Agreement Is Not Alignment: Divergent Moral Grounds in Human and LLM Ethical Judgments

Agreement with human judgments is a common proxy for evaluating the alignment of large language models (LLMs). Yet agreement in final labels does not show that human annotators and models rely on the same moral grounds. Two agents may reach the same judgment while appealing to different principles, contextual assumptions, or interpretations of the situation. We test this distinction using a curated 500-item ETHICS-derived benchmark spanning five domains of moral judgment, with new human annotator and LLM annotations of both final labels and supporting rationales. Across frontier and open model families, agreement with human annotator majority labels is often high. However, rationale-level analysis reveals systematic divergence in the moral grounds expressed by human annotators and models. In particular, models redistribute attention across categories such as harm, respect, promise-keeping, justice, desert, and excuse relevance, even when their final labels match the human annotator majority. Our results show that agreement should not be treated as equivalent to alignment. Label-based evaluation can therefore be misleadingly reassuring unless complemented by analysis of the reasons, principles, and moral priorities expressed in model judgments.