Research Program / Claims / guilt-3
Intentional killing beyond what is necessary for survival is an infringement and is considered a violation of natural guilt.
超过维生所需的有意杀戮是一种侵犯，会被视为对自然罪恶感的违反。
Concept guilt · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable
This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.
Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Recruit approximately 3,000 people across at least 10 cultures. Use vignette experiments orthogonally manipulating killing target, survival necessity, intentionality, alternative means, and group norms. Measure anticipated guilt and infringement judgments. Supplement with a 12-month observational study of about 300 people with hunting or slaughtering experience, without inducing actual harm. Test whether a stable cross-cultural threshold exists for 'beyond survival necessity'; the normative 'ought' cannot be adjudicated by this.
Suggested paper title
Subsistence Necessity and Intentional Killing: A Preregistered Cross-Cultural Study of Guilt and Moral Judgment
What it would overturn
If a stable necessity threshold independent of social norms is found, it will revise the explanation that post-killing guilt mainly depends on learned norms, responsibility attribution, and situational evaluation.
Candidate labs / funders
Roger Giner-Sorolla; Benjamin Grant Purzycki; Martin Lang
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Survival necessity' is more specific than general harm aversion and can generate threshold predictions, but must define whether survival includes self-defense, ecological management, and collective livelihood.
Note
This is a mix of normative judgment and psychological universality hypothesis; war-related moral injury literature cannot directly verify survival thresholds, so it is not used as evidence.
Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim guilt-3, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/guilt-3