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It's been two decades since I took an ethics class, but here's my stab: Kant would call this unethical because he argued against any philanthropic impetus towa

It's been two decades since I took an ethics class, but here's my stab: Kant would call this unethical because he argued against any philanthropic impetus towards lying. Of course he would also call the misrepresentation by the students to be unethical. Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater greater than the damage a single cheater does. Rule-based utilitarianism attempts to resolve this by considering that if too many people cheat, the negative outcomes to the school then outweigh the sum of the individual advantages of those cheating (particularly since any performative aspects of getting a high grade go away when it becomes well known that many people cheated to get those grades). Many people argue that rule-based utilitarianism just devolves to utilitarianism since no two situations are ever identical. I never really quite grokked virtue ethics, but it seems to me that if the professor is upright and is acting with the intent of helping the students who didn't cheat (by raising their grade relative to cheaters) then this would probably get a stamp of approval. Moral relativism would acknowledge that his actions will be deemed immoral by his students (who just want to pass the class, and feel attacked and deceived by this), but moral from the point of view of a teacher who is required by their position to come up with some form of practical assessment for a class of nearly 100 students.

mquander 3y ago
> Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater greater than the damage a single cheater does. It clearly doesn't? There's no sensible mechanism by which someone cheating to get a higher grade will help them, except by hurting someone else. The main dream of the cheater is to get some kind of rewarding job later based on the strength of their transcript, instead of some other guy who would otherwise have been doing that job, and who (if you think the grades prior to cheating had any usefulness at all) would most likely have been better at the job. It's hard to be able to predict in advance exactly who will be harmed by any given act of cheating, but that isn't a problem for utilitarianism.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Unless the outcomes to all students involved are zero-sum, it's not hard to have a model in which a single student getting an artificially higher grade through some unfair mechanism is a net utility gain. It was one of the arguments specifically presented in my intro-to-ethics class (though it was not cheating, it was a student asking their professor (who was a utilitarian) to give them a slightly higher grade; for pure utilitarianism the mechanism that results in inflating the grade is irrelevant).

mquander 3y ago

> Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater greater than the damage a single cheater does. It clearly doesn't? There's no sensible mechanism by which someone cheating to get a higher grade will help them, except by hurting someone else. The main dream of the cheater is to get some kind of rewarding job later based on the strength of their transcript, instead of some other guy who would otherwise have been doing that job, and who (if you think the grades prior to cheating had any usefulness at all) would most likely have been better at the job. It's hard to be able to predict in advance exactly who will be harmed by any given act of cheating, but that isn't a problem for utilitarianism.

aidenn0 3y ago
Unless the outcomes to all students involved are zero-sum, it's not hard to have a model in which a single student getting an artificially higher grade through some unfair mechanism is a net utility gain. It was one of the arguments specifically presented in my intro-to-ethics class (though it was not cheating, it was a student asking their professor (who was a utilitarian) to give them a slightly higher grade; for pure utilitarianism the mechanism that results in inflating the grade is irrelevant).