These are our future business and political leaders ensuring unabated corruption continues for generations to come.
It's world-views like these students' which explains why articles like this Onion spoof are sadly funny: http://www.theonion.com/articles/wealthy-teen-nearly-experie...
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/education/students-of-harv...
Also, even if the exam was "unrelated to the lectures", tough luck; they are paying a lot for a degree, on the understanding that the school makes the rules. If the school is being unfair, the correct response is not to cheat; it's to stop placing so much weight on a degree that really doesn't mean much.
Finally, your suggested analogy between frivolous patents and a supposedely unfair exam is nonsense. The correct analogy would be between a business that ignores a patent because it is convinced the patent is unfounded and would not stand up to a court challenge, and an employer that ignores a C in Government from Harvard (for a job applicant who took the hit on an unfair exam rather than cheat) because it knows Harvard's grades are no longer an accurate reflection of a person's job potential.
> business that ignores a patent because it is convinced the patent is unfounded and would not stand up to a court challenge
Same thing here. The students may be convinced the cheating charge would not stand up to a court challenge, hence they threaten to sue.
> an employer that ignores a C in Government from Harvard (for a job applicant who took the hit on an unfair exam rather than cheat)
The applicant wouldn't get that far. The resume would be filtered out by software before the interview. The applicant would lose the job to the cheater. It's a dog-eat-dog world.
(Also, it's laughable to suggest that Harvard students are stuck with minimum wage if they don't cheat on exams. We're talking about Harvard; most employers won't even care what the applicant's GPA was.)
I said they won't get much past minimum wage if they take the attitude "tough luck". Successful people get used to knocking down the hurdles others endlessly throw at them, often unfairly.
Well, yes, if you lump all the things you named together and call them all "cheating" without differentiating between them, yes, everyone "cheats". But I don't think everyone would agree that all the things you named should be lumped together. That's a subjective judgment, which means we probably won't get anywhere arguing about it--but see further comment below.
> Successful people get used to knocking down the hurdles others endlessly throw at them, often unfairly.
But the way you are putting it, anything I don't like or anything I don't want to comply with is just a "hurdle" that I'm justified in knocking down. By your logic, if I want my boss's job, it would be OK for me to murder him and then fill the vacant position; after all, he's just a "hurdle", right? Or if you don't think that would be OK, where do you draw the line? What principle lets me differentiate between things that are just "hurdles" that I'm allowed to knock down to be successful, and things that I'm not?
Easy: employ your own ethics system built around the Golden Rule, rather than blindly follow a system designed largely to make rich people richer.
Wouldn't this system forbid you from cheating?
"All versions and forms of the proverbial Golden Rule have one aspect in common: they all demand that people treat others in a manner in which they themselves would like to be treated." The Golden Rule doesn't only demand that you treat others that way; it also demands that others treat you that way, which may require action on your part.
But how do you know what's fair? More to the point, how do you know what all the other people, whom you're supposed to treat the way they themselves would like to be treated, think is fair? You've assumed that cheating on an exam which you believe to be unrelated to the course material is "fair"; how do you know all the other people who are affected by your action would agree?
Also, I probably should have made it clearer at the outset that judging that something is "unfair" to you is highly subjective and prone to error. I do not really believe that the exams the Harvard students cheated on were "unfair"; I think the students were just too lazy to learn the material and then tried to weasel out of the consequences. But they themselves probably sincerely believe that the exam was unfair and unrelated to the course. The fact that so much was at stake makes their judgment that the exam was unfair quite different from, for example, my judgment that I know better than the people who put up speed limit signs what a "safe" speed is under the current driving conditions. See further comments below.
> You get the gold by leveraging your renewed equal opportunity.
Cheating doesn't give you "equal" opportunity; it gives you an extra opportunity that the people who don't cheat don't have. Whether that is actually "fair" is, as I said above, highly subjective, and it's very easy to judge wrongly if you have a strong personal stake in the outcome. That's why we have ethical norms that don't allow people to make such judgments unilaterally in cases where self-serving judgments are highly likely and have large consequences.
Since I asked for a principle that distinguishes when it's OK to "cheat" and when it isn't, I should offer one of my own--actually two, following on from the above comments. I see at least two key differences between, for example, the case of exceeding speed limits, and the case of cheating on exams:
(1) I can make a good case that I, driving my car on a particular road under particular conditions, can better judge what a safe speed is in that situation than lawmakers or regulators who just have very general rules for setting speed limits: I am there and they are not, and I'm the one who risks injury if I have an accident. So I have more information and am motivated to make good judgments. The case of students cheating on exams is opposite in these respects: the students do not have more information than the professor does, and they are highly motivated to make self-serving judgments about whether the exam is "fair", rather than accurate ones.
(2) I gain no significant advantage over other drivers from speeding. I get where I'm going faster than I otherwise would, but that does not hinder any other driver from getting where they're going. There's no competitive element involved. In the case of students cheating on exams, there certainly is a competitive element; a student who cheats does not just gain an advantage, he takes away an advantage from others.
So I would distinguish "cheating" that should be prohibited from infractions like speeding, by these two principles: the motivation for self-serving judgments, and the competitive element where one person gaining an advantage means others lose it.
> The Golden Rule doesn't only demand that you treat others that way; it also demands that others treat you that way, which may require action on your part.
I'm not sure the Golden Rule includes this, but that's an argument about terminology, not ethics. Basically, you're saying that you have to let other people know how you want to be treated. I agree with that general principle, but I'm not sure cheating accomplishes that purpose. Are the students who cheated at Harvard being treated more like they wanted to be treated because they cheated?
Had they gotten away with it, maybe! It depends on what the circumstances actually were. Like you say, they may have just been lazy. My point is that cheating, rule-breaking and lawbreaking can be okay under the right circumstances. If it's to unfairly gain an advantage over others, that violates the Golden Rule. In this case the students may have been justified, if indeed the exam was completely unrelated to the lectures.
> how do you know all the other people who are affected by your action would agree?
It doesn't matter what they think; they may well disagree with you. It was illegal for Rosa Parks to sit in the front of the bus, but her interpretation of fairness trumped the law. No doubt plenty of people felt that killing her would be a fair punishment; after all, her crime had large consequences, namely it fomented a rebellion, encouraging millions of others to break (Jim Crow) laws. Had the rebellion failed, history may have recorded that she was a horrible person, instead of her bus being in a museum.
> That's why we have ethical norms that don't allow people to make such judgments unilaterally in cases where self-serving judgments are highly likely and have large consequences.
So when there's a draft, people should trust their leaders and submit to combat, not bothering to examine whether the war is just? Many of those ethical norms are designed to benefit the privileged few at the expense of the rest. The "large consequences" are often a lie. The norms should be used only as a guideline for your own judgement, lest you become someone's pawn.
Avoiding the draft is a good test case that we haven't considered yet. It certainly meets my second condition, that people have a strong motivation to make self-serving judgments instead of correct ones. It also may meet my first condition: citizens who judge that a war is unjust probably can't claim to have significant information that their political leaders do not. (In fact, the political leaders probably have information that the citizens do not.)
However, I can see a third principle that this example brings out: does the other party in the case, the one which is being "cheated" (the government in the case of the draft, the professor in the case of the exam), also have a strong motivation to make self-serving judgments? Certainly that is the case for a draft: political leaders have all kinds of motivations to claim that a draft is justified when it isn't. So in this case I would agree with you that "cheating" might be justifiable.
I'm not sure the case of cheating on exams meets this third condition, although it could be argued that professors do have motivations, if not to purposely make exams unfair, at least to not expend a lot of effort making them fair. But professors also have motivations to keep students coming to their school, for financial if no other reasons, which gives them an incentive to expend effort to make classes and exams fair.
> The norms should be used only as a guideline for your own judgement, lest you become someone's pawn.
I don't disagree with this, but "your own judgment" is not infallible either. That's why I have been trying to find some principles that can help guide one's judgment. You appear to agree with this general idea, since you too draw a distinction between justified "cheating" and unjustified cheating. Your definition of "unjustified" is "if it's to unfairly gain an advantage over others", but that merely postpones the problem: what counts as "unfairly" gaining an advantage? That's what I've been trying to get a handle on.
In this case Harvard may go overboard on a crackdown, to shore up their reputation that's worth a lot of money to them. In that case the students may need to counter with a lawsuit, to restore fairness.
> what counts as "unfairly" gaining an advantage?
Ultimately it's best for you to decide, as fallible as your judgement may be. Anyone else may have their interests at heart, over yours. Their pet interests may be enshrined in the rules, the law, and/or the public psyche.
Wow. In that situation I would certainly agree that the professor was being egregiously unfair. I'm glad that complaining at least got him demoted, but the school should also have corrected the grades of everyone who was affected--I'm guessing they didn't since you didn't mention it.