Probing Ethical Framework Representations in Large Language Models: Structure, Entanglement, and Methodological Challenges
When large language models make ethical judgments, do their internal representations distinguish between normative frameworks, or collapse ethics into a single acceptability dimension? We probe hidden representations across five ethical frameworks (deontology, utilitarianism, virtue, justice, commonsense) in six LLMs spanning 4B--72B parameters. Our analysis reveals differentiated ethical subspaces with asymmetric transfer patterns -- e.g., deontology probes partially generalize to virtue scenarios while commonsense probes fail catastrophically on justice. Disagreement between deontological and utilitarian probes correlates with higher behavioral entropy across architectures, though this ...
| Authors | Weilun Xu, Alexander Rusnak, Frederic Kaplan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 March 2026 |
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