Which is Worse?
- Thread starter nc-1701
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Mise
isle of lucy
I took this to mean that you didn't believe that moral statements could be true or false. But in light of what Traitorfish said I may have been misinterpreting the scope of what you were saying.
Well, quite trivially, theft would be the wrong kind of property deprivation, whereas taxes aren't theft and therefore are fine. If we're going by what "the majority of people accept", then the majority of people clearly don't accept your assertion that taxation is "theft" (or extortion). The majority of people would probably say that "theft is just wrong", too.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I just meant that morals and laws and philosophy of right and wrong (ethics perhaps?) can all be different, and that it'd be weird to subject morality to law. What kind of immutable rightness and wrongness is subject to the state? You'd have to believe in divine right.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Okay, we could define theft as specifically unjust acts of appropriation; something along the lines of the old "murder/killing" distinction, which is very widely accepted. But if we accept this, we can't reasonably make the claim that a given act is theft, and then conclude from this that the act is wrong, which is Phrossack's "shoplifting = theft = wrong" equation does. Rather, we would have to first establish that a given act of appropriation is unjust and therefore wrong, which would then permit us to define it as "theft". Otherwise we're just going in circles; "shoplifting is wrong because it's theft, and it's theft because it's wrong, and it's wrong because it's theft".
I should probably clarify, I don't actively approve of shoplifting, I just think that we actually have any particular moral obligation to pay for things. In practice, shoplifting usually a bit of a dick move, because the financial burden is shifted onto employees, but I have no problem with, for example, the legally identical "theft" of wasted stock, i.e. dumpster-diving, and I would presume that most people agree.
aelf
Ashen One
What? you haven't explained yourself very well at all. Surely learning to your fullest potential is through going to lectures, studying hard, going to tutorials, reading around the subject. You seem to think that only by cheating through getting other people to tell you what to include in your essay is the only way to achieve "fullest academic potential". Crazy.
Obviously at some point you will need to prove to your professor that you have adequetely digested the material and can represent it in a logical manner in response to a question. Your argument against "testing in a vacumn" is really an argument against examinations. Should we ban exams? How do we tell whose the best student and whose the worse?
Dude, it seems like yourself and a lot of other people in this thread have been cheating for years and only now have you realised and your rushing to some non sequitur that i'm against students learning to their full potential. I think everybody engages in it, including me, at least i'm honest about it
Great, so we are all cheating a highly-abstracted system that exists in a purely academic environment with no analogous system for discerning merit outside.
I think it's easier to simply say that such a system is imaginary, brah.
Quackers
The Frog
Dude, once again you either misunderstood or are deliberately being dishonest about my position. I don't care about problem sets, tutorial questions or homework. I'm talking specifically about "coursework" AKA a marked paper answering a question which contributes to your final grade. Whether a midterm contributes to your final grade or not, it looks like your professor is complicit in cheating. I mean, fundamentally you believe your fellow classmates giving you ideas for your own essay is legitimate. Disgusting IMO. It means people who woulda not included certain points were informed of them by you or others and got a grade which wasn't a good determinate of their actual ability.
Imagine a fellow who got an essay question. He could not think of an adequete response for 2 whole weeks and the deadline was tommorow! Fortunately he asked a good friend of his - he handily gave our hero several good points which helped him in his essay. Because of this friendly intervention instead of getting 40% he got 80%. Now was that final grade honestly attained?
Well lets look at each point:
A) Exams - cannot talk to anybody obviously.
B) Coursework - cannot talk to anybody.
C) Problem set in a lecture or outside one - who cares? It doesn't affect your final grade and if your getting your friend to answer for you - your cheating yourself.
Don't see how this is relevent. You can blather on about irelevent stuff, but the only thing I'm contending is the giving people good points for an essay which they didn't think of originally.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Because your scenario is impossible. And that's why. It's a hypothetical situation weighted against the realities of learning.
I'm going to do something I've been working hard to refrain from mentioning. I go to one of the hardest (sometimes claimed to be the hardest) universities in the US. We are as competitive to get into as all but the top 15 schools, and only because we admit 10 times their numbers (look at the stats for the top students down to the number of their schools, and they have no advantage). I'm very lucky to be there. I also am one of the students who comes up with the essay ideas.
My school is not training the next crop of rote workers. The goal of my school is to train people to create intelligence, to lead, innovate, and so forth. They want us to learn how to learn fast. That means teaching each other as well as reading texts, attending lectures, and so forth. They want you to come out educated. Not accomplished in winning the grade school game. Educated. Educated in how to best educate yourself further. Educated in how to best seek help when confronting a problem. Educated in how to achieve competence or even mastery of a field that you had to go the extra mile to succeed in--not just sitting back in lecture and working in a cave to prove you are better.
As all good schools do.
In politics, business, and science, you solve problems as a team, but have to do your own work as well. That's why when training the future of society they test and grade us in a multi faceted way.
Did you know we are encouraged to study for tests together as well?
Sure, you could wait to the last day to start a paper and pull an A. But that's because you'd be a really smart and a very well trained student. But if you were set to receive a 40% (lol) you could not possibly have the understanding and grasp on the subject to move into an 80. Your friend is busy working on his paper. You have to know where in your 20 hours of lecture and 1000 pages of reading between deadlines you would need to look to have the material to craft a B level paper. And if you could do that, you're already going to get a B.
To get a 40% means you didn't even read the question prompt. Or couldn't, in either case you're probably not going to get much help from a friend at the last minute.
On the most magical of circumstances, let's say you were slotted for a failing grade and you ended up passing in the way you described. I can't see that possible. I could see that when studying in a group for a quantitative class, but not for paper writing.
But let's say you get pointed in a good direction like that. That means A) your friend is a genius teacher, and B) that means you actually did understand the class and the material and did deserve the higher grade, you were just about to make a mistake.
A) of course
B) take home coursework is always required to be your own work, but you are encouraged to . It's worse in the sciences where the answers are limited and the work to get there is as well.
C) there's no such thing as a problem set in lecture. Problem sets are graded homework. They affect your final grade. They can be upward 50% of your course grade.
Finally, how can you accuse a professor of cheating if the professor is the one who defines the rules for that class?
Mise
isle of lucy
/agree with Hygro.
To add to what Hygro said, when you're in a top university, you often learn as much from the other students than you do from lectures, classworks, office hours and tutorials. It's the first time in your life where you're surrounded by people who are as smart or smarter than you -- and chances are it's the only time in your life, too. If you don't learn as much as you can from the people around you during that time, then you've wasted the best educational opportunity of your lifetime.
To add to what Hygro said, when you're in a top university, you often learn as much from the other students than you do from lectures, classworks, office hours and tutorials. It's the first time in your life where you're surrounded by people who are as smart or smarter than you -- and chances are it's the only time in your life, too. If you don't learn as much as you can from the people around you during that time, then you've wasted the best educational opportunity of your lifetime.
aelf
Ashen One
To be fair, that's true for most people, including - I'm sure - Mr. Quackers here.
Both are wrong, but I feel that shoplifting is considerably worse. It may be unfair on my part but I don't view what you did as particularly bad, and I would not be horrified to find out that a friend / girlfriend did it. But if someone I know shoplifts a camera from a store and I find out I'll want nothing to do with that person. As Yeekim said, it's just a very lowlife thing to do.
