Can LLMs Imagine Moral Alternatives Beyond Binary Dilemmas?

Title:Can LLMs Imagine Moral Alternatives Beyond Binary Dilemmas?

Abstract:As LLMs increasingly serve as moral advisors and agents, they must address conflicts between competing values. Yet prior work on moral dilemmas overlooks a central aspect of human moral cognition: imagining alternatives beyond the given options. We introduce MoralAltDataset, comprising 307 Advisor and AI-facing Agent dilemmas augmented with compromise and reframed alternatives. We compare human and LLM judgments in binary and four-option settings. Across human participants and 15 LLMs, aggregate moral choice distributions differ substantially between the two settings, with compromise often preferred over either original binary option. Results show value shifts and stronger human-LLM agreement on alternatives. Source-stratified results reveal a descriptive gap: human alternative-selection rates are similar across authoring sources, whereas LLMs select GPT-5-authored alternatives substantially more often. We then compare human-authored alternatives with outputs from three representative LLMs through pairwise preference and expert-based evaluations. Alternatives from these LLMs are generally preferred and better satisfy fine-grained structural and ethical criteria, while revealing a trade-off between structural quality and practical feasibility. Our dataset is available here: this https URL, and our project page is here: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2606.31213 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.31213v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.31213 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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