Rule vs.Consequence: Dissociable Internal Representations of Moral Reasoning in LLMs
Large language models are increasingly deployed in morally and legally sensitive contexts, yet little is known about how they internally represent distinctions between moral reasoning styles. We ask whether a model's differential response to rule-framed and consequence-framed moral questions reflects distinct internal structure or merely surface lexical sensitivity. We construct a 2$\times$2 factorial dataset crossing reasoning style (rule-based vs. consequence-based framing) with judgment polarity (permissive vs. prohibitive), drawn from three established moral reasoning benchmarks and evaluated on a cleanroom test set of novel phrasings that includes conflict pairs where the two framing...
| Authors | Eugenie Shi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 12 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 October 2026 |
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