[gavinsyancey]

Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?

It really is a cultural thing, and that sort of culture is primarily passed down from upperclassmen to underclassmen. I went to a different college with an honor code (Harvey Mudd) and when I graduated in 2019 it was still doing relatively well, but from what I've heard COVID really killed students caring about / adhering to the honor code.

[AnnikaL]

I'm in Mudd's class of '27 (and I was on the honor board for 2 years), and I do think the honor code system has gotten somewhat less functional over the time I've been here. But I think a majority of students and faculty still want to make it work.

[ericmay]

> Which is bad, someone who cheats on a test or someone who rats out their friend for cheating on a test?

Obviously the first. How is this even a question?

[crazygringo]

This is not obvious at all.

Loyalty is a fundamental moral principle. Loyalty to a friend carries a lot of moral weight. Humans are a social animal, and loyalty to a friend can easily outweigh loyalty to some abstract institution. Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now. The university I went to won't do shit for me.

Like, if you're talking about loyalty to a friend who wants you to cover up an unjustified murder they committed, then I think most people will say the value of telling the cops about the murder outweighs the loyalty to your friend.

But for cheating on some test where probably 30% of the other students are cheating anyways? I think the vast majority of people will say that loyalty to your friend is the more important moral principle here. We all make mistakes in life, and the whole idea of loyalty and love to a friend is that we support them even though they make mistakes. As long as the mistakes are common mistakes like cheating on a test or cheating on a boyfriend, as opposed to things like felony crimes.

[ericmay]

You’re introducing additional details and scenarios that are part of a different conversation, one in which is certainly nuanced and well-worth discussing.

But what you are doing here is justifying behavior. That’s separate from a discussion about what’s right or wrong. You have to not only consider one’s friendship, but the negative effects across society that their actions cause. In other words, reporting the friend negatively affects (in general) only two individuals, while cheating affects many more people and cultural values and norms. I’m not a Utilitarian, but intent and effect matter.

[wat10000]

It's not a mistake if they do it routinely.

I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough.

But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's protecting deliberate bad behavior.

[crazygringo]

We can make mistakes in our ongoing behaviors. Nobody's perfect.

The question is simply how you balance loyalty to the institution vs loyalty to a friend.

A lot of people will think that cheating in a context where a lot of other people cheat too, is just not a big deal. That it's certainly not worth losing a friendship over. Like, are you going to end a friendship because someone jaywalks? Because they habitually speed 5 mph over the legal limit? Because they sometimes take illegal drugs? Because they deducted things on their tax return that you know weren't actually business expenses?

The size or importance of a moral violation matters, when weighing up conflicting moral obligations.

[wat10000]

I guess this really comes down to differences in morality.

I think cheating is pretty serious. It qualifies as self-harm, and it harms your classmates by devaluing their eventual degree.

Jaywalking and minor speeding are not even immoral at all, in my view. I don't mean they're insignificant, I mean they're outright not morally wrong to me, so that comparison suggests that we have a pretty strong difference in what we consider to be morally good here.

[crazygringo]

Yeah, those are exactly the differences.

It's very easy to argue speeding is immoral: it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle. So you can speed to rush to a hospital, for example, but everyday speeding is immoral both because it breaks the morally legitimate democratic law and increases the chance of physical harm.

For many people, cheating on a test is little different from speeding. Calling it "self-harm" is a stretch, and there's zero direct harm to your classmates if it's not graded on a curve (which I haven't seen in a long time). And you could easily argue that the marginal difference it makes to the value of everyone's degree from that institution overall is basically as negligible as the marginal difference it makes to public safety as speeding by 5 mph does.

Also, different exams are different. Fewer people will be bothered by cheating on a freshman year calculus exam, whereas cheating on a final qualification to become any type of emergency responder is far, far more serious because somebody could directly die as a result of your lack of knowledge.

[hgoel]

I don't consider it loyalty to know a friend has cheated, and let them get away with it.

Teachers/Professors are already used to accommodating dumb planning/mistakes from students. An honest "I spent too much time partying and fell behind, can I get an extension" email will often get you very far.

Also baffled to hear cheating on a boyfriend included there, cheating of that sort would be friendship ending.

[dingaling]

> Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now

Im not convinced that's the case, if it's a person who can normalise cheating.

They've already made the decision that benefit to themselves outweighs everything else.

[thaumasiotes]

> Obviously the first.

The more usual perspective would be that they're both bad.

[JCTheDenthog]

Only in certain fucked up moral systems. Though I guess Confucianism would be one of those:

>The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.”

>Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”

-from the Confucian Analects

[ericmay]

That would be a very unusual perspective, at least in the western world and specifically the United States which has a legal and moral system broadly constructed on a mixture social trust and rule of law and we take into consideration both intent and effect in our moral judgements. There are certainly cases, for example someone cheated on a test but that test allowed them to achieve some greater good, that we can modify our moral beliefs on but there's no clear perspective that would suggest both would be bad. That really doesn't make sense.