Echoes of Deeds: Moral History Can Shape and Steer LLM Behavioral Choices

arXiv:2609.35070v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) morality typically consider decisions in isolation, thus overlooking whether an individual's unrelated prior conduct influences the model's subsequent choices. This leaves open the question of whether, and to what extent, moral history shapes LLM decisional behaviors. Prior work on human moral decision-making shows that past behavior can influence subsequent moral choices. Building on this observation, we investigate whether analogous effects emerge in LLMs in two complementary ways: at the behavioral level, through the model's observable responses, and at the representation level, through its latent internal representations. We introduce MoralLedger, a framework for studying how an actor's moral history shapes actions for LLMs' behaviors under a fixed decision context. At the behavioral level, we find that prior moral histories systematically alter subsequent choices as a function of their valence and intensity. At the internal representation level, these histories induce a linearly recoverable direction in the residual stream that generalizes to held-out examples. Intervening along this direction on neutral-history prompts produces two-sided intensity-dependent changes in subsequent choices, with effects that are stronger than those induced by prompting alone or by favorable-nonmoral direction. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that a latent representation of an actor's prior moral conduct can provide signed inference-time control over a moral decision. Our MoralLedger extends moral evaluation beyond static dilemmas, establishing moral history as both a source of behavioral sensitivity and a causal target for auditing and controlling moral behavior in LLMs.

Abstract:Evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) morality typically consider decisions in isolation, thus overlooking whether an individual's unrelated prior conduct influences the model's subsequent choices. This leaves open the question of whether, and to what extent, moral history shapes LLM decisional behaviors. Prior work on human moral decision-making shows that past behavior can influence subsequent moral choices. Building on this observation, we investigate whether analogous effects emerge in LLMs in two complementary ways: at the behavioral level, through the model's observable responses, and at the representation level, through its latent internal representations. We introduce MoralLedger, a framework for studying how an actor's moral history shapes actions for LLMs' behaviors under a fixed decision context. At the behavioral level, we find that prior moral histories systematically alter subsequent choices as a function of their valence and intensity. At the internal representation level, these histories induce a linearly recoverable direction in the residual stream that generalizes to held-out examples. Intervening along this direction on neutral-history prompts produces two-sided intensity-dependent changes in subsequent choices, with effects that are stronger than those induced by prompting alone or by favorable-nonmoral direction. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that a latent representation of an actor's prior moral conduct can provide signed inference-time control over a moral decision. Our MoralLedger extends moral evaluation beyond static dilemmas, establishing moral history as both a source of behavioral sensitivity and a causal target for auditing and controlling moral behavior in LLMs.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY)

arXiv:2609.35070 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.35070v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35070 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Echoes of Deeds: Moral History Can Shape and Steer LLM Behavioral Choices

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