Reasoning or Rhetoric? An Empirical Analysis of Moral Reasoning Explanations in Large Language Models

Do large language models reason morally, or do they merely sound like they do? We investigate whether LLM responses to moral dilemmas exhibit genuine developmental progression through Kohlberg's stages of moral development, or whether alignment training instead produces reasoning-like outputs that superficially resemble mature moral judgment without the underlying developmental trajectory. Using an LLM-as-judge scoring pipeline validated across three judge models, we classify more than 600 respo

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ethics.ai (23 March 2026), “Reasoning or Rhetoric? An Empirical Analysis of Moral Reasoning Explanations in Large Language Models,” evidence record 6854, https://ethics.ai/record/6854 (originally published by arXiv).

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