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Information Ethics Problem of the Month is a feature on the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Web site. Librarians, computing professionals, faculty, and students will be invited to contribute short essays on questions of special interest to the university community. If you would like to comment on an essay, suggest a topic, or volunteer to write a guest column, please contact the feature editor, Jean Alexander, jeana@andrew.cmu.edu.

Plagiarism, the Ultimate Misinformation
by
James Vroom
Philosophy Librarian
jvroom@andrew.cmu.edu

"A Plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times."¹

Plagiarism is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,

The action or practice of plagiarizing; the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one's own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas (literary, artistic, musical, mechanical, etc.) of another.

Looking at the above definition, we can recognize what plagiarism is, at least in its most blatant form. Kenneth G. Wilson states that "With proper attribution, to quote another's thoughts and words is appropriate; plagiarism, however, is cheating . . ."² We know that it is cheating to plagiarize, but often cannot say exactly why it is cheating. We might simply state that it is wrong and leave it at that. We appeal to what are ultimately assumptions. It is these assumptions that need to be examined to see what, if any, compelling ethical foundation can be established for these assumptions.

Assumption: Cheating (plagiarism) and other deliberate forms of misinformation in an academic essay is wrong.

Why?

There are many reasons why plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism is misinformation. The information plagiarized may be correct, but the reader is misinformed about where, or from whom, certain ideas originated. Misinformation at best wastes the reader's time. When we are reading for information we do not want to be deliberately misinformed.³ If a source that we rely on is plagiarized from another source, how are we to know? What if we refer to a plagiarized source in our own research? We will have continued the fabrication without even knowing.

Among the many good reasons for information honesty is that this is the very reason for language itself. Language is a gift, accident, or somewhere in between; however you look at it, we use it for communication, for information. This gift of language can be said to have certain moral implications. W. H. Auden, in his poem "Their Lonely Betters," states that

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds. . . .

Not one of them [animals and plants] was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters . . .
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.⁴

Say I claimed to write the above poem. Some of you may think wow, what a great poem. To others, it would look strangely familiar. Still others will recognize the poem and know that I plagiarized it. If I plagiarized the poem, then you would have to wonder what other things I borrowed. You might wonder if you could trust any of my words at all. Without the trust behind them, many words become meaningless.

Words are for us who have responsibilities. For us who have promises to keep. If we use our words to misinform or mislead, then what purpose does our communication serve? Deliberate misinformation tears at the fabric (based on trust) of communication. Academic essays, for example, are pointless if the reader cannot at least trust the intellectual sincerity of the author.

Of course, one of the most convincing arguments against plagiarism, and other forms of intellectual dishonesty, is that you could get caught. A practical guide to identifying plagiarism was prepared by Writing Tutorial Services at Indiana University, at http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/wts/plagiarism.html.

Notes
¹ Kraus, Karl. Beim Wort Genommen (1955); Half Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, translated by Harry Zohn, U of Chicago Press, (1990).
² Wilson, Kenneth G., The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, Columbia U. Press, (1993).
³ Of course, we do not always read to gain knowledge. We also read humorous essays, fiction etc. But even here we at least do not want to be misinformed about the authorship of such works.
⁴ Auden, W.H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random, 1976.