Enabling large language models (LLMs) to diagnose and correct moral errors is crucial not only for ensuring their reliable deployment but also for charting a pathway toward continuous improvement. Existing research has primarily followed two directions: fine-tuning LLMs on corpora of morally appropriate texts and developing carefully designed prompting strategies to promote moral behavior, including moral self-correction and self-improvement. However, both lines of work often remain brittle, relying heavily on shallow heuristics rather than enabling LLMs to reason about why and how a given moral discourse is morally (in)appropriate. In this paper, we address this challenge by developing pragmatic inference-driven approach that help LLMs learn to diagnose and correct moral errors. Pragmatic inference is the reasoning process through which implied meanings are derived, a central concept in linguistics. To improve the reasoning efficiency, our approach adapt the inference procedure according to the inferential load required by different moral discourses. Empirical results demonstrate that our method not only improves LLMs' ability to diagnose and correct moral errors, but also generalizes effectively across tasks without relying on shallow heuristics.

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