How Utilitarian Are OpenAI's Models Really? Replicating and Reinterpreting Pfeffer, Krügel, and Uhl (2025)
Pfeffer, Krügel, and Uhl (2025) report that OpenAI's reasoning model o1-mini produces more utilitarian responses to the trolley problem and footbridge dilemma than the non-reasoning model GPT-4o, and they raise the question whether growing reasoning capabilities bring about a "utilitarian turn" in LLMs. I extend their exploratory study in a direction they call for: with four current OpenAI models and systematic prompt variation. On the trolley dilemma, the hypothesized utilitarian turn is not confirmed. GPT-4o's low utilitarian rate reflects safety refusals triggered by the prompt's advisory framing rather than a deontological commitment; on reformulated prompt variants -- for instance, a...
| Authors | Johannes Himmelreich |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 July 2026 |
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