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
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to a range of concerns about the ethical impact of the technology. This includes concerns about the day-to-day behaviour of robotic systems that will interact with humans in workplaces, homes and hospitals. One of the themes of these concerns is the need for such systems to take ethics into account when reasoning. This has generated new interest in how we can specify, implement and validate ethical reasoning. The aim of this workshop would be to look at formal approaches to these questions. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- Logics for morality and ethics
- Knowledge representation of ethical theories and ethically salient information
- Computational modelling of morality and ethics
- Specification of ethical reasoning and behaviour
- Verification of ethical reasoning and behaviour
- Formal modelling of ethical accountability
Schedule and Location
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. FEAR will be a hybrid meeting, supporting both virtual and in-person attendance. We strongly encourage in-person attendance.
Keynote Speaker
TBASubmission Information
We will accept three types of paper prepared using the EPTCS LaTeX style.
- Regular papers describing completed research (up to 16 pages in length).
- Short papers describing work-in-progress or directions for future work (up to 8 pages in length).
- Abstracts providing a high-level description of some research published (or submitted/intended for publication) elsewhere (up to 2 pages in length).
Papers should be submitted using OpenReview. The paper type should be included as part of the paper title. Reviews will be single-blind. Please note that OpenReview can take up to two weeks to approve a new profile registration that does not contain an institution email address.
We intend to host informal workshop proceedings on OpenReview.
Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: Monday, 3rd of August 2026, 11:59 UTC-0
- Notification: Monday, 7th of September 2026
- Workshop: Tuesday, 3rd of November 2026
