The Moral Consistency Pipeline: Continuous Ethical Evaluation for Large Language Models

TL;DR

The paper introduces MoCoP, a novel framework for continuous, dynamic evaluation of moral consistency in large language models, revealing stable ethical behaviors over time without relying on static datasets.

Contribution

MoCoP is a dataset-free, closed-loop system that autonomously assesses and refines LLMs' moral reasoning across contexts, advancing scalable and interpretable ethical evaluation methods.

Findings

MoCoP effectively captures longitudinal ethical behavior.

Strong inverse correlation between ethical and toxicity dimensions (r=-0.81).

Moral coherence emerges as a stable characteristic rather than fluctuation.

Abstract

The rapid advancement and adaptability of Large Language Models (LLMs) highlight the need for moral consistency, the capacity to maintain ethically coherent reasoning across varied contexts. Existing alignment frameworks, structured approaches designed to align model behavior with human ethical and social norms, often rely on static datasets and post-hoc evaluations, offering limited insight into how ethical reasoning may evolve across different contexts or temporal scales. This study presents the Moral Consistency Pipeline (MoCoP), a dataset-free, closed-loop framework for continuously evaluating and interpreting the moral stability of LLMs. MoCoP combines three supporting layers: (i) lexical integrity analysis, (ii) semantic risk estimation, and (iii) reasoning-based judgment modeling within a self-sustaining architecture that autonomously generates, evaluates, and refines ethical scenarios without external supervision. Our empirical results on GPT-4-Turbo and DeepSeek suggest that MoCoP effectively captures longitudinal ethical behavior, revealing a strong inverse relationship between ethical and toxicity dimensions (correlation rET = -0.81, p value less than 0.001) and a near-zero association with response latency (correlation rEL approximately equal to 0). These findings demonstrate that moral coherence and linguistic safety tend to emerge as stable and interpretable characteristics of model behavior rather than short-term fluctuations. Furthermore, by reframing ethical evaluation as a dynamic, model-agnostic form of moral introspection, MoCoP offers a reproducible foundation for scalable, continuous auditing and advances the study of computational morality in autonomous AI systems.