THE ETHICIST-A TAP

 

You don't seem to think this incident was covered by your college's academic-integrity policies, but at the heart of such policies is the insistence that students present work that is their own and acknowledge their sources.

Whatever the syllabus said, your fellow student was surely violating the professor's expectations by taking a presentation off the internet.

More to the point, if the presentation was meant to contribute to the participant's grades, your classmate was cheating - knowing where the material came from would have affected the professor's evaluation.

And, by not actually doing the work of creating the presentation, your classmate was deprived of the educational benefit of the task.

Many colleges have honor codes that require you not only to refrain from cheating but to report any cheating you know about ; they can run into trouble, because students are inclined to think that snitching is itself dishonorable.

Is there anything to be said for this attitude?  Depending on the circumstances, there may be a case for regarding snitching with some ambivalence. Because our explicit, articulated moral discourse tends to be individualistic, it gives short shrift to values such as loyalty.

But loyalty - along with trust and sense of community - isn't easily reconciled with snitching, where someone gains power over a peer by enlisting an impersonal and punitive agency. At same time, we all know that silence can sometimes protect and sustain pernicious behavior.

What about this case? The classroom ethics of A.I. isn't complicated - it's all about transparency - but plainly the collective process of norm setting is still underway. I'd be inclined to tell your classmates what you found out, in a nonconfrontational way, and make the point that we do ourselves a disservice when we skip the work that helps us learn.

Though you're his classmate, you're also a professor, so those words will probably come better from you than from a contemporary. And if you're struggling to find them?

Clearly there's an app for that.

The World Students Society thanks Kwame Anthony Appiah, who teaches philosophy at N.Y.U. His books include '' Cosmopolitanism,'' ''  The Honor Code '' and '' The Lies That Bind : Rethinking identity.''