# Moral Reasoning Across Languages: The Critical Role of Low-Resource Languages in LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19759 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19759/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 8 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03021/) (2022)
- [Ethical Reasoning over Moral Alignment: A Case and Framework for In-Context Ethical Policies in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07251/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Machine Ethics -- Can LLMs Perform Moral Reasoning through the Lens of Moral Theories?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15399/) (2023)
- ["Oops, Did I Just Say That?" Testing and Repairing Unethical Suggestions of Large Language Models with Suggest-Critique-Reflect Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02626/) (2023)
- [Do Moral Judgment and Reasoning Capability of LLMs Change with Language? A Study using the Multilingual Defining Issues Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02135/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Untangling Input Language from Reasoning Language: A Diagnostic Framework for Cross-Lingual Moral Alignment in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10257/) (2026)
- [HiMed: Incentivizing Hindi Reasoning in Medical LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24635/) (2026)
- [MET: Theory-Grounded and Culture-Aware Multilingual Moral Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11736/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce the Multilingual Moral Reasoning Benchmark (MMRB) to evaluate the moral reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) across five typologically diverse languages and three levels of contextual complexity: sentence, paragraph, and document. Our results show moral reasoning performance degrades with increasing context complexity, particularly for low-resource languages such as Vietnamese. We further fine-tune the open-source LLaMA-3-8B model using curated monolingual data for alignment and poisoning. Surprisingly, low-resource languages have a stronger impact on multilingual reasoning than high-resource ones, highlighting their critical role in multilingual NLP.