From Virtual to Virtue: Ethics, Epistemology, and Education
June 15-16, 2026
Ljubljana, Slovenia (venue: National Museum of Slovenia – Metelkova)
Conference information
We are delighted to announce a conference dedicated to exploring virtue, virtuousness, and related concepts in the context of emerging AI technologies and the digital realm. Grounded in the understanding that human beings are fundamentally relational, and that virtues are formed through lived experience, the conference examines how these processes are challenged and reshaped within digital environments.
Conference program
DAY 1 — June 15th 2026
09:00 – 09:40 — Jennifer Ang Mei Sze: Moral Predicaments and Responsible Moral Agents
09:40 – 10:20 — Marco Tassella: Moral AI and Moral Upskilling – The Procedural Artificial Moral Assistant
10:20 – 10:40 — Coffee Break
10:40 – 11:50 — GaMS LLM Session:
- Domen Vreš: Building GaMS: Addressing Data Scarcity and Cultural Alignment in a Less-Resourced Language (link)
- Octavian Machidon & Alina L. Machidon: Aligning Large Language Models with Human Moral Judgment: Insights from a Subset of the ETHICS Dataset
- Vojko Strahovnik & Mateja Centa Strahovnik: Reasons and Ethics Training of LLMs (handout)
11:50 – 12:00 — Short Break
12:00 – 13:00 — PhD Session:
- Carl Sohmer: The Problems of AI, The Reconfiguration of Education, and Intellectual Character Paradigm of Education
- Hannah Fitzke: From Theory to Practice in Relational Ethics
- Urška Jenčič: Uncanniness of AI Animals – How AI-Generated Animal Slop Reinforces The Human–Animal Divide
- Mátyás Nagy: Am I the One Who Decides? Determinism in Profiling and Recommender Systems in the Age of AI
13:00 – 14:30 — Lunch
14:30 – 15:10 — Jakob Ohlhorst: Virtues in Joint Reasoning with LLMS
15:10 – 15:50 — Diana Daly: Thinking Scenes: Performance, Disappearance, and the Staging of Machine Cognition
15:50 – 16:10 — Coffee Break
16:10 – 16:50 — Anco Peeters & Lotte van Elteren: From Pedagogical Wisdom to Frictional AI
16:50 – 17:30 — Ivan Cerovac: Content Moderation and Epistemic Democracy: Evaluating Meta’s Shift from Fact-Checking to Community Notes
20:00 — Conference Dinner (Location: Dežela okusov, map)
From Virtual to Virtue
DAY 2 — June 16th 2026
09:00 – 09:40 — Jason Kawall: Cultivating Epistemic Autonomy With (and Despite) the Use of Generative AI
09:40 – 10:20 — Peter Fossey: Performing Authorship with Generative AI
10:20 – 10:40 — Coffee Break
10:40 – 11:20 — Borut Trpin: Aesthetic Injustice without Participants?
11:20 – 12:00 — Dušan Rebolj: Epistemic Courage, Trust, and Faith: In AI, and Because of AI
12:00 – 12:10 — Short break
12:10 – 13:00 — PhD Session:
- Jan Hölzer: LLM-based Driver Education: On the Potential of Vision-Language-Action Models for Meaningful Human Control in Partially Automated Driving
- Francisco Miguel Macías-Pozo: The impact of Online Echo Chambers in Epistemic Virtues and Vices Key for Political Debate: How Online Interactions are Shaping and Shaped by our Epistemic Character and Beliefs About Democracy
- Madeleine Potoskie: Cultivating Intellectual Character in AI-Mediated Classrooms
- Pietro Phelan: Virtual Acknowledgement A Cavellian Approach to Empathy and Immersive Technologies
13:00 – 14:30 — Lunch
14:30 – 15:10 — Delfin Tursin: Temporal Stress Patterns in Virtual Reality-Based Trauma Care Training: A Multimodal Study of Nursing Students’ Physiological and Interactional Responses
15:10 – 15:50 — Jonas Miklavčič: Living in the Cut: Virtuality as a Post-Cinematic Environment of Moral Formation
15:50 – 16:10 — Coffee Break
16:10 – 16:50 — Thomas Mitchell: Trustworthy AI and the King Midas Problem
17:00 — Concluding words
Abstracts
Book of abstracts (link to PDF)
Links to posters
- Carl Sohmer: The Problems of AI, The Reconfiguration of Education, and Intellectual Character Paradigm of Education
- Hannah Fitzke: From Theory to Practice in relational Ethics
- Urška Jenčič: Uncanniness of AI Animals – How AI-Generated Animal Slop Reinforces The Human–Animal Divide
- Mátyás Nagy: Am I the One Who Decides? Determinism in Profiling and Recommender Systems in the Age of AI
- Jan Hölzer: LLM-based Driver Education: On the Potential of Vision-Language-Action Models for Meaningful Human Control in Partially Automated Driving
- Francisco Miguel Macías-Pozo: The impact of Online Echo Chambers in Epistemic Virtues and Vices Key for Political Debate: How Online Interactions are Shaping and Shaped by our Epistemic Character and Beliefs About Democracy
- Madeleine Potoskie: Cultivating Intellectual Character in AI-Mediated Classrooms
- Pietro Phelan: Virtual Acknowledgement A Cavellian Approach to Empathy and Immersive Technologies
Other info
Student section and workshops
The conference will include workshops and poster presentations devised for PhD candidates and early-career researchers. These workshops and presentations will provide a supportive environment for presenting work in progress, receiving feedback, and engaging in methodological and conceptual discussions fostering academic growth. (Students are invited to apply at the contact email below.)
Deadlines and other instructions
The conference is planned as an exclusively in-person event. Each lecture will last 30 minutes (followed by 15 minutes of Q&A).
Conference fee: In alignment with the Centre’s commitment to open and accessible science, there is no registration fee for this event.
All presenters will receive complimentary coffee, snacks, and lunch on both days of the conference. Additionally, presenters will receive a conference swag bag and an invitation to submit a full paper for a peer-reviewed collection (to be published by an international academic publisher, TBD).
Full paper submission (optional): The deadline for submission is tentatively scheduled for early autumn 2026. Instructions TBA.
Program committee
Vojko Strahovnik
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
Director of the Centre for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of New Technologies
Mateja Centa Strahovnik
Faculty of Theology, University of Ljubljana
Leader of the research programmeThe Intersection of Virtue, Experience, and Digital Culture: Ethical and Theological Insights
Diana Daly
Associate Dean, Graduate Academic Affairs, University of Arizona College of Information Science
Ivan Cerovac
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka
Contact person
Mateja Centa Strahovnik
Faculty of Theology, University of Ljubljana
info@identity.ethics-ai.eu
About the Venue
National Museum of Slovenia – Metelkova
The new venue of the National Museum of Slovenia is housed in the ex-barracks complex on Metelkova street. The transformation of the one-hundred-year-old barracks complex, comprising the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Slovenian Cinemateque and the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, was designed by the local Architectural Bureau Groleger and Miroslav Kvas. In the glass-clad extension the Museum building has a string of restoration workshops as well as a lecture room, while the exhibition galleries are on the ground floor (for temporary exhibitions and displays) and on the first and the second floors the permanent exhibition History and Arts Collections.
(images courtesy of: National Museum of Slovenia)
Info about visiting Slovenia: https://travelslovenia.org/