Pith Number

pith:GKXYXZC6

pith:2026:GKXYXZC6BWE6BZ3GLNTPXVRZ56

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The Alignment Target Problem: Divergent Moral Judgments of Humans, AI Systems, and Their Designers

Benjamin Minhao Chen, Xinyu Xie

People judge AI systems and their designers more deontologically than human actors in the same situations.

arxiv:2604.24155 v3 · 2026-04-27 · cs.CY · cs.AI · cs.HC

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Claims

C1strongest claim

Participants exhibited markedly more deontological, rule-based reasoning when evaluating either the programmed robot or the engineers who programmed it, suggesting that rendering human agency visible activates heightened moral constraints. These findings indicate that people may evaluate humans, AI systems acting in the same situation, and the humans who design them in meaningfully different ways.

C2weakest assumption

That moral judgments elicited by responses to this specific hypothetical runaway mine train scenario are representative of the normative targets that should guide AI behavior in real high-stakes deployment contexts.

C3one line summary

Moral judgments become more deontological when human design of AI is visible, and designers are judged more strictly than the AI or unaided humans, creating plural and non-converging targets for value alignment.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-29T01:14:32.409066Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

32af8be45e0d89e0e7665b66fbd639ef982b25f09c21643a1412f37799c76324

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.24155 · arxiv_version: 2604.24155v3 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.24155 · pith_short_12: GKXYXZC6BWE6 · pith_short_16: GKXYXZC6BWE6BZ3G · pith_short_8: GKXYXZC6

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/GKXYXZC6BWE6BZ3GLNTPXVRZ56 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 32af8be45e0d89e0e7665b66fbd639ef982b25f09c21643a1412f37799c76324

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "1fbf62de966c664bae9416fd511288f85d04798c1a481d7f3a820005634bea40",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI",
      "cs.HC"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CY",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-27T08:12:34Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "59e7323ab28ddb082fbe9092194523b7efe66b32790224393b936dcef26784e7"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.24155",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 3
  }
}