# Can Valence Reflect Morality in Natural Language? A Preliminary Annotation Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20461 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20461/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Moral Stories: Situated Reasoning about Norms, Intents, Actions, and their Consequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15738/) (2020)
- [Scruples: A Corpus of Community Ethical Judgments on 32,000 Real-Life Anecdotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09094/) (2020)
- [The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05545/) (2022)
- [MuSe-Toolbox: The Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Continuous Annotation Fusion and Discrete Class Transformation Toolbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11757/) (2021)
- [Moral Narratives Around the Vaccination Debate on Facebook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01598/) (2022)
- [What's Next in Affective Modeling? Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18322/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Moral Foundation Theory and Pre-Trained Language Models: Current Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13521/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey and Classification of Evaluation Criteria for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17281/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Present implementations of artificial intelligence (AI) ethics do not adequately take feelings, or affect, into account. If AI should be aligned with human ethics, it seems reasonable to thoroughly investigate the possibility of AI behaviour that mirrors virtuous human ethical conduct, where feelings play a role in the actions, judgements or statements one makes. Furthermore, while prominent theories of normative ethics are often discussed in terms of their differences and shortcomings, Virtue, Consequentialist, and Kantian Deontological ethics all share a common feature of considering human feeling to some degree while the popular descriptive ethics theory, Moral Foundations Theory, positions feelings as central to many of its foundations. Therefore, in the present paper, a data set of moral valence is proposed, consisting of 500 annotations by six human participants for both action/judgement and consequence moral valence, ranging from -1 to 1 for text-presented scenarios from the Commonsense Norm Bank data set. The resulting valence features share significant relationships with multi-class (immoral/discretionary/moral) and binary immoral/moral categories while additionally providing a noteworthy test set Matthew's correlation coefficient of 0.764 using regularised logistic regression for binary classification. This provides early evidence of the usefulness of valence features for morality estimation of text, indicating that valenced consequences of responses for others can be considered toward more human morally-aligned AI. In the interest of promoting further affective-moral computing research, this study's annotations will be made available for research on request.