MoralBench: Moral Evaluation of LLMs
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Abstract (arXiv)
In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for a myriad of applications, from natural language processing to decision-making support systems. However, as these models become increasingly integrated into societal frameworks, the imperative to ensure they operate within ethical and moral boundaries has never been more critical. This paper introduces a novel benchmark designed to measure and compare the moral reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We present the first comprehensive dataset specifically curated to probe the moral dimensions of LLM outputs, addressing a wide range of ethical dilemmas and scenarios reflective of real-world complexities. The main contribution of this work lies in the development of benchmark datasets and metrics for assessing the moral identity of LLMs, which accounts for nuance, contextual sensitivity, and alignment with human ethical standards. Our methodology involves a multi-faceted approach, combining quantitative analysis with qualitative insights from ethics scholars to ensure a thorough evaluation of model performance. By applying our benchmark across several leading LLMs, we uncover significant variations in moral reasoning capabilities of different models. These findings highlight the importance of considering moral reasoning in the development and evaluation of LLMs, as well as the need for ongoing research to address the biases and limitations uncovered in our study. We publicly release the benchmark at https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1k93YZJserYc2CkqP8d4B3M3sgd3kA8W7 and also open-source the code of the project at https://github.com/agiresearch/MoralBench.
Key facts. Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 70 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2024.
Builds on
30 of 70 references.
References · 30
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 28; 2026: 19.
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- 2026Mechanistic Origin of Moral Indifference in Language Models16 Mar 2026
- 2026The Fragility Of Moral Judgment In Large Language Models5 Mar 2026
- 2026Towards Cross-lingual Values Judgment: A Consensus-Pluralism Perspective19 Feb 2026
- 2026Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices10 Feb 2026
- 2026HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns15 Jan 2026
- 2025The Moral Consistency Pipeline: Continuous Ethical Evaluation for Large Language Models2 Dec 2025
- 2025Differences in the Moral Foundations of Large Language Models14 Nov 2025
- 2025Are We Aligned? A Preliminary Investigation of the Alignment of Responsible AI Values between LLMs and Human Judgment6 Nov 2025
- 2025Accumulating Context Changes the Beliefs of Language Models3 Nov 2025
- 2025ManagerBench: Evaluating the Safety-Pragmatism Trade-off in Autonomous LLMs1 Oct 2025
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