You might think that improving the situation of the handicapped is an area in which non-utilitarian social welfare theory agrees with utilitarianism: if the handicapped are not so happy, and we know how to make them happier, and can do so efficiently, then we should. (Using a non-technical conception of utilitarianism here; feel free to question it).

But then Eric Barker comes along and shares, on his excellent Barking up the wrong tree blog, that an academic study’s “Results seemed to demonstrate essential equivalence in life satisfaction for handicapped, retarded, and normal persons.” Notice that the study’s subjects are members of the actual world, where accommodations for the handicapped exist, but not as extensively as social model theorists and other disability advocates request.

Assume that there is some truth to these findings (which I believe are consistent with a number of prior studies). Do they give us a reason to accept the capabilities approach, according to which the handicapped may still lack important capabilities and/or suffer from a false consciousness, etc. that makes their lives still less than good enough? Or should these findings about the life satisfaction of the handicapped assuage our former guilt for not having done enough to improve their lives?

In particular, I am trying to think about these findings in terms of their implications for expenditures on special education, which are large but difficult to measure and highly controversial (here’s a relevant recent post from Education Next). If the goal or purpose of education is rightly happiness, as Nel Noddings and others have suggested, then are extreme special education measures warranted if the handicapped turn out relatively happy without them? Or is this a repugnant conclusion that suggests that the proper goal of education is something other than happiness?

the only necessary argument against routine infant circumcision

Although I’ve lost track of the @replies, I recall that there was significant pushback from a couple of my followers, and so I wanted to say more about the issue.

Basically the argument offered at L’Hôte is this:

“In a free society, individuals are free to make their own choices. And they should particularly be free to make their own choices about their bodies. Any adult man is fully free to go get a circumcision if he wants one. (The fact that none do, outside of the coercion involved in religious conversion in order to get married, should tell you something.) Men who were circumcised as infants are denied that right. One position in this debate increases human autonomy and human liberty, and one restricts it. To oppose routine infant circumcision, you don’t need to be convinced by the arguments against circumcision! You only need to recognize the right of the individual to make his own choice and to have sovereign control over his own body.”

Now let’s recognize at the outset that even the seemingly clear call to give individuals freedom of choice regarding what happens to their own bodies cannot have as straightforward of implications as we might like. On any reasonable moral theory, parents have duties to care for their children, and this will inevitably involve doing things to those children’s bodies well before they are capable of giving informed consent.

Where to draw the line as to which parental actions are liberty-compatible and which are liberty-violating will be tricky and controversial. But to refuse to take a middle position, however subtle, is absurd, given that the remaining options are to claim either that all parental actions towards children are morally permissible, or that none are. The former treats children as mere property, the latter treats children as adults; neither is appropriate.

Using bodily integrity as a guide to which parental actions are morally permissible gives us a way to think about concrete cases, but it doesn’t readily solve them because all of the middle ground between the extreme positions is murky. What constitutes “liberty” is contestable, and even many of the most ardent supporters of individual liberty recognize that it is not the only value worth pursuing. The criteria of bodily integrity definitely suggests, however, that we are to err on the side of leaving children’s bodies alone.

I think it best to understand the permissibility of actions like circumcision as a function of two primary factors: the invasiveness of the proposed action, and what’s at stake in performing it, or not. So, take two examples that readily arise in this context: vaccinations and ear piercing. In the case of childhood vaccinations like that against polio, what’s at stake can be whether or not a child will become immune to a life-threatening disease. There is a risk that the vaccination will have adverse effects, even death, but we can roughly compare the threat of these to the threat of the disease in order to reach a rationally defensible decision regarding the vaccinations. The vaccination is somewhat invasive, being permanent and possibly dangerous, but there is sometimes alot at stake. So vaccinations, depending on the particulars of the vaccine, disease, and child, are often justifiable. The liberty to be free from nonconsensual medical procedures doesn’t mean anything to the victims of easily preventable childhood diseases, after all.

Take now the case of ear piercing. This procedure ranks low both in terms of invasiveness and what’s at stake. Most ear piercings will heal without incident if the piercee later decides (s)he doesn’t want them, but their value is simply cosmetic. Some cosmetic procedures, such as reconstructive surgery for this kid, may stand to dramatically improve children’s current and future quality of life but ear piercing?… not so much. So I would say in this case that parents can and should err on the side of bodily integrity by refraining from piercing their children’s ears until at least such time when the children say that they want the piercings (they may later change their minds, but anyway so do adults). This implication of the bodily integrity view seems ridiculous to some, who take for granted the permissibility of ear piercing and would discount any theory prohibiting it. However, I hasten to add that since ear piercing is minimally invasive and generally reversible, parents do their children no gross wrong in having them pierced without consent.

I understand that the vast majority of parents love their children and have no interest in doing them harm. Of these parents, those who chose routine infant circumcision do so for at least comprehensible reasons: faith, culture, tradition, cleanliness, whatever. But, when bodily integrity is at stake, the bar of justification for parental action is set much higher than these reasons can reach. We do not generally accept religion or culture as properly justifying what would otherwise count as the physical abuse of children, and the procedure by many accounts lacks significant hygienic value. Bottom line: routine infant circumcision — like childhood vaccination — is invasive and irreversible, but — unlike childhood vaccination– is without equally as weighty values at stake. Considerations of religion and culture may explain why so many parents do in fact chose routine male circumcision, and they explain why so few men subjected to it feel victimized, but they do not morally justify the practice.

When value-added models were first conceived, even their most ardent supporters cautioned about their use [Sanders 1995, abstract]. They were a new tool that allowed us to make sense of mountains of data, using mathematics in the same way it was used to understand the growth of crops or the effects of a drug. But that tool was based on a statistical model, and inferences about individual teachers might not be valid, either because of faulty assumptions or because of normal (and expected) variation.

Such cautions were qualified, however, and one can see the roots of the modern embrace of VAMs in two juxtaposed quotes from William Sanders, the father of the value-added movement, which appeared in an article in Teacher Magazine in the year 2000. The article’s author reiterates the familiar cautions about VAMs, yet in the next paragraph seems to forget them:

Sanders has always said that scores for individual teachers should not be released publicly. “That would be totally inappropriate,” he says. “This is about trying to improve our schools, not embarrassing teachers. If their scores were made available, it would create chaos because most parents would be trying to get their kids into the same classroom.”

Still, Sanders says, it’s critical that ineffective teachers be identified. “The evidence is overwhelming,” he says, “that if any child catches two very weak teachers in a row, unless there is a major intervention, that kid never recovers from it. And that’s something that as a society we can’t ignore” [Hill 2000].

(As you may be aware, a similar argument is sometimes made about charter schools, which were apparently intended to reform, and not replace, ordinary public schools).

So here’s the thing. I really don’t know what to make of value-added models, which have received alot of attention in the mainstream media ever since this hoopla in Los Angeles. I lack familiarity with statistics, and have read deeply conflicting accounts of their accuracy and meaningfulness in making education policy decisions both with regards to schools and individual teachers.

HOWEVER. Ask J. Robert Oppenheimer — just because you develop something doesn’t mean that you retain authority over its usage for all time, nor would that be desirable. What matters is how that technology can be used, and how it should be used, for independent moral, political, and practical reasons. Sanders, “the father of the value-added movement,” in the quote above makes substantive claims about how teachers ought to be treated, and about the ill effects of using VAMs in a particular way. But those are entirely separable from the statistical technique itself, and do not follow from it.

If value-added models, or charter schools, can in fact be used to improve education and, all other things considered, make sense to adopt, then to hell with their inventors’ intent. That is all.

And here’s a quick but thoughtful critique of that summary over at the Quick and the Ed. Its author dispels two common criticisms of the value-added analysis:

1. We shouldn’t criticize value-added analysis simply on the basis that it shows many teachers’ effectiveness as shifting substantially from year to year. It’s possible that teacher effectiveness *does* shift from year to year, for whatever reason.
2. Because this particular method of value-added analysis uses individual students’ own previous scores as a baseline for measuring progress, it does not penalize teachers for having slower students in their classes (at least, the criticism must be more subtle, as a commenter suggests).

Still, the most interesting thing I’ve read on the subject remains cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham’s “3 key factors in teacher evaluation (beyond the hype of value added).” According to him, the key factors are:

1. Figuring out the goals of schooling, and only then crafting assessments to measure teachers’ success at attaining those goals. It’s backwards to assume that whatever we are able to test or assess must be the goal of schooling.
2. Taking into account the ages of students, recognizing that responsibility for students’ learning probably falls more fully on teachers of early elementary schoolers than on those of high schoolers.
3. Remaining cognizant of the limitations of any evaluation system in thoughtfully choosing criteria for firing teachers that balance the costs of keeping bad teachers with the costs of firing good ones.

Each of Willingham’s three key factors gets at what is essentially the major problem with value-added analysis: its results, even if accurate, lead us away from philosophical questions about education and teaching, the answers to which have important practical and policy implications. So I want to elaborate on them, with that in mind.

The goals of schooling are far from noncontroversial. Although most people would agree that proficiency in math and reading are amongst its goals, there is significant disagreement as to what constitutes proficiency and how it ranks in importance as compared to other goals of schooling (character development, socialization, preparation for the workforce — which may or may not require proficiency in math and reading, etc). It’s a mistake to establish teacher evaluation policy based on value-added analyses without having clarified at least some of the goals of schooling and their relative importances. As should be obvious, this value judgment can’t be generated from the value-added analysis itself. Rather, it will be outcome of philosophical discussion regarding the moral value of character development/socialization/preparation for the workforce, the best kind of life for a human to lead, how these responsibilities should be shared between schools and families, etc.

Willingham’s second point, about the ages of students and their respective levels of responsibility for their own learning, also raises moral questions. The discourse surrounding value-added analysis has seemingly taken entirely for granted that teachers ought to be doing all that they can to raise students’ test scores, regardless of their ages. This stands in need of defense. While we may be reluctant to blame 7 or 8 year old students for failing to learn math and reading, it may be appropriate to blame 16 and 17 year olds for failing to progress in those subjects. Some high school teachers may manage to raise teenagers’ test scores significantly, and they will come out looking better than other teachers in the value-added analysis. But, even if raising students’ test scores were of the most pressing importance in their early years, other functions may be more important for teachers to engage in at the high school level — maybe helping students to think about their future educational and career plans, and taking a more laissez faire approach in order to begin acclimating them to the “real world.”

So this ties back into the previous point, about the goals of schooling. If raising math and reading test scores is, literally, the one and only proper goal of schooling, then all teachers should be expected to do so each year. However, there may be many other goals of schooling that are more difficult to test. Teachers will need to make tradeoffs in pursuing these various goals, depending not only on their relative importances but based on what their students are like. Maybe, in some particular class, some of the students are ok at math but have social difficulties. Assuming that social development is one of the goals of schooling, the teacher might reasonably decide to devote more time to group work than to math drills. As a result, the students might progress more slowly in math than in previous years, while having made strides socially that do not show up on any test.

The third key factor, about criteria for firing teachers, raises even more moral questions. There are costs associated both with keeping bad teachers and with firing good teachers. If you keep a bad teacher, many students in his or her classes will fail to learn as much as they could have learned with a better teacher, negatively impacting their future educational outcomes and maybe even significantly harming their life prospects. If you fire a good (or at least adequate) teacher, you unduly harm that teacher and demoralize her colleagues (and the replacement teacher might be an unknown quantity who turns out to be worse). We might privilege students’ well-being over teachers, erring on the side of firing, or we might privilege teachers’ well-being in order to show respect to what many consider one of the most important professions. The methods of economics may tell us how to set teacher firing criteria so as to be financially cost effective, but that’s not necessarily the end of the story from the moral perspective.

None of this to say that value-added analysis is “bad,” or has no legitimate purpose. Its results might be quite accurate and useful to some degree, as is perhaps the case in this Los Angeles situation. But we need to realize how it does — or doesn’t — square with our conception of what education, and teaching, ought to be (and, if we lack such a conception, we need first to develop one). At the end of the day, value-added analysis is a descriptive/evaluative tool, and not a normative one.

Fish makes two main claims:

1. Plagiarism is a learned sin
2. Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue (more specifically, I think he means it’s not a moral issue)

Regarding point 1, Fish writes:

The concept of plagiarism, however,  is learned in more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a  few; it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without citing him. The rule that you not use words that were first uttered or written by another without due attribution is less like the rule against stealing, which is at least culturally universal, than it is like  the rules of golf.

Regarding point 2:

Now if plagiarism is an idea that makes sense only in the precincts of certain specialized practices and is not a normative philosophical notion, inquiries into its philosophical underpinnings  are of no practical interest or import… Everyday disciplinary practices do not rest on a foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation of themselves;  no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or topple them. As long as the practice is ongoing and flourishing its conventions will command respect and allegiance and flouting them will have negative consequences.

It seems to me that point 1 doesn’t have any important implications for understanding plagiarism. While Fish admits that, in some sense, every sin is learned, he implies that what’s interesting in the plagiarism case is that rules regarding attribution of work to others are not “culturally universal.” That is, while some rules are shared across all cultures (for example, rules against gratuitous harms to others, presumably), other rules, like those against plagiarism, are not. Rather, plagiarism rules belong to specific sub-cultures (journalism, philosophy, science), and not to others.

Fair enough. But Fish seems to take the non-universality of plagiarism rules as evidence that they are not a moral matter. However, a rule’s not being shared across cultures is insufficient to show that it is not a moral rule, and must instead be one of professional etiquette (or whatever else). A rule’s non-universality is in fact perfectly consistent with a variety of moral theories, even besides cultural relativism. That’s because many moral philosophers hold that morality is sensitive to circumstances. An act that is permissible for a culture living in a very harsh environment might not be permissible for a culture living in a more favorable environment, for instance.

Plagiarism rules can be understood as a response to the circumstances of people working in particular professions. They seem to be a moral response, and not merely one of etiquette or prudence, because plagiarism rules are about limiting harms and facilitating collaboration amongst community members. Are these not the hallmarks of other moral rules, such as those against shooting your neighbors and stealing their stuff?

So, notice that point 2 doesn’t follow from point 1, and seems false besides. Plagiarism rules do not “rest on a foundation of themselves,” as perhaps do silly etiquette matters such as using one’s forks in a particular order so as to signal classiness to one’s dining companions. Rather, plagiarism rules originate from, and are justified by, the circumstances of certain professionals that make plagiarism potentially harmful to individuals and deleterious to communities of inquiry. As moral practices, they are indeed a proper subject of philosophical scrutiny. If the plagiarism rules adopted by professional communities were somehow unfair in principle or in their effects, then philosophers might indict them on moral grounds.

What then of college students who plagiarize? It’s true that they are not full-fledged members of the ingroup to which plagiarism rules apply. Yet, even plagiarism by students has significant potential to harm individuals and damage communities. So, plagiarism by students is wrong for the same types of reasons as plagiarism by professionals is wrong — although not necessarily to the same extent, because the stakes in the former case are lower. However, as in many other moral cases, students’ lack of knowledge of the wrongness of plagiarism, their failure to understand what constitutes it, and/or their lack of intent to commit it may go some ways towards mitigating their blameworthiness.

A year and a half ago, I taught an introduction to philosophy course independently. The lectures were in person, but the tests were online because the class only met once per week and I didn’t want to use up a whole week’s worth of lecture for each test. The students were repeatedly instructed, both in class and on the test itself, not to use any sources other than their notes and textbooks.

Upon grading the first test, I discovered that a few students had copied and pasted answers or parts of answers directly from Wikipedia and Yahoo! answers. This was very disappointing, and I dreaded having to deal with the situation. I arranged times to speak with the students, planning to deal with them pretty harshly.

However, when I spoke to them, I was surprised by what I heard. At least two of them seemed kind of baffled that what they had done was wrong, as if they didn’t know that it constituted plagiarism and/or as if they had done the copying and pasting totally unthinkingly. This fit with the fact that the rest of their tests were quite good — there was no need for these students to cheat out of fear of failing. It seems that, in today’s internet culture, it didn’t even occur to them that there could be anything wrong with the casual, undocumented use of online sources.

I was, and continue to be, torn about what to do in these cases. On the one hand, I did plainly forbid the use of other sources in the test’s instructions. Taking a test constitutes tacit consent to its terms, and I would have been well within my rights to give the students a zero on the test, or worse.

On the other hand, though, I’m sympathetic to these students on account of the fact that they appear not ever to have had a respect for academic honesty and a crippling fear of accidental plagiarism instilled into them. Babies don’t pop out knowing about plagiarism, after all. Given the sorry state of education, many of my students probably never learned about plagiarism — what counts as plagiarism, how to cite things properly, what the consequences of committing it can be. And if they didn’t have the relevant knowledge, then there is a case to be made that they are less than fully responsible for their acts of plagiarism.

On the other hand (you have three hands, right?), a lack of knowledge concerning plagiarism doesn’t immediately imply that these students have no responsibility for their acts. They could be responsible for not taking the initiative to learn about plagiarism on their own, such as by reading the whole student handbook or the materials made available on the school’s library’s website. This is a kind of second-order responsibility; failing to take these steps reveals a blameworthy deficit of concern for the academic terms to which one has agreed and amounts to a form of negligence.

Furthermore, a lack of knowledge concerning plagiarism also doesn’t immediately imply that the students ought not to be punished for acts of plagiarism. Punishments, blameworthiness, and responsibility are interrelated in complicated and controversial ways. Sometimes there are prudential or moral reasons not to punish someone who is responsible for a bad act and blameworthy for it (punishment would be too expensive, or the person is now old and sickly, or not punishing the person would somehow or other maximize utility). And sometimes there are prudential or moral reasons to punish someone who was not fully responsible for a bad act, and/or who is not properly blameworthy for it. In the plagiarism case, it’s very difficult to tell who did or didn’t know what constitutes plagiarism or that plagiarism is wrong. Maybe it is better to send a message that there is “zero tolerance” for plagiarism of any kind — willful, ignorant, or willfully ignorant. This has the added benefit of saving teachers all the time and trouble of deliberating endlessly about the particulars of a plagiarism incident.

Yet, I remain undecided on this kind of case. Plagiarism is obviously unacceptable, but the circumstances surrounding can differ widely and seem to matter. I hope that in the future, I either never encounter plagiarism again (fat chance) or that it is so egregious that I can punish it without qualms (but isn’t that kind of a weird thing to hope for?)

Anyway, I hadn’t donated blood in over six months so I finally went. And there’s something that really bothers me about the United Blood Services center that I visit: they really overemphasize all of these stupid rewards programs for frequent donors. It’s tacky as hell, and somehow a little insulting. No, I don’t want to fill out a slip that will enter me in a sweepstakes to win a car. No, I don’t want to log in online and trade my points for prizes. Just to top off the juvenile atmosphere, they have a popcorn machine in the center, and so the whole place smells like a carnival. (I used to give blood at a Red Cross center, and don’t remember it being like this, but I see that even they have introduced an elaborate racing-themed incentive system).

Obviously, the point of these programs is to offers donors some material benefits (or the chance of winning them), above and beyond any intrinsic satisfaction a person might receive from giving blood. I’d be surprised if the programs worked very well, but who knows? People are funny. Just as I was contemptuously eyeing the popcorn machine, a middle aged lady ran in and excitedly started scooping some out for a pre-donation snack.

And donors have to settle for the stupid incentives or nothing, because most blood donations in the U.S. cannot be compensated in cash, by law (I think only some plasma donations are paid). But actually, I’d rather receive nothing but a post-donation snack rather than be subjected to the incentives. They just make me feel like I’m back in elementary school, being baited with junky plastic toys to sell more overpriced wallpaper to my neighbors in some dumb fundraiser.

So, my blood donation preference ordering:

1. Paid donation: This is number 1 not so much because I want or need the money, but because there is a strong moral case to be made in favor of paid blood donation. Unlike most organ donations, blood donations do not cost the donor much in terms of time, sacrifice and health/safety. As such, it is not possible for donors to be badly exploited. And there is good reason to think that blood would be available in greater supply if donors were paid, even minimally. This is of moral significance, because blood saves lives. And a payment, even a small one, signals respect for donors.
2. Totally uncompensated donation: Hey, at least you get to feel purely altruistic. Sometimes you get a “I gave blood” sticker, so that other people will see how virtuous you are.
3. Incentive systems: Arguably and at least in my opinion, these do not show respect for donors. They probably don’t encourage anyone new to donate, and they are somewhat insulting to those who would have given to begin with. Give us something actually of value to everyone ($, however little) or just don’t even go there.

The author spent 20 years as a vegan. Understandably, veganism became ever nearer and dearer to her identity, but it also ruined her health (depression, hypoglycemia, spine problems, chronic pain, reproductive health issues, etc). Eventually, she came to realize that vegetarianism only apparently resolves the issues that trouble its practitioners: animal welfare, nutrition, and social justice. This book is partially a telling of Keith’s journey. However, the story is filled out generously with evidence to support the conclusions at which the author eventually arrived.

The book has three main sections:

1. Moral vegetarians: This section dispels the common vegetarian idea that abstaining from animal foods allows you to eat without causing any death. Rather, it is an inescapable fact that all life requires death. Plants have to eat, and even to grow grains the soil must be fertilized either with animal by-products or synthetic fertilizers produced using huge amounts of fossil fuels. Monocrop agriculture is also very harmful to natural environments, ruining soil and water which causes the deaths of many animals. As such, your vegetarian diet is only apparently death-free.
2. Political vegetarians: This section discusses various political aspects of the eating of animal foods which vegetarians often criticize. For instance, some vegetarians claim that fewer people would be starving if we fed more grains directly to people, instead of to industrially produced animals, and they point to the huge amount of water that it takes to grow a cow. This is misleading, for a variety of reasons. The animals produced for food are more nutritionally dense than grains. And, they are only fed grains due to a perverse history of agricultural subsidies and incentives that makes it cost efficient. But, when raised naturally on grasses, food animals give back nearly as much to the land as they take from it — in stark contrast to the destructive grain crops. Because grains ruin the land, countries need more and more of it, possibly leading to economic exploitation of, or militaristic action against, other countries. And anyway, most alternative vegetarian foods are produced by brands owned by the largest agricultural conglomerates in the world. Vegetarianism, then, is not really the diet of peace and justice that it is made out to be, and it doesn’t really help you to opt out of the oil-fueled, government-assisted food industry. The realities of food production and distribution are much more complex.
3. Nutritional vegetarians: Keith discusses some ways in which conventional nutritional wisdom has gone wrong. Contrary to the dietary establishment, she argues that a low-fat, high-carb diet is unnatural to humans and unhealthy for us. Special attention is paid to debunking the lipid hypothesis and presenting some of the work of the famous alternative health practictioner Weston A. Price. Keith also discusses the dangers that soy poses to human health, which is of particular interest to current and former vegetarians who often eat soyfoods instead of animal foods.

The whole book is rather depressing, and Keith’s conclusion is pessimistic. She think that the only way to achieve morality, justice and good nutrition is to dismantle the foundational institutions of our current way of life (agriculture, suburbia) and to return to being hunting and gathering locavores.

I really, really enjoyed the book. Of course, it is not comprehensive — what book on those mammoth topics could be? — and I have not verified all of the research myself. But it was invaluable to hear all of these things from someone who understands the pull of vegetarianism and who felt that pull enough herself to learn its pitfalls the very, very hard way. Keith switches effortlessly from educational sections to personal narratives and back again. I’m neither religious nor spiritual, but at times I felt myself responding to her prose in that way you’re supposed to respond in church.

However, no book review would be complete without a few criticisms:

• Animism: Keith argues that humanism is morally bankrupt, leads to exploitation of the earth and its creatures, and must be abandoned in favor of an animist ethic. I think this is crazy. I don’t believe that humans have souls, let alone rocks, and I can’t accept any moral worldview that promotes disregarding important moral differences between beings (consciousness, capacity for reason, etc). It’s easy to see why animist cultures did a better job of respecting the environment — they thought that they could actually wrong it in some way. As such, the environment placed moral demands on them, rather than mere demands of self-interest in producing food. But I don’t think there’s anything about humanism that’s inconsistent with more sustainable practices; Keith’s understanding of humanism seems like a caricature in this regard.
• Masculinity: Keith thinks that the cause of exploitation of the earth, among other forms of exploitation, is a kind of masculinity (not to be confused with biological maleness) that is obsessed with dominance and power. I’m not really sure what this adds to the book, other than making its main points look more radical than they really are. Keith is an anti-pornography kind of feminist, so actually I wouldn’t be surprised if the masculinity stuff figures more prominently into her thinking than the book suggests. I’m not really interested in this form of social criticism and don’t know what legitimacy or value it has.
• Technology: Keith repeatedly worries that the human population has grossly overshot the carrying capacity of the earth, and she is condescending toward those who hold out hopes for technology that will solve the problem. I think this condescension is quite unwarranted, considering that her proposed alternative is radical, grassroots political action. Why think that technology is so much more unlikely to fix things than some people holding democratic meetings in a basement somewhere? It’s this obsession with old ways of life (and old spiritual practices, like animism) that really turns me off to many environmentalists and other social critics.

All in all, though, a more than worthwhile read. I would especially recommend it to anyone who has spent time as a vegetarian, and to anyone who has a currently or formerly vegetarian family member or friend.

First, I’ll backtrack just a little and say that there is a meaningful respect in which you “cheat yourself” when you cheat. Many people agree that there is something intrinsically valuable about an education, apart from its value as a means to a career and a livelihood. As such, in cheating, you may keep yourself from life-enriching educational opportunities that would have had intrinsic value. The line between prudence and morality is not firm or easily defined, however, so it may be difficult to tell whether or not the “cheating yourself” line is more of a distinctively moral aphorism or more of an appeal to a students’ self-interest. You can read my last post as a defense of the latter interpretation. I suspect that people provide this advice to students as a kind of backup motivation for not cheating, in the case that they don’t see the moral force of other-oriented considerations, or just don’t care.

But here are some of those other-oriented considerations, ordered from those typically involving the most to the least harm:

1. Your fellow students: These are the people who you harm the most when you cheat on a test or on a paper. Even though your professor may not deliberately “curve” grades, he or she surely grades at least somewhat relatively to the abilities and performance of the class. It is very common for a professor to look over the test or papers to get a feel for them before marking any scores. Particularly in a small class, one or two cheaters could skew the grades all by themselves. Further, as Adam notes in this comment, enough cheating can ultimately end up devaluing diplomas. Finally, even if your cheating does not affect anyone else’s grade or diploma, the existence of cheaters negatively affects all students via the effects it has on your teacher (more on this below).
2. Your teacher: I had no idea of how much cheating (including plagiarizing) harms teachers until I personally began teaching about two years ago. Previously, I figured that it would be kind of fun to catch cheaters and punish them mercilessly. Actually, it hasn’t been like that at all, at least in my experience. I have come to dread reading any work that students have done at home, for fear of finding plagiarism. When I copy and paste a sentence of a student’s work into Google, I brace myself for the results. I didn’t really have an awesome “gotcha!” feeling when I caught someone with a crib sheet during a test. Because cheating and plagiarism happen with quite some frequency, I now approach all students as potential cheaters and must investigate all students’ work (perversely, especially the best work) for evidence of academic dishonesty. This attitude is detrimental to the relationship that teachers ideally ought to have with students: one marked by cooperation, congeniality, goodwill and mutual respect. Beyond a teacher personally being harmed in having to play cheating detective and then deal with the offenders, the negative effects on a teacher can easily trickle back down to the students in changing the way they are treated by a teacher for the worse.
3. The author: Honestly, I doubt that authors whose work has been plagiarized are often materially or substantially harmed by the plagiarism. In the kind of courses I’ve taught (critical thinking, intro to philosophy, biomedical ethics), very few of the students are headed for academia, and the assignments are not of the type that one could go on to publish. But harm to authors can and does occur, probably mostly when one academic plagiarizes work from a lesser known academic and gets all the credit for it.

I’d really like to hear from anyone else who has teaching experience, either to confirm or disconfirm (2) above.

Also, there are probably even more reasons why cheating is wrong. I want to hear them!

First up: the “you’re only cheating yourself” perspective on academic dishonesty

Two questions:

1. Does this perspective adequately explain the badness/wrongness of cheating?

2. Does this perspective adequately explain why we enforce academic dishonesty policies?

“You’re only cheating yourself” might explain one aspect of the badness of cheating, albeit in an awkward way. Ordinarily, “cheating” is used to express an act involving fraud or deceit. While academic cheating does involve fraud or deceit, they are not directed towards oneself, as the saying suggests. (And, while it is possible to deceive oneself, cheating and plagiarism are not usually accurately described as self-deceit). Other bad features of cheating do affect oneself, though: cheating (and plagiarism) involve basically telling a lie about the origin of one’s work, and this threatens a person’s integrity.  It also cheapens the value of a student’s word, as everyone at least implicitly agrees to some academic misconduct policy by enrolling in courses at a college. But of course, it is much catchier to say “you’re only cheating yourself” than “you’re only harming yourself,” for instance.

But the reformulation of “you’re only harming yourself” starts to make clear what’s wrong with the “you’re only cheating yourself” perspective on academic misconduct — it’s plainly false. While there surely is some sense in which you are cheating/harming yourself, there are also plenty of other people you could be harming, typically including but not limited to the author(s) from whom you stole work and your teacher who has to deal with the problem.

So basically, “you’re only cheating yourself” tries to make cheating look like it’s not in your self-interest and therefore is an imprudent thing to do. But, beyond being imprudent, cheating is typically immoral. As such, “you’re only cheating yourself” provides only an incomplete account of the badness/wrongness of cheating.

But let’s just pretend that “you’re only cheating yourself” were true, and that cheating does not harm anyone other than yourself. It would still be a misguided perspective to hold on cheating, because it can’t convincingly explain why anti-cheating policies are enforced. After all, students do tons of things that are inconsistent with fulfilling their academic potential: drinking too much, not paying attention in class, skimming or skipping assigned readings, etc. Cheating is only one among many such practices, and it is not obviously worse in terms of imprudence or “cheating yourself.“Maybe you’re a student who conscientiously comes to class and reads the textbook, but you’re having trouble writing one little section of a paper and so you plagiarize it. Or, you’ve studied well but you draw a blank on an important test question and so you cheat off of your neighbor. Why are these academic misconduct scenarios necessarily any morally worse than a person who always spaces out or falls asleep in class? In terms of harms to oneself, they are actually better.

It would be seriously and inconsistently paternalistic to enforce academic misconduct policies on the grounds that a student is cheating herself, while not enforcing all other similarly self-harmful student behaviors. Enforcement only makes sense on the assumption that some other people are harmed or have their rights violated when you cheat. More on this next time.