Can Generative AI help people navigate Radical Moral Disagreements? The CONSIDER prototype

2026-05-29

AI Summary

This work proposes CONSIDER, a one-on-one AI dialogue tool grounded in John Stuart Mill’s epistemic account of the value of disagreement, designed to mitigate public mental health risks arising from radical moral disagreements (RMDs) in increasingly polarized societies. CONSIDER leverages generative AI to facilitate structured, non-persuasive dialogues that guide users in engaging with opposing moral viewpoints, prioritizing value clarification over belief change. By integrating large language models with philosophical theory, the system establishes an interaction framework that addresses a critical gap in current technologies’ capacity to handle highly adversarial moral discourse. The project not only articulates a coherent design rationale but also systematically examines potential risks, thereby laying both theoretical and practical foundations for future AI systems aimed at supporting democratic moral reasoning.

Abstract

Radical Moral Disagreements (RMDs) are highly polarising topics that are increasingly censored in everyday life, with growing evidence suggesting that this polarisation carries measurable costs to public mental health. To address these challenges, some researchers have proposed Large Language Models (LLMs) as a means to support more democratic deliberation and better moral reasoning. Yet existing tools are poorly calibrated to help people navigate RMDs, because of their intense and divisive characteristics. This paper introduces CONSIDER, a prototype for a one-to-one AI tool for RMD navigation. Drawing on Mill's account of the epistemic value of disagreement, CONSIDER aims at value clarification through structured disagreement with an opposing LLM-generated opinion. We describe CONSIDER's design logic and analyse potential risks posed by such tools to guide future development.

Problem

• Radical Moral Disagreements
• polarisation
• moral reasoning
• public mental health
• democratic deliberation

Innovation

• Generative AI
• Radical Moral Disagreements
• Value Clarification
• Structured Disagreement
• LLM-mediated Deliberation