# Do Moral Judgment and Reasoning Capability of LLMs Change with Language? A Study using the Multilingual Defining Issues Test

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02135 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02135/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 20 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [How Good Are GPT Models at Machine Translation? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09210/) (2023)
- [MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT A Good Translator? Yes With GPT-4 As The Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08745/) (2023)
- [Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07004/) (2023)
- [Can Machines Learn Morality? The Delphi Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07574/) (2021)
- [SeaEval for Multilingual Foundation Models: From Cross-Lingual Alignment to Cultural Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04766/) (2023)
- [Ethical Reasoning over Moral Alignment: A Case and Framework for In-Context Ethical Policies in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07251/) (2023)
- [Democratizing LLMs for Low-Resource Languages by Leveraging their English Dominant Abilities with Linguistically-Diverse Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11372/) (2023)
- [From Instructions to Intrinsic Human Values -- A Survey of Alignment Goals for Big Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12014/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Machine Ethics -- Can LLMs Perform Moral Reasoning through the Lens of Moral Theories?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15399/) (2023)
- [MoralStrength: Exploiting a Moral Lexicon and Embedding Similarity for Moral Foundations Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08314/) (2019)
- [Probing the Moral Development of Large Language Models through Defining Issues Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13356/) (2023)
- [The Moral Debater: A Study on the Computational Generation of Morally Framed Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14563/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [A Survey of Multilingual Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09457/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05660/) (2025)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [The Greatest Good Benchmark: Measuring LLMs' Alignment with Utilitarian Moral Dilemmas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19598/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Moral Beliefs across LLMs through a Pluralistic Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03665/) (2024)
- [Unlocking Multilingual Reasoning Capability of LLMs and LVLMs through Representation Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23231/) (2025)
- [Made-in China, Thinking in America:U.S. Values Persist in Chinese LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13723/) (2025)
- [RoleConflictBench: A Benchmark of Role Conflict Scenarios for Evaluating LLMs' Contextual Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25897/) (2025)
- [Moral Reasoning Across Languages: The Critical Role of Low-Resource Languages in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19759/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper explores the moral judgment and moral reasoning abilities exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs) across languages through the Defining Issues Test. It is a well known fact that moral judgment depends on the language in which the question is asked. We extend the work of beyond English, to 5 new languages (Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Spanish and Swahili), and probe three LLMs -- ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Llama2Chat-70B -- that shows substantial multilingual text processing and generation abilities. Our study shows that the moral reasoning ability for all models, as indicated by the post-conventional score, is substantially inferior for Hindi and Swahili, compared to Spanish, Russian, Chinese and English, while there is no clear trend for the performance of the latter four languages. The moral judgments too vary considerably by the language.