Understanding Moral Reasoning Trajectories in Large Language Models: Toward Probing-Based Explainability

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16017v1
• Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:51:30 GMT
• Title: Understanding Moral Reasoning Trajectories in Large Language Models: Toward Probing-Based Explainability
• Abstract summary: We study how large language models organize ethical frameworks across reasoning steps.<n>We find that moral reasoning involves systematic multi-framework deliberation.<n>We propose a Moral Representation Consistency (MRC) metric that correlates strongly with LLM coherence ratings.
• Score: 8.026492468995187
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly participate in morally sensitive decision-making, yet how they organize ethical frameworks across reasoning steps remains underexplored. We introduce \textit{moral reasoning trajectories}, sequences of ethical framework invocations across intermediate reasoning steps, and analyze their dynamics across six models and three benchmarks. We find that moral reasoning involves systematic multi-framework deliberation: 55.4--57.7\% of consecutive steps involve framework switches, and only 16.4--17.8\% of trajectories remain framework-consistent. Unstable trajectories remain 1.29$\times$ more susceptible to persuasive attacks ($p=0.015$). At the representation level, linear probes localize framework-specific encoding to model-specific layers (layer 63/81 for Llama-3.3-70B; layer 17/81 for Qwen2.5-72B), achieving 13.8--22.6\% lower KL divergence than the training-set prior baseline. Lightweight activation steering modulates framework integration patterns (6.7--8.9\% drift reduction) and amplifies the stability--accuracy relationship. We further propose a Moral Representation Consistency (MRC) metric that correlates strongly ($r=0.715$, $p<0.0001$) with LLM coherence ratings, whose underlying framework attributions are validated by human annotators (mean cosine similarity $= 0.859$).

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