Machine Ethics and Reasoning in AI

Second MERe AI Workshop · 2026

December 14–15, 2026
Vector Institute · Toronto, Canada

In person, with Day 1 streaming planned

Submit via OpenReview by Friday, October 30, 2026, 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC−12). Acceptance notifications will be sent on Friday, November 13, 2026.

About the Workshop

The Machine Ethics and Reasoning in AI (MERe AI) Workshop is a two-day academic workshop bringing together researchers in philosophy, machine ethics, AI safety, and evaluations to strengthen the scientific basis for normative competence in frontier AI systems: the ability to recognize morally relevant features of a situation, apply principles in unfamiliar contexts, and reason through conflicting commitments and uncertainty.

As AI systems encounter situations not spelled out during training, how can we tell whether their moral reasoning is sound? The workshop connects philosophical foundations with empirical evaluation to identify what we should measure, how to measure it, and where current approaches fall short. Shared evaluation targets can support safer systems, more effective human oversight, and responsible use across domains where AI decisions affect people.

Day 1 will feature invited talks, contributed papers, and posters. Day 2 will focus on a shared task: developing a taxonomy of moral reasoning competencies and drafting an open problems paper to guide future research.

Our aim is to build agreement on what competent moral reasoning requires while preserving reasonable disagreement about moral conclusions. This is the second edition of the workshop, following the first MERe AI workshop held online in July 2025.

Call for Papers

We welcome contributions on machine ethics and moral reasoning in AI, spanning philosophical, theoretical, and empirical work. The workshop is non-archival. Review criteria will be published soon.

Submissions must be uploaded as PDFs in the single-column ACM manuscript format. Templates are available for Microsoft Word, LaTeX, and Overleaf. LaTeX users should use \documentclass[manuscript,screen,review,anonymous,nonacm]{acmart}. Submissions must be anonymized for review.

Submit your work through the OpenReview submission site by Friday, October 30, 2026, 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC−12). Reviews will take place November 2–11, with final decisions prepared on November 12 and acceptance notifications sent on November 13. Presenters must confirm their participation by November 20, 2026.

Topics of Interest

We welcome submissions on the following topics, grouped by theme:

Philosophical and Cognitive Foundations

  • Moral reasoning, moral uncertainty, and value pluralism
  • Metaethics and normative theory as foundations for machine ethics
  • Philosophical foundations of alignment, corrigibility, and agency
  • Cognitive science perspectives on moral reasoning and competence

Evaluation and Measurement

  • Evaluation and measurement of normative competence in language models and AI agents
  • Auditing and red-teaming the ethical reasoning of AI systems
  • Cross-cultural and pluralistic perspectives on ethics evaluation
  • Distinguishing sound reasoning from appropriate-looking answers across everyday situations and multi-turn interactions

Alignment, Values, and Multi-Agent Systems

  • Robust alignment under distribution shift and adversarial pressure
  • Specification, elicitation, and aggregation of human values
  • Multi-agent ethics: cooperation, conflict, and norm emergence

Transparency, Oversight, and Governance

  • Interpretability and transparency of ethical reasoning in frontier models
  • Estimating bounds on deception from the comprehensiveness of observable reasoning
  • Surfacing influential or hard-to-follow reasoning steps for effective human oversight
  • Machine ethics in relation to AI governance, standards, and assurance

AI for Ethics Research and Deliberation

  • AI tools for deliberation, argumentation, and conceptual engineering
  • Reflective equilibrium, thought experiment generation, and AI that supports human reasoning

Important Dates

Submission deadline
Friday, October 30, 2026, 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC−12)
Review period
November 2–11, 2026
Final decisions prepared
Thursday, November 12, 2026
Acceptance notifications
Friday, November 13, 2026
Presenter confirmation
Friday, November 20, 2026
Workshop
December 14–15, 2026

Program

The detailed schedule and invited speakers will be announced soon.

Day 1: Presentations and Posters · December 14

Invited talks, contributed research presentations, and a poster session. Streaming is planned for participants who cannot attend in person.

Day 2: Shared Task and Collaborative Writing · December 15

A working day of facilitated discussions to develop a taxonomy of moral reasoning competencies, identify evaluation gaps, and begin a co-authored open problems paper. Participants will shape a research agenda and form collaborations around the gaps they identify.

Shared Task: Moral Reasoning Competencies

There is growing interest in measuring and improving moral reasoning in AI, but limited agreement on the broadly applicable competencies that constitute successful reasoning. Participants will work together to identify these competencies and organize them into a shared taxonomy. The scope includes everyday morally relevant situations and deliberation with users or other models, extending beyond single-turn dilemma answers and chain-of-thought traces.

Possible starting points include:

The intended outputs are a draft taxonomy and an open problems paper that help researchers and funders prioritize concrete research directions. Participants will explore candidate evaluation tasks to clarify what a model should do, how its reasoning could be assessed, and where expert judgment or reasonable disagreement remains. The workshop aims to seed ongoing collaborations; implemented benchmarks are possible follow-on work.

Attendance

We welcome interest from researchers in philosophy, AI, cognitive science, and related disciplines. The workshop will take place at the Vector Institute in Toronto. Day 1 streaming is planned; Day 2 will focus on in-person collaboration.

Registration information and remote access details will be announced here.

Travel Support

We hope to offer limited support for participants without institutional travel funding. Availability, eligibility, and application details will be announced when confirmed.

Organizers

Contact

For workshop inquiries, email contact@mere-ai-workshop.com.