both at the Kilburn Building, the University of Manchester, UK.

Overview

Machine ethics, the field where most work on formal ethical agents and robots is found, is in general concerned with equipping autonomous intelligent agents with explicit moral reasoning capability. This problem offers many challenges and requires many minds form different disciplines. As part of planned activities within the Distinguished International Associates program with the Royal Academy of Engineering we would like to consolidate and enlarge the field of formal methods for machine ethics within the UK. To this end we are offering this tutorial, collocated with the The Second International Workshop on Formal Ethical Agents and Robots (FEAR)

Tutors

Ethics under uncertainty
Marcus Pivato
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Marcus Pivato
Marcus Pivato
Topic

TBA

Ethics of human and AI
Malcolm Brown
University of Bath, United Kingdom
Malcolm Brown
Malcolm Brown
Topic

Ethics is most frequently encountered as a series of processes or checks which validate a particular field of work. But Ethics is also an academic discipline and, no less than others, is vigorously contested between divergent schools of thought. So, when we talk about ethics in the context of other realms of study or activity, including the development and application of AI, we have to ask, What sort of ethics? Today, the state of ethical thinking in the academy is out of step with what passes for ethics in Western society in general – and this poses important challenges to the ways in which AI is being rolled out. The culture of the global marketplace has fostered an assumption that consequentialist ethics is all there is, and a crude utilitarianism follows. Academic ethics has, for the last 40 years or so, turned increasingly to the nature of the human person, the idea of virtue and the practices of moral formation. Bringing the ethics of the human, and of virtue, into the ways we build AI has become an urgent necessity as the interface between technology and the human person becomes more loaded with both promise and threat. In the process, our language of AI in relation to the human person may have to change and perhaps we will come to understand better exactly what makes us human in the first place.

Reward Machines and Norms
Radu Calinescu
University of York, United Kingdom
Radu Calinescu
Radu Calinescu
Topic

TBA

Registration Information

This year we will hold a free one-day workshop with informal proceedings, consisting of short talks and opportunities for discussion, and a free one-day tutorial that engages conversation in the state-of-the-art machine ethics fields. The workshop and tutorial will be held at Atlas room, Kilburn Building, the University of Manchester.

FEAR will be a hybrid meeting, supporting both virtual and in-person attendance. We strongly encourage in-person attendance. We encourage PhD candidates and interested academics to register via this link.

Program Chair

Louise Dennis, University of Manchester
Marija Slavkovik, University of Bergen
Raynaldio Limarga, University of Manchester
Sarah Moth-Lund Christensen, University of Sheffield
Tuva Bardal, University of Warwick
Marina De Vos, University of Bath

Program Committee