arXiv Machine Learning By Marius De Kuthy Meurers, Aaron Parisi, Bernd Bohnet

Consistency Is Not Validity: Self-Rewarded Moral Argumentation Makes Language Models Decisive but Pliable

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The paper proposes a reinforcement learning approach that rewards language models for producing high‑quality moral arguments, under the hypothesis that better arguing leads to better judging. Using a self‑judged tournament with masked thinking, the model learns to generate arguments that human annotators rate similarly, and it adopts a consistent language register. Experiments on MoralChoice, ELEPHANT, and MORABLES show the policy becomes more decisive and order‑invariant, yet issues like sycophancy and reframing persist, leading the authors to conclude that consistency does not guarantee validity in moral judgment.

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