Kantian Antiques

This experiment explores a simple but unsettling moral question: when one party knows more than the other in a transaction, is silence always fair game?

You will be shown a series of cases involving sellers, buyers, bargains, antiques, charity shops, and professional expertise. Some cases are very close neighbours, but they differ in ways that many people find morally significant.

Answer according to your first considered intuition. Do not aim at consistency. The point is to discover whether your judgements hold steady across adjacent cases, and if not, where they begin to shift.

We will not simply march you through thirteen cases and then disappear behind a clipboard. After each main section, we pause, take stock, and show how your responses compare with those of the wider cohort.

You will answer with a simple verdict each time: Permissible or Not Permissible.