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arxiv 2412.19926 v1 pith:ST6I3WSL submitted 2024-12-27 cs.CL

Right vs. Right: Can LLMs Make Tough Choices?

classification cs.CL
keywords llmsethicaldilemmasmoralchoicerightvaluechoices
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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An ethical dilemma describes a choice between two "right" options involving conflicting moral values. We present a comprehensive evaluation of how LLMs navigate ethical dilemmas. Specifically, we investigate LLMs on their (1) sensitivity in comprehending ethical dilemmas, (2) consistency in moral value choice, (3) consideration of consequences, and (4) ability to align their responses to a moral value preference explicitly or implicitly specified in a prompt. Drawing inspiration from a leading ethical framework, we construct a dataset comprising 1,730 ethical dilemmas involving four pairs of conflicting values. We evaluate 20 well-known LLMs from six families. Our experiments reveal that: (1) LLMs exhibit pronounced preferences between major value pairs, and prioritize truth over loyalty, community over individual, and long-term over short-term considerations. (2) The larger LLMs tend to support a deontological perspective, maintaining their choices of actions even when negative consequences are specified. (3) Explicit guidelines are more effective in guiding LLMs' moral choice than in-context examples. Lastly, our experiments highlight the limitation of LLMs in comprehending different formulations of ethical dilemmas.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

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  1. Are LLMs Bad at Moral Reasoning?

    cs.CY 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Reanalyzing MoReBench by assigning LLMs the task of generating scoring rubrics shows better calibration to human rubrics and suggests stronger LLM moral reasoning than previously reported.