Saturday, December 2, 2006
interesting question
Continuing a week-us horribilus for Columbia University, The New York Daily News reported yesterday that some Columbia University journalism students have been caught cheating in an ethics class. Honor-system-like, the exam can be taken in any 90-minute period over 36 hours presumably because it's a grad school class and many schedules of many students to take into account. The onomatapeicness of cheating in an ethics class is rather delightful and altogether impossible to resist. But in times when we're trying to understand and make room for all points of view and value systems, some questions arise. The ever-perceptive Spunky sets it up:
if I asked you to tell me how long a line was, you would tell me your answer, then I would tell you mine. Then we would get a ruler and measure to see who was correct. That's an independent standard. We recognize and accept that a ruler is the standard to measure length. Without a ruler we would have no way of determining the length of a line.Which is fine for factual things. But then comes a sixty-four million dollar question: in a morally relative world, why is it wrong to cheat on a test? To which those of us who are not religious reply "because some things are wrong and some things are right." But how to know what's right and what's wrong, not to mention why they're right and wrong, not to mention prove it?
Labels: reflections
Never cheated in college.
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