Moral Competence Before Moral Content: Why LLM Agents Lack the Prerequisites for Coherent Alignment
AI alignment requires AI systems to adhere to human norms, values, or intentions. Under value pluralism there is no correct target, but a shared prerequisite is that the system's behavior expresses a coherent policy: a mapping from situations to verdicts that is invariant while a situation's morally relevant features are preserved, and sensitive when they change. We introduce four structural conditions for such coherent policies: verdict stability, monotonicity, decisiveness, and Pareto viability. Together they measure a form of moral competence that is evaluable from behavior alone, without reference to a moral standard or expert baseline, forming a structural floor for alignment rather ...
| Authors | Arno Libert, Derck W. E. Prinzhorn, Daan R. Henselmans |
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| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 4 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 September 2026 |
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