Caroline Hendy | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

A Scalable Approach to Evaluating Moral Sensitivity in LLMs

Moral sensitivity is the ability to identify the morally relevant features of a decision situation and use them as the basis for action. It is the foundation of broader moral competence: any other moral reasoning capabilities will be irrelevant if an agent lacks sensitivity to the relevant facts. In this paper, we offer a new evaluation of LLM moral sensitivity and in doing so, we address and resolve a central problem in AI alignment research: how to scale behavioural evaluations beyond expensive and sometimes metaethically dubious comparisons with a human baseline, without adopting an LLM judge that must be assumed to have the very capability that you are attempting to evaluate. Our central question is this: can LLMs successfully identify the morally relevant features of noisy cases, in which various kinds of morally irrelevant information have been introduced to distract the respondent? To explore this, we introduce \textbf{MORPH-1K (MOral Robustness under Perturbed Hypotheticals)}, a procedurally-generated 1,000-case benchmark spanning 50 moral foundation-pole combinations across four social domains. MORPH-1K is paired with a suite of textual noise elements, along with a method for validating that the distractors do not change the morally salient content of the case. We apply MORPH-1K to eight contemporary LLMs, and show that while morally irrelevant perturbations often changed the number of features listed, the semantic content of those features remained stable across all noise conditions, with similarity scores above our calibrated floor threshold. More broadly, our invariance framework extends to evaluative domains where ground truth is difficult to specify but relevant and irrelevant features can be separated by design.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Discerning What Matters: A Multi-Dimensional Assessment of Moral Competence in LLMs

Moral competence is the ability to act in accordance with moral principles. As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in situations demanding moral competence, there is increasing interest in evaluating this ability empirically. We review existing literature and identify three significant shortcoming: (i) Over-reliance on prepackaged moral scenarios with explicitly highlighted moral features; (ii) Focus on verdict prediction rather than moral reasoning; and (iii) Inadequate testing of models' (in)ability to recognize when additional information is needed. Grounded in philosophical research on moral skill, we then introduce a novel method for assessing moral competence in LLMs. Our approach moves beyond simple verdict comparisons to evaluate five dimensions of moral competence: identifying morally relevant features, weighting their importance, assigning moral reasons to these features, synthesizing coherent moral judgments, and recognizing information gaps. We conduct two experiments comparing six leading LLMs against non-expert humans and professional philosophers. In our first experiment using ethical vignettes standard to existing work, LLMs generally outperformed non-expert humans across multiple dimensions of moral reasoning. However, our second experiment, featuring novel scenarios designed to test moral sensitivity by embedding relevant features among irrelevant details, revealed a striking reversal: several LLMs performed significantly worse than humans. Our findings suggest that current evaluations may substantially overestimate LLMs' moral reasoning capabilities by eliminating the task of discerning moral relevance from noisy information, which we take to be a prerequisite for genuine moral skill. This work provides a more nuanced framework for assessing AI moral competence and highlights important directions for improving moral competence in advanced AI systems.

cs.AI↗