Seligman does well basically to refuse to engage in the endless philosophical debate over what happiness is, exactly. And he does seem to have taken seriously, and largely accomplished, his goal of providing a descriptive account of the constitutive elements of happiness and how to achieve and sustain them. In other words, Seligman does not suggest that the body of evidence regarding happiness necessarily has normative force for all readers; you may have some reasons — prudential and/or moral — not to do some of the things that conduce to happiness. (For example, you may have a principled commitment to retributive justice such that you reasonably choose not to forgive some wrongdoers in your life, even though research shows that forgiveness is an important element of happiness).

However, I’m worried that Seligman’s descriptive task goes notably off the rails towards the beginning of the book, in the midst of a cursory discussion of positive emotions. Seligman describes his friend Len who, despite “having made it big both in work and play,” remains “constitutionally at the low end of the spectrum of positive affectivity” (p. 34–35). Although Len is a high achiever, his achievements don’t do as much to make him feel as great, good, joyful, etc. as they would for most other people. Yet, Seligman maintains that, like Len (who eventually finds a compatible spouse for his “chilly” personality), “a person can be happy even if he or she does not have much in the way of positive emotion.”

This will come as welcome news to anyone who, like Len (and Seligman), finds himself on the low end of the positive emotion scale. But why believe it’s true? To claim that happiness doesn’t require much positive emotion is to commit to one particular — and controversial — normative conception of the best kind of life for a human being. Seligman has, in essence, defined away the possibility that happiness consists primarily in the positive emotions. It may be true that we can’t change where we fall on the positive emotion scale, and that it’s better to focus on what we can change than what we can’t. But Seligman’s statement is quite strong: happiness is ultimately independent of how much positive emotion one experiences. This entails a thick, normative, and controversial account of happiness; a matter that ought not to be settled by postulation.

Without having given it too much thought, I have the following pretheoretical view: Positive emotions either aren’t an important part of the good/flourishing/happy life for a human being, or they are. If they aren’t, then why pay special attention in the book to people who don’t experience many of them, and point out their ability to partake in other facets of the good/flourishing/happy life (e.g., achievement)? On the other hand, if positive emotions are an important part of the good/flourishing/happy life for a human being, then those with low positive affect have reason to want them, apart from the other facets of the good/flourishing/happy life they may have achieved, even if this is a difficult or even impossible task.

For those who tl;dr-ed, here’s the gist: Seligman claims to be providing a descriptive account of happiness, and not a normative one. However, in his extending the umbrella of happiness by definition to potentially cover those with somewhat or even drastically low positive affect, he makes important assumptions about the happy (or “good,” or “flourishing”) life for a human being. This isn’t necessarily bad or wrong, but it isn’t value-free.

In my opinion, it is better to keep the positive affectivity and achievement/satisfaction/etc. components of happiness entirely distinct, calling neither by itself “happiness,” for the sake of conceptual clarity. More on this later, maybe.

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.

“In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas.”

Relevant experiments have been extensively replicated, and the depletable self-control hypothesis seems reasonably well-confirmed. The implication for poverty is this: the less money you have, the more situations you will encounter in which you must restrain yourself and make difficult purchasing tradeoffs, and this means you’ll have less willpower leftover later to deal with other situations in which you might need it. In other words, of two individuals who have the same baseline level of natural and/or cultivated willpower (assuming there is such a thing), the richer one will make better choices, ceteris paribus, than the poorer one, where those choices require willpower and self-control.

In light of these findings, and to put some words in Dr. Cholbi’s mouth, we might wonder whether it is reasonable to maintain a commonsense view that willpower and self-control are virtues: stable states of character with rational, affective, and behavioral components, and which agents cultivate over time. Instead, the depletable self-control hypothesis suggests that the behaviors of individuals are largely subject to the circumstances in which they find themselves, financially and choices-wise. The fact of the psychological matter may be that willpower is less of a trait that one develops and more of a force to which one is susceptible.

However, I think it makes better sense to think about the depletable willpower hypothesis not as evidence that willpower isn’t a virtue, but as supporting the view that developing the virtues requires a sufficient amount of certain external goods (such as money, health, being born into a good family, etc). At first blush, the external goods requirement may seem as somewhat elitist, entailing as it does that privileged people are more likely to become virtuous. But really this is a reasonable alternative to the Socratic-ish view that only morally bad acts can truly harm us, and therefore that virtue can be developed essentially independently of one’s circumstances. Tragic as it is, our life possibilities are in fact constrained by the situations in which we find ourselves, situations that may not be entirely or even partially under our control, and this includes our prospects for flourishing or not. If you are poor, the moral deck may be stacked against you when it comes to willpower (and becoming well educated, and reserving time for contemplation, and having aesthetic experiences, and so on).

But, even assuming that the external goods requirement is correct, we can and should take up the further question of the extent to which an individual bears responsibility for her continued lack (or possession) of some external good or other. A clear example is to what kind of family  you’re born, an external good potentially contributing to human flourishing for which no one ever bears responsibility. People will be responsible for their financial situations (and, relatedly, the extent to which their willpower is continually taxed) to varying degrees.

This picture pretty much comports with standard Aristotelian virtue ethics, and with commonsense morality too, I think. Its most important implication for the depletable willpower hypothesis is actually not related to understanding how virtue theory applies to impoverished individuals themselves, but for correcting how we morally appraise those individuals. If the hypothesis is true, and a person is impoverished for reasons substantially beyond her control, compassion and wisdom require that we refrain from labeling her as merely lacking in willpower, or as having anemic self-control. This may cause us to treat impoverished people better (policy-wise or on an individual level) than we would if we were thinking of them instead as weak, depraved, akratic, etc.

Finally, notice that there are still rich people facing few willpower-taxing situations who still make bad choices. The external good of financial security supports willpower, self-control, and temperance, but it doesn’t guarantee them. These qualities may indeed be virtues, but virtues that are more dependent upon the having the external good of wealth than some other virtues.

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.

The value of education is not purely as an investment. Education also provides some degree of consumption value.

This observation kind of throws a wrench in human capital theory, because it will be difficult to decide whether certain forms of education spending were worth it in the absence of information about the value that that education had to students in virtue of merely consuming it, apart from any job they subsequently got or whatever. The consumption value of education is subjective, and will vary widely from person to person. But the fact that education’s consumption value is difficult, or impossible, to observe and measure does not give us good reason to ignore it.

The consumption value of education came to my mind frequently as I recently read “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” Throughout the book, the authors stress that college students today emphasize the social value of college to an extreme degree, some of them going so far as to say that the relationships that they form and experience in college are significantly more important than anything they may learn in the classroom. Unfortunately, gaining extensive social experience in college is, to some extent, at odds with performing well academically: for instance the authors show that, while participating in a fraternity or sorority may improve academic performance somewhat, studying in groups is less effective than studying alone. And, because our time is finite, hours spent socializing are mostly hours spent not studying, reading, or writing, activities which occupy less of college students’ time today than in the recent past, apparently to their detriment.

Now, socializing at college may itself have some investment value, particularly at elite colleges (i.e., “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”). But college students engage in many social activities simply because they are enjoyable. As such, social opportunities and experiences constitute much of the consumption value of going to college, and students self-report that this is a very important aspect of college life to them. Yet, practically daily now there is a story in every major news outlet, describing the shock, frustration, anger, and sadness of college graduates upon realizing that they are unable to trade their college credentiala for a high-paying job, or even any job (here’s an example from the NYT).

My assessment of the situation: Stuff doesn’t acquire investment value just because you want it to. Students and parents realize, on some level, that the value of college consists to a large extent in consumption. This is why they speak frequently of the college “experience” and make college decisions taking things like sports, dorms, and dining hall food into account. But then, when it’s time for the degree to hit the fan and for interested parties to see what kind of investment value that expensive education really had, they are unable to bite the bullet and admit that college is greatly about consumption.

Notice that another aspect of the consumption value of education consists in students’ simply enjoying attending classes (your author is the queer sort of creature who often enjoys it immensely) and partaking in other academic experiences available only through institutionalized education. This should be kept in mind when we think about students’ decisions to attend graduate school and pursue careers in academia, despite the dismal job prospects. Many of the requisite educational expenditures should be understood as (maybe) overpaying for educational experiences, rather than as failed investments.

On the one hand, sometimes the badness of being judgmental gets explained something like this: “Well, when I first met Bob, I thought he was stupid and annoying, but I gave him another shot. And now he’s my best friend! So we shouldn’t be too judgey about people.” This view is really about what’s prudentially wrong with being judgmental: you sometimes judge wrongly, causing you to miss out on valuable relationships and experiences.

But there’s still something morally wrong with being judgmental: it’s vicious to have negative attitudes towards others, in certain cases. No reasonable person would go so far as to say that negative attitudes towards others are always wrong to have — attitudes like resentment play an important role in our moral-psychological lives. So to be “judgmental” in this sense must have something to do with having unwarranted negative attitudes towards others. Our judgments are unwarranted when they are based on too little information about another person, such as a single encounter with them or just going by their appearance.

There are probably some ought-implies-can issues here, in that our attitudes may not be under our rational control. I actually think that’s true, and as a result people should be cut a certain amount of moral slack for merely having negative attitudes towards others. But they should refrain from acting upon those attitudes when they are in fact unwarranted.

But notice that not being judgmental, on this account, is completely compatible with making informed judgments about the qualities of others’ characters and deciding to associate with them (or not) on that basis. One need not refrain from making any social discriminations in order to avoid charges of being judgmental. In my opinion, it is neither morally required nor prudent to behave as a kind of equal opportunity socializer — our time is limited, and we should spend it with certain people (and not with others) for good reasons.

To be charitable, we should not assume that speakers have in mind some characteristic of persons that is easily expressible in other ordinary terms. So, taking onself too seriously must not be reduced to simple arrogance, selfishness, egoism, self-absorbedness, pretentiousness, etc.

In wracking my brain for alternative meanings of the phrase, I was reminded of The View From Nowhere, written by philosopher Thomas Nagel while he was still awesome, before he jumped the shark. Nagel describes two distinct viewpoints that human beings commonly assume: subjective and objective. From the subjective point of view, our own lives (desires, plans, projects, ambitions, hopes, loves, etc) seem to be of the utmost importance. We doggedly pursue our own ends (whatever they may be), day in and day out, and often at great cost. However sometimes we are, for various reason, compelled to assume the objective point of view, or “the view from nowhere;” this is a presumably uniquely human capacity. When we do our best to mentally and emotionally detach from our particular lives and to think about stuff in general as if disembodied, we come to question the importance or value of the things with which we are preoccupied from the subjective point of view. Startled by this finding, we can’t just reject the objective point of view altogether because we have a prior belief that impartial views ought to be taken as normative over partial ones. Still, we find ourselves psychologically incapable of rejecting the subjective point of view, even if we’d like to do so. According to Nagel, the problem of the meaning of life is just that these two viewpoints irrevocably clash and cause a philosophical sort of cognitive dissonance.

If I were able just to choose a meaning for “taking yourself too seriously,” this is what I’d say: A person takes herself too seriously when she fails to assume the objective point of view (i.e., to “look at the big picture” or to “put things in perspective”) at a time when doing so would be conducive to her welfare. Something along these lines may actually be what users of the phrase have in mind. They imply that they don’t want to be, or to be around, people who work all the time and/or who are unable to kick back and have fun. And we can understand relaxing or having fun as a manifestation of a person’s belief that life is short, being a perfectionist about work isn’t valuable, and that one ought not “sweat the small stuff.” These attitudes are just reflections of one’s having assumed the objective point of view in a way that promotes the person’s welfare across her lifetime.

But to say that all ambitious and work-oriented people necessarily take themselves too seriously would be inaccurate. Whether or not taking oneself very seriously is a vice will depend on the context, as well as on individual differences in temperament and character. For at least some people who apparently take themselves very seriously, living in the way that they do is in fact maximally conducive to their individual welfare. “Lightening up” or “taking it easy” would make them not better off but worse off.

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.