Machine Ethics and Reasoning in AI (MERe AI) 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.