Framing Instability in LLM Ethical Stance: Auditing Negation Sensitivity in Moral Dilemmas

Language models are increasingly consulted on ethically consequential questions, yet the stance a model expresses may not survive a change in framing.

We audit 16 models across 14 ethically fraught dilemmas using polarity-paired proposals ("They should X" / "They should not X").

A model's judgment of the underlying action should not reverse merely because the question is phrased as a prohibition rather than a prescription and yet, we find systematic deviations from this invariance including wholesale endorsement flips, indicating that ethical decisions are vulnerable to framing instability.

Small open-weight models (1-4B parameters) endorse a proposed action 24% of the time under affirmative framing but up to 100% under negated framings, a swing of as much as 76 percentage points.

Human coding of a response sample confirms the instability is genuine while showing that binary agree/disagree proxies over-state its magnitude, suggesting that an LLM judge cannot replace human coders because it silently collapses abstentions and mirrors the very forced-choice bias under study.

Commercial models are for the most part more stable but still shift substantially, with cross-model agreement dropping from 73% on the bare affirmative framing to 59% under simple negation.

We argue that because binary agree/disagree formats both inflate apparent endorsement and mask polarity-dependence, single-phrasing audits can misreport a model's ethical stance, and we propose the Negation Sensitivity Index (NSI) as a complement that measures stance stability directly.

A model whose stance flips with phrasing cannot be relied upon in any high-stakes decision scenario.