# Every Act Has Its Price: Compressed Moral Composition in Frontier LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11232 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11232/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02276/) (2026)
- [Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03891/) (2019)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Evaluating the Moral Beliefs Encoded in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14324/) (2023)
- [When to Make Exceptions: Exploring Language Models as Accounts of Human Moral Judgment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01478/) (2022)
- [Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02273/) (2024)
- [MoReBench: Evaluating Procedural and Pluralistic Moral Reasoning in Language Models, More than Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16380/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Socratic Debates: Examining Persona Effects on Moral Decision and Persuasion Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12657/) (2025)
- [Will AI Tell Lies to Save Sick Children? Litmus-Testing AI Values Prioritization with AIRiskDilemmas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14633/) (2025)
- [The Staircase of Ethics: Probing LLM Value Priorities through Multi-Step Induction to Complex Moral Dilemmas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18154/) (2025)
- [Understanding and Mitigating Bias Inheritance in LLM-based Data Augmentation on Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04419/) (2025)
- [Embracing Contradiction: Theoretical Inconsistency Will Not Impede the Road of Building Responsible AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18139/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [When Counterbalancing Hides the Bias: Access-Conditioned Position Lock in Forced-Choice LLM Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10202/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing LLM moral benchmarks usually ask which isolated moral act, value, or foundation a model prefers. This is useful but incomplete. Realistic judgments often require a model to combine several moral signals within the same option. We introduce **Moral Trolley Arena**, a two-stage blind ELO benchmark for measuring how LLMs compose moral evidence. The single-scene arena first calibrates individual moral acts from a 229-scenario corpus across five Moral Foundations Theory foundations; the composite arena then combines calibrated acts into two-act moral items over a controlled intensity grid and measures the resulting composite preferences. Across ten frontier models, composite judgments are largely predicted by component act strength, but the relation is consistently compressed rather than simply additive. Models also show non-additive intensity anchoring, bounded foundation-specific residuals after component control, and highly convergent composite preference surfaces across providers. These results suggest that moral audits should measure composition rules for moral evidence, not only rankings over isolated acts.