Morality serves as the foundation of societal structure, guiding legal systems, shaping cultural values, and influencing individual self-perception. With the rise and pervasiveness of generative AI tools, and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), concerns arise regarding how these tools capture and potentially alter moral dimensions through machine-generated text manipulation. Based on the Moral Foundation Theory, our work investigates this topic by analyzing the behavior of 12 LLMs among the most widely used Open and uncensored (i.e., ”abliterated”) models, and leveraging human-annotated datasets used in moral-related analysis. Results have shown varying levels of alteration of moral expressions depending on the type of text modification task and moral-related conditioning prompt.

Moralities, emotions, and events are complex aspects of human cognition, which are often treated separately since capturing their combined effects is challenging, especially due to the lack of annotated data. Leveraging their interrelations hence becomes crucial for advancing the understanding of human moral behaviors. In this work, we propose ME2-BERT, the first holistic framework for fine-tuning a pre-trained language model like BERT to the task of moral foundation prediction. ME2-BERT integrates events and emotions for learning domain-invariant morality-relevant text representations. Our extensive experiments show that ME2-BERT outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for moral foundation prediction, with an average increase up to 35% in the out-of-domain scenario.