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How do LLMs Evaluate Perceived Moral Agency? Investigating Moral Decision-Making in Human-Artificial Agents Interactions — arXiv:2609.05037

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05037
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-16T22:28:59.957Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 387f7709c509bf60407d6933fa8d3d619a5e09527e53ee7bc551f9ff7dd08410
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_b33a06bd445a

How to cite

How do LLMs Evaluate Perceived Moral Agency? Investigating Moral Decision-Making in Human-Artificial Agents Interactions — arXiv:2609.05037 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05037 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_b33a06bd445a (Metraipolis archive dc_b33a06bd445a, sha256 387f7709c509bf60407d6933fa8d3d619a5e09527e53ee7bc551f9ff7dd08410)

BibTeX

@misc{dcb33a06bd445a,
  title = {How do LLMs Evaluate Perceived Moral Agency? Investigating Moral Decision-Making in Human-Artificial Agents Interactions — arXiv:2609.05037},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05037},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_b33a06bd445a; sha256 387f7709c509bf60407d6933fa8d3d619a5e09527e53ee7bc551f9ff7dd08410},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05037. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

As LLMs take on roles requiring moral advice, understanding how they attribute moral agency becomes critical. Humans possess moral agency, the capacity to make ethically guided decisions and bear responsibility for their consequences, a well-established construct in moral psychology. Yet as artificial agents (AAs) such as robots, drones, and disembodied AI systems become increasingly embedded in smart city environments, the question of whether and how moral agency is attributed to them takes on new urgency. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first empirical study comparing how humans and LLMs evaluate perceived moral agency (PMA) across human and autonomous artificial agents varying in embodiment, situated in plausible smart city scenarios. Using an adaptation of a validated PMA scale, we applied a protocol to 190 human participants as well as various LLMs. Our evaluation reveals higher perceptions of moral agency in humans than in AAs. However, when facing moral dilemmas in concrete scenarios, LLMs reason outward from the situation, prioritizing harm severity and contextual urgency over any stable assessment of the agent itself, amplifying a context-sensitivity also present in human raters. These findings are particularly relevant as LLMs become increasingly involved in everyday moral decisions.

Tema degli esploratori: agenti e intelligenza artificiale (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-09-07 in cs.AI).
Categorie arXiv: Computation and Language (cs.CL) ; Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05037 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-16T22:18:11.564Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.AI/2026-09-07?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).