Call for Abstracts for NOWAR 8
We invite you to submit abstracts for the 8th New Orleans Workshop on Agency & Responsibility (NOWAR), to take place on November 13-15, 2025, at the Intercontinental Hotel in New Orleans, LA. Abstracts may be on any area of agency & responsibility, which covers wide but focused terrain (see below for explanation). Abstracts are due no later than noon (EST), March 15, 2025, and should be sent to dws267@cornell.edu. Anyone is eligible to submit an abstract, with the exception of those who presented at the previous NOWAR in 2023.
FORMAT: Abstracts should be no more than three double-spaced pages long (not including bibliography), Times New Roman 12 point font, one-inch margins, saved and sent in PDF format. They should be prepared for anonymous review, with the file name being the title of the paper. Failure to heed these instructions will mean the abstract will not be read.
TIMELINE: Abstracts will be evaluated by a vetting committee, and approximately ten of them will be selected for presentation at NOWAR 8. Full drafts of the proposed papers must be submitted three weeks in advance of NOWAR 8, as this is a read-ahead workshop. Papers must also be exclusively promised as submissions for Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, volume 10 (which will be published by 2027).
NOWAR will go forth without any keynote speakers, as funding has tightened a bit. There will also be a registration fee to secure the event space, graduated in accordance with professional rank.
Please share this CfA with any interested colleagues and students.
NOWAR (New Orleans Workshop on Agency & Responsibility)
is a biennial workshop, sponsored by Cornell University, featuring the presentation of sophisticated original research on issues roughly captured under the label “agency and responsibility.” This general area involves investigation of such questions as: What does it mean to be an agent? How (if at all) does the nature of personhood and personal identity across time bear on questions of agency? What is the nature of, and relation between, moral and criminal responsibility? What is the relation between responsibility and the metaphysical issues of determinism and free will? What do various psychological disorders and neurodivergencies (autism, psychopathy, intellectual disabilities) tell us, if anything, about agency and responsibility, and should the proper conditions of agency/responsibility be derived from neurotypical people? What is involved in the development of moral agency? What are the will, willpower, and weakness (or strength) of will? What do the results from neuroscience imply (if anything) for our questions about agency and responsibility? What is the nature of autonomy and how is it related to agency and responsibility? Are there differences between other-blame/praise and self-blame/praise? Does desert play a crucial role in justifying blame/praise, and is it some kind of moral justification (of justice or fairness, say)? And many more....
Work in agency and responsibility, while more or less having a home base in the world of moral philosophy, draws from a host of cross-disciplinary sources, including moral psychology, psychology proper (experimental, developmental, etc.), political economy, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of law, legal theory, metaphysics, neuroscience, neuroethics, social norm theory, political philosophy, and more. It is unified by its focus on who we are as deliberators and (inter)actors, embodied practical agents negotiating (sometimes unsuccessfully) a world of moral and legal norms.
The Oxford University Press series Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility (I am the general editor) draws on presentations from this workshop.
Starting with the 2025 cycle, NOWAR will be organized and hosted by the recently formed NOWAR Council, which consists in Santiago Amaya, Matt King, Elinor Mason, Hannah Tierney, and Dave Shoemaker.