The Ethics at Notre Dame Symposium (“ENDs” for short) is a biennial, thematic conference in normative ethics held every other spring at the University of Notre Dame, beginning in 2027. Free and open to all registrants, ENDs aims both to advance new work on significant themes in ethical theory and to support scholars, especially those early in their careers, through feedback, mentorship, and potential publication opportunities.
Each conference features a call for abstracts, and future meetings will also invite theme proposals from prospective guest co-organizers. With generous support from Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good and the Ethics Initiative, ENDs covers presenter expenses, offers financial assistance grants, provides a stipend for guest co-organizers, and awards a $5,000 early-career paper prize.
ENDs invites submissions of abstracts for ENDs 2027, which will be held at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, on Friday, April 30, and Saturday, May 1, 2027. Abstracts should be between 750 and 1,000 words (inclusive of everything except the bibliography) and must be prepared for blind review. The title of the proposed paper should be included at the top of the document, above the abstract. Please save the abstract as a PDF titled with the paper’s name (e.g., “Paper’s Title.pdf”) and attach it to an email sent to ends@nd.edu with the subject line “Abstract for ENDs 2027.” The deadline for submission is noon (EST) on Sunday, December 6, 2026.
The proposed paper must be in normative ethics and engage with the theme “Ethics Beyond Action.” Submissions that open up new lines of inquiry related to this theme are especially encouraged.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to: (1) moral education; (2) moral perception; (3) moral virtues and vices; (4) morally relevant feelings, attitudes, and emotions; (5) moral ideals and individual and cultural moral improvement; (6) whether things besides actions (such as beliefs, biases, feelings, perceptions, dispositions, etc.) can be right or wrong; (7) whether moral theories should avoid being exclusively act-oriented; (8) the moral significance of motives and intentions; (9) the epistemological relevance of emotions to deontic and evaluative assessment; (10) the moral relevance of the reasons or motives on which we act; and (11) whether moral responsibility extends beyond voluntary control.