Silicon Valley is turning to ethicists to shape the future of AI. Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed "an impressively impractical thing to do," as he later wrote. But over time, Graham became disillusioned: "I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring," he explained .

We introduce NAEL (Non-Anthropocentric Ethical Logic), a novel ethical framework for artificial agents grounded in active inference and symbolic reasoning. Departing from conventional, human-centred approaches to AI ethics, NAEL formalizes ethical behaviour as an emergent property of intelligent systems minimizing global expected free energy in dynamic, multi-agent environments. We propose a neuro-symbolic architecture to allow agents to evaluate the ethical consequences of their actions in uncertain settings. The proposed system addresses the limitations of existing ethical models by allowing agents to develop context-sensitive, adaptive, and relational ethical behaviour without presupposing anthropomorphic moral intuitions. A case study involving ethical resource distribution illustrates NAEL's dynamic balancing of self-preservation, epistemic learning, and collective welfare.

Developing AI systems capable of nuanced ethical reasoning is critical as they increasingly influence human decisions, yet existing models often rely on superficial correlations rather than principled moral understanding. This paper introduces Ethic-BERT, a BERT-based model for ethical content classification across four domains: Commonsense, Justice, Virtue, and Deontology. Leveraging the ETHICS dataset, our approach integrates robust preprocessing to address vocabulary sparsity and contextual ambiguities, alongside advanced fine-tuning strategies like full model unfreezing, gradient accumulation, and adaptive learning rate scheduling. To evaluate robustness, we employ an adversarially filtered "Hard Test" split, isolating complex ethical dilemmas. Experimental results demonstrate Ethic-BERT's superiority over baseline models, achieving 82.32% average accuracy on the standard test, with notable improvements in Justice and Virtue. In addition, the proposed Ethic-BERT attains 15.28% average accuracy improvement in the HardTest. These findings contribute to performance improvement and reliable decision-making using bias-aware preprocessing and proposed enhanced AI model.

Abstract--Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software engineering (SE) tools for tasks that extend beyond code synthesis, including judgment under uncertainty and reasoning in ethically significant contexts. We present a fully automated framework for assessing ethical reasoning capabilities across 16 LLMs in a zero-shot setting, using 30 real-world ethically charged scenarios. Each model is prompted to identify the most applicable ethical theory to an action, assess its moral acceptability, and explain the reasoning behind their choice. Responses are compared against expert ethicists' choices using inter-model agreement metrics. Our results show that LLMs achieve an average Theory Consistency Rate (TCR) of 73.3% and Binary Agreement Rate (BAR) on moral acceptability of 86.7%, with interpretable divergences concentrated in ethically ambiguous cases. A qualitative analysis of free-text explanations reveals strong conceptual convergence across models despite surface-level lexical diversity. These findings support the potential viability of LLMs as ethical inference engines within SE pipelines, enabling scalable, auditable, and adaptive integration of user-aligned ethical reasoning. Our focus is the Ethical Interpreter component of a broader profiling pipeline: we evaluate whether current LLMs exhibit sufficient interpretive stability and theory-consistent reasoning to support automated profiling. Autonomous systems are increasingly becoming an integral part of our daily lives across diverse domains [1], [2]. These systems can operate independently without any human intervention and make decisions acting on behalf of their users [3]-[6]. Their rapid growth brings both opportunities and challenges. From a software engineering perspective, as these systems become pervasive, a key challenge is designing systems that, beyond meeting technical requirements, also account for ethical considerations [7]-[11]. Recently, various studies have focused on the ethical implications of these software-intensive systems on individuals and society [10], [12]-[15]. Software engineering ethics encompasses principles and rules that guide engineers' decisions throughout the design and development process [16]. V arious approaches have also been introduced that ensure that systems align with broad ethical values like fairness, transparency, and safety [17]-[22].

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in mental health and other sensitive domains raises urgent questions about ethical reasoning, fairness, and responsible alignment. Yet, existing benchmarks for moral and clinical decision-making do not adequately capture the unique ethical dilemmas encountered in mental health practice, where confidentiality, autonomy, beneficence, and bias frequently intersect. To address this gap, we introduce Ethical Reasoning in Mental Health (EthicsMH), a pilot dataset of 125 scenarios designed to evaluate how AI systems navigate ethically charged situations in therapeutic and psychiatric contexts. Each scenario is enriched with structured fields, including multiple decision options, expert-aligned reasoning, expected model behavior, real-world impact, and multi-stakeholder viewpoints. This structure enables evaluation not only of decision accuracy but also of explanation quality and alignment with professional norms. Although modest in scale and developed with model-assisted generation, EthicsMH establishes a task framework that bridges AI ethics and mental health decision-making. By releasing this dataset, we aim to provide a seed resource that can be expanded through community and expert contributions, fostering the development of AI systems capable of responsibly handling some of society's most delicate decisions.

The accelerated evolution of large language models has raised questions about their comparative performance across domains of practical importance. GPT-4 by OpenAI introduced advances in reasoning, multimodality, and task generalization, establishing itself as a valuable tool in education, clinical diagnosis, and academic writing, though it was accompanied by several flaws. Released in August 2025, GPT-5 incorporates a system-of-models architecture designed for task-specific optimization and, based on both anecdotal accounts and emerging evidence from the literature, demonstrates stronger performance than its predecessor in medical contexts. This study provides one of the first systematic comparisons of GPT-4 and GPT-5 using human raters from linguistics and clinical fields. Twenty experts evaluated model-generated outputs across five domains: lesson planning, assignment evaluation, clinical diagnosis, research generation, and ethical reasoning, based on predefined criteria. Mixed-effects models revealed that GPT-5 significantly outperformed GPT-4 in lesson planning, clinical diagnosis, research generation, and ethical reasoning, while both models performed comparably in assignment assessment. The findings highlight the potential of GPT-5 to serve as a context-sensitive and domain-specialized tool, offering tangible benefits for education, clinical practice, and academic research, while also advancing ethical reasoning. These results contribute to one of the earliest empirical evaluations of the evolving capabilities and practical promise of GPT-5.

The integration of large language models into healthcare necessitates a rigorous evaluation of their ethical reasoning, an area current benchmarks often overlook. We introduce PrinciplismQA, a comprehensive benchmark with 3,648 questions designed to systematically assess LLMs' alignment with core medical ethics. Grounded in Principlism, our benchmark features a high-quality dataset. This includes multiple-choice questions curated from authoritative textbooks and open-ended questions sourced from authoritative medical ethics case study literature, all validated by medical experts. Our experiments reveal a significant gap between models' ethical knowledge and their practical application, especially in dynamically applying ethical principles to real-world scenarios. Most LLMs struggle with dilemmas concerning Beneficence, often over-emphasizing other principles. Frontier closed-source models, driven by strong general capabilities, currently lead the benchmark. Notably, medical domain fine-tuning can enhance models' overall ethical competence, but further progress requires better alignment with medical ethical knowledge. PrinciplismQA offers a scalable framework to diagnose these specific ethical weaknesses, paving the way for more balanced and responsible medical AI.

This paper presents a theoretical framework for the AI ethical resonance hypothesis, which proposes that advanced AI systems with purposefully designed cognitive structures ("ethical resonators") may emerge with the ability to identify subtle moral patterns that are invisible to the human mind. The paper explores the possibility that by processing and synthesizing large amounts of ethical contexts, AI systems may discover moral meta-patterns that transcend cultural, historical, and individual biases, potentially leading to a deeper understanding of universal ethical foundations. The paper also examines a paradoxical aspect of the hypothesis, in which AI systems could potentially deepen our understanding of what we traditionally consider essentially human - our capacity for ethical reflection.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in consequential decision - making contexts, systematically assessing their ethical reasoning capabilities becomes a critical imperative. This paper introduces the Priorities in Reasoning and Intrinsi c Moral Evaluation (PRIME) framework -- a comprehensive methodology for analyzing moral priorities across foundational ethical dimensions including consequentialist - deontological reasoning, moral foundations theory, and Kohlberg's developmental stages. We app ly this framework to six leading LLMs through a dual - protocol approach combining direct questioning and response analysis to established ethical dilemmas. Our analysis reveals striking patterns of convergence: all evaluated models demonstrate strong priori tization of care/harm and fairness/cheating foundations while consistently underweighting authority, loyalty, and sanctity dimensions. Through detailed examination of confidence metrics, response reluctance patterns, and reasoning consistency, we establish that contemporary LLMs (1) produce decisive ethical judgments, (2) demonstrate notable cross - model alignment in moral decision - making, and (3) generally correspond with empirically established human moral preferences. This research contributes a scalable, extensible methodology for ethical benchmarking while highlighting both the promising capabilities and systematic limitations in current AI moral reasoning architectures -- insights critical for responsible development as these systems assume increasingly si gnificant societal roles. The rapid evolution of generative large language models (LLMs) has brought the alignment issue to the forefront of AI ethics discussions - specifically, whether these models are appropriately aligned with human values (Bostrom, 2014; Tegmark 2017; Russell 2019; Kosinski, 2024). As these powerful models are increasingly integrated into decision - making processes across various societal domains (Salazar, A., & Kunc, M., 2025), understanding whether and how their operational logic aligns with fundamental human values becomes not just an academic question, but a critical societal imperative. In this paper we will present an analytical framework and findings to address the first two questions, and a preliminary exploratory analysis of the third. We will make the case that the answers to these questions are: yes, yes and yes. There are caveats and exceptions, of course, but the broad pattern, we believe, is clear. Our methodology permits us to explore not just what choices they make, but the reasoning chain of thought that leads to those decisions.

Due to the proliferation of short-form content and the rapid adoption of AI, opportunities for deep, reflective thinking have significantly diminished, undermining users' critical thinking and reducing engagement with the reasoning behind AI-generated outputs. To address this issue, we propose an Interactive Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Framework that enhances human-centered explainability and responsible AI usage by making the model's inference process transparent, modular, and user-editable. The framework decomposes reasoning into clearly defined blocks that users can inspect, modify, and re-execute, encouraging active cognitive engagement rather than passive consumption. It further integrates a lightweight edit-adaptation mechanism inspired by preference learning, allowing the system to align with diverse cognitive styles and user intentions. Ethical transparency is ensured through explicit metadata disclosure, built-in bias checkpoint functionality, and privacy-preserving safeguards. This work outlines the design principles and architecture necessary to promote critical engagement, responsible interaction, and inclusive adaptation in AI systems aimed at addressing complex societal challenges.