Do large language models rank moral values? A transitivity test of moral competence

Katelyn A. Wasson, Kiwon Song, James M. Jennings, Brittney Currie, Konstantina Sokratous +1

LLMs are increasingly used to support decisions that require moral consideration. While LLMs perform well on morality benchmarks from psychology and philosophy, producing appropriate outputs on these benchmarks (moral performance) does not establish that an LLM weighs competing moral values at stake in a decision (moral competence). We test a minimal, necessary condition for such weighing: that an ordinal ranking can represent LLM moral choices. Such a ranking requires transitivity. To assess transitivity, we presented LLMs with pairwise trade-offs among moral value violations in vignette choice sets and extracted resulting choice probabilities from first-token distributions. Tested against three stochastic transitive choice models, most choice sets admitted weak or unstable orderings. Aggregating an LLM's responses, a common practice in LLM moral evaluation, produced transitive structure that matched no individual choice set. Evaluations of AI morality should establish that choices are structured before asking whether they are aligned.