mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MoralBench: Moral Evaluation of LLMs

arXiv 2406.04428 ↗First posted 6 Jun 2024cs.CL cs.AIcited by 50

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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

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
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  7. 2021Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Modelscited by 957
  8. 2024Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technologycited by 889
  9. 2020Aligning AI With Shared Human Valuescited by 706
  10. 2021Persistent Anti-Muslim Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 376
  11. 2022Pre-Trained Language Models for Interactive Decision-Makingcited by 220
  12. 2023LanguageMPC: Large Language Models as Decision Makers for Autonomous Drivingcited by 188
18 more
  1. 2023A Study of Generative Large Language Model for Medical Research and Healthcarecited by 160
  2. 2024The Impact of Reasoning Step Length on Large Language Modelscited by 152
  3. 2021Can Machines Learn Morality? The Delphi Experimentcited by 140
  4. 2021Lawformer: A Pre-trained Language Model for Chinese Legal Long Documentscited by 115
  5. 2022Who is GPT-3? An Exploration of Personality, Values and Demographicscited by 112
  6. 2022The Ghost in the Machine has an American accent: value conflict in GPT-3cited by 105
  7. 2023The Programmer's Assistant: Conversational Interaction with a Large Language Model for Software Developmentcited by 95
  8. 2024AIOS: LLM Agent Operating Systemcited by 94
  9. 2023Moral Foundations of Large Language Modelscited by 84
  10. 2023GenRec: Large Language Model for Generative Recommendationcited by 62
  11. 2024TrustAgent: Towards Safe and Trustworthy LLM-based Agentscited by 62
  12. 2023Exploring the psychology of LLMs' Moral and Legal Reasoningcited by 43
  13. 2024Knowledge Graph Large Language Model (KG-LLM) for Link Predictioncited by 36
  14. 2022Does Moral Code Have a Moral Code? Probing Delphi's Moral Philosophycited by 31
  15. 2023MathAttack: Attacking Large Language Models Towards Math Solving Abilitycited by 31
  16. 2024AttackEval: How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Jailbreak Attacking on Large Language Modelscited by 26
  17. 2024EmojiPrompt: Generative Prompt Obfuscation for Privacy-Preserving Communication with Cloud-based LLMscited by 9
  18. 2024Large Language Models in Biomedical and Health Informatics: A Review with Bibliometric Analysiscited by 9

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 28; 2026: 19.

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  1. 2025The Personality Illusion: Revealing Dissociation Between Self-Reports & Behavior in LLMscited by 35
  2. 2025Accumulating Context Changes the Beliefs of Language Modelscited by 25
  3. 2025The Scales of Justitia: A Comprehensive Survey on Safety Evaluation of LLMscited by 24
  4. 2025SafeDialBench: A Fine-Grained Safety Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues with Diverse Jailbreak Attackscited by 23
  5. 2026Large Language Model Reasoning Failurescited by 20
  6. 2024Whose Morality Do They Speak? Unraveling Cultural Bias in Multilingual Language Modelscited by 17
  7. 2025Unmasking Conversational Bias in AI Multiagent Systemscited by 16
  8. 2025Structured Moral Reasoning in Language Models: A Value-Grounded Evaluation Frameworkcited by 16
  9. 2025When Ethics and Payoffs Diverge: LLM Agents in Morally Charged Social Dilemmascited by 14
  10. 2025Are Language Models Consequentialist or Deontological Moral Reasoners?cited by 12
  11. 2024Moral Persuasion in Large Language Models: Evaluating Susceptibility and Ethical Alignmentcited by 10
  12. 2025MORALISE: A Structured Benchmark for Moral Alignment in Visual Language Modelscited by 10
38 more
  1. 2024MM-MoralBench: A MultiModal Moral Evaluation Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 9
  2. 2026The Fragility Of Moral Judgment In Large Language Modelscited by 8
  3. 2025REVAL: A Comprehension Evaluation on Reliability and Values of Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 5
  4. 2025One Model, Many Morals: Uncovering Cross-Linguistic Misalignments in Computational Moral Reasoningcited by 4
  5. 2025RoleConflictBench: A Benchmark of Role Conflict Scenarios for Evaluating LLMs' Contextual Sensitivitycited by 4
  6. 2025AI-Driven Automation Can Become the Foundation of Next-Era Science of Science Researchcited by 3
  7. 2025Identifying, Evaluating, and Mitigating Risks of AI Thought Partnershipscited by 3
  8. 2025Localizing Persona Representations in LLMscited by 3
  9. 2025BenchHub: A Unified Benchmark Suite for Holistic and Customizable LLM Evaluationcited by 3
  10. 2025LocalGPT: Benchmarking and Advancing Large Language Models for Local Life Services in Meituancited by 3
  11. 2025ManagerBench: Evaluating the Safety-Pragmatism Trade-off in Autonomous LLMscited by 3
  12. 2025Differences in the Moral Foundations of Large Language Modelscited by 3
  13. 2026Moral Sycophancy in Vision Language Modelscited by 3
  14. 2026Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choicescited by 3
  15. 2026Ads in AI Chatbots? An Analysis of How Large Language Models Navigate Conflicts of Interestcited by 3
  16. 2025Who Gets the Kidney? Human-AI Alignment, Indecision, and Moral Valuescited by 2
  17. 2025Beyond Ethical Alignment: Evaluating LLMs as Artificial Moral Assistantscited by 2
  18. 2025The Moral Consistency Pipeline: Continuous Ethical Evaluation for Large Language Modelscited by 2
  19. 2026If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires IIcited by 2
  20. 2025I'm Sorry Dave: How the old world of personnel security can inform the new world of AI insider riskcited by 1
  21. 2025BengaliMoralBench: A Benchmark for Auditing Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models within Bengali Language and Culturecited by 1
  22. 2026HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patternscited by 1
  23. 2026Individual Turing Test: A Case Study of LLM-based Simulation Using Longitudinal Personal Datacited by 1
  24. 2026Does LLM Alignment Really Need Diversity? An Empirical Study of Adapting RLVR Methods for Moral Reasoningcited by 1
  25. 2026Reasoning or Rhetoric? An Empirical Analysis of Moral Reasoning Explanations in Large Language Modelscited by 1
  26. 2026Distributional Open-Ended Evaluation of LLM Cultural Value Alignment Based on Value Codebookcited by 1
  27. 2025NurValues: Real-World Nursing Values Evaluation for Large Language Models in Clinical Contextcited by 0
  28. 2025OpenEthics: A Comprehensive Ethical Evaluation of Open-Source Generative Large Language Modelscited by 0
  29. 2025Probabilistic Aggregation and Targeted Embedding Optimization for Collective Moral Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 0
  30. 2025Are We Aligned? A Preliminary Investigation of the Alignment of Responsible AI Values between LLMs and Human Judgmentcited by 0
  31. 2026MM-SCALE: Grounded Multimodal Moral Reasoning via Scalar Judgment and Listwise Alignmentcited by 0
  32. 2026Towards Cross-lingual Values Judgment: A Consensus-Pluralism Perspectivecited by 0
  33. 2026Questionnaire Responses Do not Capture the Safety of AI Agentscited by 0
  34. 2026Mechanistic Origin of Moral Indifference in Language Modelscited by 0
  35. 2026Persona-Model Collapse in Emergent Misalignmentcited by 0
  36. 2026An Ethical eValuation Agent (EeVA): Results of a Proof-of-Concept Test on a Prototype Agentic-like Workflow to Assist Ethical Deliberationscited by 0
  37. 2026Are LLMs Bad at Moral Reasoning?cited by 0
  38. 2026CORDA: A Benchmark for Hierarchical Harm-Centric Moral Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 0

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  1. 2024The Moral Turing Test: Evaluating Human-LLM Alignment in Moral Decision-Making
  2. 2023Potential Benefits of Employing Large Language Models in Research in Moral Education and Development
  3. 2024Ethical Reasoning and Moral Value Alignment of LLMs Depend on the Language we Prompt them in
  4. 2026Position: Evaluations of AI Moral Reasoning Still Miss Half of the Picture
  5. 2025Discerning What Matters: A Multi-Dimensional Assessment of Moral Competence in LLMs
  6. 2024Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems
  7. 2025Diverse Human Value Alignment for Large Language Models via Ethical Reasoning
  8. 2025The Convergent Ethics of AI? Analyzing Moral Foundation Priorities in Large Language Models with a Multi-Framework Approach