VFWA2026: Varieties of free will and agency University of Sussex Falmer, UK, July 1-2, 2026 |
| Conference website | https://freewillandagency.wordpress.com/ |
| Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vfwa2026 |
| Abstract registration deadline | March 15, 2026 |
| Submission deadline | May 15, 2026 |
Part of the 2026 convention of the UK Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), 1-2 July at the University of Sussex, UK.
What does it mean to say that a certain class of agents have free will? This symposium is a follow-up to last year’s successful AISB symposium on free will.
Free will is broadly considered to be an agential capacity, tied to attribution of responsibility both moral and legal. Is free will an illusion? If so, is it one over which – lacking free will – human beings have no control? If free will is real, who has it and what does it mean to have it? Is free will limited to human beings, or do certain other animal species have it? Is it conceivable that a present or future artefact could have it?
What are the properties that mark a given agent as having free will or not? Must a free-willed agent be by some appropriate description intelligent? Must it be conscious? Must it be reflectively self-aware? Some would ascribe all these properties to present-day chatbots. Do they have free will? If not, what are they lacking?
Is free will dependent on “the ability to do otherwise”, as leeway compatibilists and many if not most libertarians would have it? Is it rather dependent on proximal locus of control, as Daniel Dennett has suggested? Does free will merely require the agent being the source of its own agency — the agent’s actions are in some substantive sense its own — as the source compatibilists claim? Is it the agent’s history that matters: how the agent came to acquire its properties of agency? Do purported AI agents have these properties, or are they ”agents” in a different, perhaps strictly metaphorical sense?
How much, if at all, does it matter if an agent “really” has free will or not? What is the difference between an agent claiming free will and actually having it?
What would it mean for a non-human species or an artefact to be successfully identified as having free will? How would that change its relation to us, and how might that change our understanding of what it means to be human?
This symposium is interested in revisiting traditional perspectives around free will and, more so, exploring fresh perspectives that address these and related questions. It seeks out approaches that can move discussion past the post-Benjamin Libet stalemate, caught between compatibilism, where free will is compatible with determinism in a mechanistic universe; and those positions, including hard determinism, hard incompatibilism and libertarianism, where free will and determinism are seen as incompatible.
It is interested in libertarian views, where “libertarian” is to be understood as arguing for the ability to choose otherwise, or to have chosen otherwise, despite previous states of the universe being in all discernible ways the same. Is libertarian free will dependent, as Robert Kane would have it, on quantum indeterminacy, or are there other paths open that avoid relying on what amounts to chance?
It is likewise interested in compatibilist views according to which, even presuming determinism is true, a substantive form of free will is not ruled out. These could revolve around what, exactly, ”determinism” means, and whether or not causal determinism amounts to strict determinism. Many compatibilists are also determinists; but what of those who are not? Is Dennett the straightforward determinist he often presents himself as, or is it possible to read in him a more nuanced view?
It is interested in hard-determinist views, historically linked back to Pierre-Simon Laplace and nowadays best associated with Ted Honderich. What are the strongest arguments to be made for hard determinism? What are the consequences of holding fast to a hard-determinist view, and what paradoxical or outright contradictory conclusions might be lurking? Why is hard determinism, like libertarianism, often taken to be a minority view?
Finally, the symposium is interested in hard-incompatibilist views, according to which free will is incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism (chance) — generally with no possibility for a third alternative that isn’t causally predetermined or indeterministic. Derk Pereboom, who coined the term ”hard incompatibilism”, considers it an empirical matter that such a third alternative is ruled out; and so there is no free will, only the appearances thereof.
We especially welcome submissions that play these positions off one another in the context of present or future AI agents that might, reasonably, be said to possess free will. In the interests of interdisciplinary dialogue, we are keen to hear not just from philosophers working in free will, agency, or AI, but also from cognitive scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, and AI engineers.
Submissions should be in the form of extended abstracts or full papers (with preference to full papers), formatted according to the following template: [MS Word (recent)] [MS Word (older versions)] [LaTeX].
Deadlines
30 Dec: submission opens
15 Mar: submissions close
15 Apr: notification to authors
15 May: camera-ready copies of final abstracts/papers due, along with completed copyright forms
1-2 Jul: 2026 convention of the UK Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour