Positive Liberty

Our yard sits behind a cheap restaurant. Despite our complaints, they often leave their dumpster open, and a lot of things get blown into the lawn. Recently I found a parent-teacher note. It read “I know that Brett earned 105% in Health Class. Thank you, Kathy B—–” The note’s signature caught my attention: Apparently Brett had traced and re-traced over Kathy’s name in pencil, erased his efforts, and started again. His spidery attempts to copy his mother’s handwriting had nearly eaten through the paper. Then Brett threw the note away, hoping to hide the evidence. Instead it came to me, and I may yet send it to Found Magazine.

My Inner Ethical Council, whom I consult on such matters, formerly had a Moral Relativist as one of its members. Three worldviews ago a lettre de cachet sent the Moral Relativist to the Bastille. The guards put him in an iron mask and left him to rot in the dungeon. On finding Brett’s note I decided to pay the Moral Relativist a visit. Of anyone I know, he could surely give me some insight on cheating. I opened the peephole of his cell and peered inside.

“Come in, come in… It’s so lovely to see you again. You’re here about academic dishonesty?”

“Um.. Yeah. How did you know?”

“I bribed the guards.”

“With what?”

“Absolution. From time to time, I persuade them that their sins don’t matter, and in return they give me the dirt on you.” Suddenly I remembered why the Old Regime had imprisoned him.

“So what do you want to know?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. Cheating is such a big, complicated, inescapable problem. It makes me sick every time I think of it. I get scared that maybe cheating really is the way of the world. Maybe it’s actually how everything gets done, and maybe the few people who don’t cheat are just being naive. It bugs the hell out of me, and I don’t have a good answer. Just tell me something… I don’t know… anything…”

“Everyone cheats,” said the Moral Relativist. “You’ve done it yourself.”

“I cheated once, in first grade.” Back then I’d had the damnedest time learning to spell the word “indian.” I wrote it down on a tiny piece of paper and put it in my pencil case. During the test, I pretended to need a different pencil.

“I bet you’ve cheated more than that.”

“I haven’t. I honestly haven’t.”

“That’s what they all say, until they get caught.”

He’s right. When I say I don’t cheat, I mean it. But of course, everyone says that they don’t cheat, and everyone says that they mean it. Brett’s mother probably knows about the 105% in health. I wonder if she knows about the 45% in math? Right now she probably thinks her son is a dear little angel. Quite possibly she thinks he’s a math whiz, too. She won’t understand how he got such a bad grade when the report cards come home. Then again, I’ve seen kids forge those, too.

A recent study found that 75% of students cheat at least once in high school, often by copying papers from the Internet. You will notice that none of my academic papers appear at Positive Liberty, and none ever will, because cheaters in high school go on to cheat in college. Every term I warn my own students that I am good at catching plagiarists; every term, at least one more student gets caught. I’ve flunked them, had them put on probation, and even denied one individual the chance to go on to law school. It’s a grim duty indeed. Yet the pervasive anti-ethic of cheating goes on and on, through high school, then college, into the world of Enron, WorldCom, and Halliburton.

“How did we get into this mess?”

“It really is the adults’ fault; the kids see them and learn which way the wind’s blowing. If everyone does something, then obviously it isn’t wrong.”

I got the feeling he was grinning behind his iron mask, and I didn’t like it one bit. Then something clicked. A few days ago, while waiting in line at the computer lab, a thought occurred to me: An intense social conditioning sustains the act of waiting in line, which is itself an abstraction of a very high order, run entirely on the honor system. The process, though, is so automatic, so flawless, that we hardly notice it. In the adult world, trying to cheat the unwritten law of the line is almost unknown. We wait in line at the computer lab, in the grocery store, and at the ATM machine. No one ever questions it.

Imagine that we did. What if someone came into the computer lab after me and thus behind me in line. When a computer became available, what if he didn’t alert me to the empty spot? What if he ran up to it and sat down instead? I imagine a dialogue something like this:

“Excuse me, but I was waiting in line.”

“Excuse me, but I was faster.”

“There’s a line here. See? We’re all waiting in line.”

“Well I don’t wait in line.”

“Everyone waits in line. That’s how things work. Everyone takes a turn, and no one gets left out.”

“Taking turns is for suckers. Besides, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.”

“But that’s not the point.”

“Shut up, I’m trying to play Pong.”

“Look, asshole, if it were an emergency, you could have just asked me. I’d have gladly let you go first. But if you’re only playing games–”

“Go cry to your mommy, crybaby.”

A line presupposes a social contract in miniature. We all agree that the needs of every person in line are pretty much equal: Our needs are equal in worth, more or less equal in degree, and they deserve essentially equal treatment. On this basis, we all renounce the use of force or fraud. Lines are self-governing when everyone has a strong assurance of eventually getting served. They reflect a near-universal preference for decorum over promptness, a preference that holds true save in those few situations like soccer matches and rock concerts, where emotions run high and the rules of decorum are already weaker than usual. Still, it almost always works.

“What about standing in lines?” I asked the Moral Relativist in triumph. “Adults almost always respect a line, even if they could cheat and get away with it.”

“People only wait in line so they can look like they’re good. When no one’s watching, all bets are off. Deep in their heart of hearts, everyone secretly knows that they don’t have to play by the rules if they won’t get caught. That’s why even Christians cheat. Not only that, but Christians cheat about money. It’s the one thing that their religion says they shouldn’t care about, and still they cheat to get rich. Remember the Hanssen spy case? He was as Christian as they get, and he sold his country to the godless Soviet Union. You can’t get better proof of moral relativism than that. Brett’s a smart kid; I bet he’ll be president one day. Maybe he’ll make himself dictator. I mean, hey, why not? Taking turns is for suckers.”

Now I really wasn’t liking where the conversation was going. The slow tread of wingtips on the limestone floor told me that the Malthusian was approaching. I looked up; the rest of the Inner Ethical Council was close behind him.

“How did you get in here?”

“I bribed the guards.”

“Not you too.”

“As an economist, I know that every man has his price, and I simply resolved to pay it. I was even generous enough to spring for my colleagues. Intriguingly, there’s a diminishing marginal cost on each additional spy smuggled into the Bastille. I’m thinking of writing a pa–”

“Spare me. Do you have any suggestions about the real problem here?”

“No, I don’t. One person can’t change the world, you know. You’ll never stop people from cheating, be they politicians or even your own students.”

“That’s the most dismal thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s my job to be dismal.”

“If I can’t change the world, then at least I won’t be a part of the problem. I won’t cheat on my taxes. I won’t be mean to others. I won’t be a dictator.”

“No one asked you to,” snapped the Malthusian.

“Well I won’t cut in lines. I’ll recycle as much as I can. I might even pick out other people’s trash from time to time, you know, when they throw it in the wrong bin.” The Moral Relativist rattled his chains.

“Now he gets all crunchy-granola. I bet he draws the line at washing other people’s bottles.”

“What’s so wrong about that?” asked the Malthusian. “There’s only so much time in one life, and even virtue has diminishing marginal returns.”

Sometimes I’m glad I keep him around, dismal though he is.

“What do you others think?”

Old Mother Utopia shook her head and said nothing. The Humanitarian spoke up.

“It’s not just Christians who cheat, so you can’t pin it on them alone. Americans of all faiths do it, and that, to me, is incomprehensible. Americans have the easiest lives of any people in the world. They aren’t cheating to survive. They’re just cheating for the sake of cheating. Frankly, I don’t understand it. Don’t most American faiths say the rich should give away their money rather than accumulate it?”

The Capitalist had a quick answer. “Let’s forget about this spiritual stuff and focus on the material. A whole lot of moral problems don’t really have their answers in the heavens, but in how society sets itself up. The simple answer is that we can minimize cheating by punishing more cheaters. All we have to do is make sure that cheating is too risky to be profitable, then make sure that everone knows it.” I thought of the Malthusian’s bribery and made a mental note to flog the prison guards in the public square.

“That will never work,” said the Cynic. “The vast majority of cheating goes entirely unnoticed by anyone.”

“Unnoticed by anyone?” the Stoic asked. “Surely someone sees every single act of cheating, and that’s the cheater himself. A cheater’s victories, good grades, successes, happy marriages… They’re all empty. Looking back on his life, a cheater dies in wretched misery. Cheating is its own punishment, because it steals the happiness of success. Lots of people cheat, and lots of people are unhappy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

The Epicurean was smiling.

“Are you suggesting,” he asked, “That honesty is the only hope for real happiness?”

“I, um… suppose so,” said the Stoic. “But there’s still no guarantee.”

“Agreed,” said the Capitalist. “Convincing people that honesty brings happiness won’t always be effective. Honest but unhappy people do exist, and some of them will always be tempted to cheat. So what can we do about them?

“Lines may work on the honor system–But what makes the honor system work? It isn’t honor. It’s probably not even happiness. The trouble is that despite all codes of ethics, and despite the Stoic’s insights about happiness, there will always be some people who are willing to run the psychic risks of cheating in pursuit of a short-term gain. People compartmentalize; they put their victories in one box and their sins in another. Which box do you think they open more often?”

“I have an idea,” said the Academic. “It won’t work everywhere, but it could be a start.”

“Spill it.” The Academic craves respect. I deny him that pleasure whenever I can.

“There are probably a million essays out there about Rousseau’s Social Contract, all of them just waiting to be plagiarized from the scholarly journals, cribbed from the Internet, and inherited from one fraternity brother to the next. So bypass them all. Make your class read the Social Contract. Then instead make them write about an utterly unknown pamphleteer who borrowed a lot of ideas from Rousseau. Ask them to apply the Social Contract to analyze an obscure poem or play about the French Revolution. The following year, choose a different subsidiary text. Let’s face it, there’s no shortage of obscure, derivative writers out there.

“Are your students learning Shakespeare? Fine, let them write on King Lear, but only if their paper is a response to a literary critic from the 1970s. Structure the assignment. Pare it down until they can’t borrow anything useful from anyone else. Most importantly, never give the same assignment twice. As an added bonus, you’ll never have to grade another summary of King Lear again.”

I liked the sound of that. Students might like it too: I suspect that on some level most of them really do want a test that’s impossible to cheat. As it stands now, average students feel compelled to cheat to keep up, while bright ones dread having to compete with the cheaters.

“Practical, practical,” said the Cynic. “You still haven’t touched the root of the problem. You’ve forgotten what the Moral Relativist said, about how everyone knows that the rules are fake to begin with. Christians know it just as well as atheists: God is dead, no one’s watching, and that means they can still cheat whenever they can get away with it. All the Academic has done is to make up a narrow little workaround, a trick, if you will. It might not even work in the Academy itself, and supposing it does, still the Academy is a lot smaller than you like to think. What are the rest of us to do?”

Old Mother Utopia finally spoke.

“You’re right, of course. The Academic has come up with a clumsy little workaround. When I first left my homeland, I probably would have hated the very idea of conceding that students can’t be trusted. I’d have insisted on their honesty and then punished them for their failings, again and again.

“In Utopia, no one ever thinks of cheating, and people who start out in Utopia all too often set up regimes of punishment to get everyone else to where they are. Anyone who sets up an honor system, expecting it to run on its own, winds up bitter and disappointed; those who play into such an honor system lose all faith in honor itself.

“Sure, any true Utopian would see the Academic’s anti-cheating plan as a wretched scam. I’ve mellowed out a lot though, living in this imperfect world of yours. Accepting life, here on Earth, means learning to love clumsy. It means accepting that there are no guarantees, and that there can never be a sure thing. If we are only working around the Essential Evil, only minimizing its effect, then so be it. If we can’t presume honesty, we must produce it.

“That’s why we get new $20 bills every few weeks,” said the Malthusian. The Cynic giggled. Old Mother Utopia ignored them.

“Produce honesty by managing the terms of your encounters with others, so that honesty is the only option, and then honesty itself becomes a habit, little by little. Like standing in line.”

The Cynic looked momentarily satisfied. Then he noticed that I was looking at him. He put a cynical look back on his face and spoke again.

“Next question: How do we set up our marriages so that cheating isn’t a problem there, either?”

“Ah,” said Old Mother Utopia, “That is a question for another day.”