I had three hits today on my website from somebody googling “What Plargiarism is OK?” - Here is your answer…none.
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Sympoze- PEA Soup: Should graduate students be encouraged not to publish?Ralph Wedgwood summarizes three potential arguments against publishing before you finish your dissertation. He (and I agree) thinks they are bad, but asks for people to speak up on their views. If the comments get going, this will be a very useful post for graduate students.
- History, English Job Markets Off 15-20% More on the grim job market.
- 20 Reasons Why 2009 Will Be The Year of the EbookI don't know if 2009 will be the year, but it does seem like a major shift is on the horizon...
- Atoms Arranged MeaningwiseMore on David Foster Wallace and analytic philosophy
- Email Makes Lying More Likely?Interesting article discussing a recent study. The results suggest that people are more likely to lie to people over email than face-to-face communication.
- More on the "Uselessness" of the APAA lot of buzz in the philosophy blogosphere regarding the APA - Here is a recent installment. The discussion is worth the read.
- Men's Winter Fashion - Men's Style Advice - EsquireClick through to the fifth photo [HT: Leiter] - I'm totally adding a fashion tag for this one.
- Seven Suggestions for Future APA MeetingsFunny post from The Philosophy Smoker. Also good suggestions.
- Women Profs Spend More Time on Teaching, Less on ResearchIt'd be interesting to see whether this holds true of philosophy profs. Also, averages are one thing, but another interesting stat would be, what's the M/F ratio of, say, the top 20% of researchers. And of the bottom 20%.
- 60 Philosophy works in 60 DaysA speculative fiction author is reading a classic work in philosophy each day for 60 days, and blogging about the experience.
- PEA Soup: Should graduate students be encouraged not to publish?
5 Comments
C’mon, it can’t be that easy. Suppose a trolley is headed down a stretch of track. Ahead is a fork. If you do nothing, the trolley will go down the track to the left and kill five. If you flip the switch and plagiarize, the trolley will be diverted and kill just one. Incidentally, that one is also a plagiarist. Incidentally, the plagiarizing is necessary for flipping the switch for reasons so complicated if I tried to spell them out we’ll all be dead before we managed to work through them. Incidentally, none among the five plagiarize much.
What do you do?
I have to admit I was being a little snarky when I typed ‘none’ - I couldn’t seriously endorse the thesis that there are no possible worlds where it wouldn’t be permissible to plagiarize.
Immediately after I wrote the post, the philosopher in me wanted to go back and qualify. The case I had in mind was - Assume the world was going to blow up if I didn’t plagiarize a paper…I should plagiarize, right? Seems right.
Harder case: suppose you know that if you don’t plagiarize now, you’ll plagiarize two times tomorrow, and that if you do plagiarize now, you’ll never plagiarize again…
Myself, I’m kind of inclined to say that in this case you shouldn’t plagiarize even though you know that by doing it you would reduce the amount of total plagiarisim you commit over time — the wrongness of plagiarism deontological like that.
Plagiarize. Is it a moral fault, short cut, or lack of creativity? In the USA we think of it as a law “Thou shall not plagiarize”, with punishment more severe in some case then that of personal assault, or theft. Sure it won’t show up on your FBI rap sheet, but it will show up on your transcript (with a flag). Now go to a less westernized country and what we call plagiarism is considered a daily part of the educational process. Many teachers around the world feel that if you can use others thought/words correctly it doesn’t matter where you received the information. Now because we have a more developed educational system does that make us right and the other societies wrong? If were to teach a foreign national in our schools could we hold them to the same standard of citations?
Hey Jeff,
It’s good to hear from you.
I was thinking that Plagiarism had built into it the idea that you were intentionally passing off someone else’s ideas as if they were your own.
If someone lives in a culture where students can hand in papers with large chunks of material copied and pasted from someone else (without acknowledging in any way that these are someone else’s ideas) - then I suspect that this would not involve passing off someone else’s ideas as one’s own.
There may be no deception involved in these cases because it would be understood that when a student turns in an essay there is no expectation that the ideas be their own ideas.