Harm Is Key to Judgments That Stealing Is Immoral
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stealing is considered to be a typical moral violation, but is taking without permission immoral when it does not involve harm? To assess the role of harm in reasoning about taking resources, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, 201 American undergraduates with a range of political orientations (M = 3.81 on a 7-point scale, SD = 1.49) judged instances of taking resources without permission to benefit a third party. Study 2 built on Study 1, testing 288 undergraduate students from the U.S. and Canada with a range of political orientations (M = 4.52 on a 10-point scale, SD = 2.02). Across both studies, participants judged vignettes that varied who took the resources (an authority or an individual), the need of the recipient, and the harm to the owner (left with not enough or more than enough). Labeling acts as stealing was only moderately associated with evaluations of acts in both studies. Harm was key to judgments of taking without permission across political orientations: participants judged taking resources without permission as unacceptable when it harmed the owner but as acceptable when it helped others in need. In the absence of harm, stealing was not consistently seen as a moral issue.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it