Reasoning or Rhetoric? An Empirical Analysis of Moral Reasoning Explanations in Large Language Models
Do large language models reason morally, or do they merely sound like they do? We investigate whether LLM responses to moral dilemmas exhibit genuine developmental progression through Kohlberg's stages of moral development, or whether alignment training instead produces reasoning-like outputs that superficially resemble mature moral judgment without the underlying developmental trajectory. Using an LLM-as-judge scoring pipeline validated across three judge models, we classify more than 600 responses from 13 LLMs spanning a range of architectures, parameter scales, and training regimes across six classical moral dilemmas, and conduct ten complementary analyses to characterize the nature an...
| Authors | Aryan Kasat, Smriti Singh, Aman Chadha et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 23 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
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