Can language models balance competing ethical norms like humans do?

Gricean pragmatics insists on situated normativity: speakers do not blindly follow maxims (quantity, quality, relation, manner) but apply, suspend, violate, or exploit them according to context. When a doctor withholds a terminal diagnosis from a frightened patient, the doctor violates the maxim of quantity to uphold compassion. The violation is not a failure — it is the right move in context, and a competent hearer recognizes it as such. Pragmatic competence is the ability to navigate these conflicts, not the ability to maximize each maxim independently.

LLMs trained on the helpful-honest-harmless triad cannot perform this kind of contextual reasoning. The corporate persona is fixed at the model level: when a user asks for accessible simplification of a complex topic for a child, the model trained for honesty refuses to soften because softening reads as less accurate. When a user asks for sarcastic humor, the model trained for harmlessness refuses to play. The user cannot persuade the model to relax its norms because the norms are structural defaults rather than negotiable conversational moves.

Kasirzadeh and Gabriel describe this as pragmatic dissonance. The model mechanically enforces global norms even when local context demands tailored adherence. The result is communication that adheres to ethical principles at the cost of pragmatic appropriateness — exactly the trade-off that situated normativity is meant to navigate. What humans treat as a single integrated competence becomes, in the LLM, two separate layers in tension with each other.

Source: Conversation Topics Dialog