Conference Presentation: Seth Lazar on Evaluating LLM Ethical Competence

On December 5, Seth Lazar presented at the Lingnan University Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Conference on rethinking how we evaluate LLM ethical competence. His talk critiqued current approaches focused on binary ethical judgments, arguing instead for evaluations that assess LLMs' capacity for substantive moral reasoning and justification.

Abstract: Existing approaches to evaluating LLM ethical competence place too much emphasis on the verdicts—of permissibility and impermissibility—that they render. But ethical competence doesn’t consist in one’s judgments conforming to those of a cohort of crowdworkers. It consists in being able to identify morally relevant features, prioritise among them, associate them with reasons and weave them into a justified conclusion. We identify the limitations of existing evals for ethical competence, provide an account of moral reasoning that can ground better alternatives, and discuss the practical—and philosophical—implications if LLMs ultimately do prove to be adept moral reasoners.

For more detials please see the conference website here.