Hm. If we were talking about table-top roleplaying, I would agree with you, but DOS2 is rather far from that. In a game like DOS2, you need both a sense of role-play and choices that matter and a mechanical game system that you can "play", otherwise it would essentially just be a advanced "choose your own adventure" type game. Now, there's nothing essentially wrong with those games, but it's not what we're talking about here.
The problem is that Source stealing gives considerable benefits in that latter system, and that needs to be balanced somehow. What I'm proposing is to use "karma" as a purely mechanical system except in rare circumstances, where it makes sense that it affects dialogue.
Age of Decadence (where the screenshot is from) has both C&C and a mechanical aspect that don't contradict each other. Though the entire point of that game is role-playing. If you choose a mercenary that specializes in combat then your game will be filled with fights and bloodshed and everything related to that. If your character is a scholar he can go through the entire game without seeing one fight. You aren't forced to do this in any way, though, the classes only determine your starting zone and more possibilities to role-play that kind of character. You can be a scholar who specializes in combat and have a completely different experience and story than a scholar who specializes in knowledge and diplomacy.
Since this kind of reactivity isn't really the point of D:OS2, being a party-based game with heavy focus on combat, I can get your point, but D:OS1 proved that giving you perks for dialogue choices is a bad idea. We don't know how stealing Source (or what you do with it) affects anything in game yet. If the amount of souls you stole unlock different dialogue options (related somehow to the souls, though, not just "evil"), then that would be a better option than giving you stats. Besides, there should be no deterrents for playing a certain type of character, not really. Just how the world reacts to your character and if it reacts bad, then so be it. It can throw more mobs at you if you are overly aggressive or tougher ones etc. Alpha Protocol had such an example - if you were aggressive to a character, he rats you out to his superior, which is incidentally your next mission, and that placed more guards in the mission. Just no numerical advantage/disadvantage to your character.
