To the people who know me, I’m infamous for following rules. It’s not that I naturally defer to authority — I really don’t like being told what to do — but I can usually see why the rule is in place, and therefore believe that it’s a good idea to follow it.
I had a friend in college who used to pocket fruit in the dining hall to eat later. I reproached him for doing that, since the rule was that the buffet-style food was only to be eaten on the premises.
“What’s the harm?” he said. “Why does it matter whether I eat it now or later?”
“Because if everybody took fruit away with them, the dining hall would run out of fruit. Or they’d have to keep buying extra fruit, which means that the cost of meals would go up.”
“But everybody doesn’t do it,” he said.
“That’s because there’s a rule,” I said. “Besides, what if everybody said, ‘It’s fine if I do it, because nobody else is doing it’? That would result in everybody doing it.”
I never convinced him. He continued to pocket the fruit, and nothing bad happened as a result.
Like the not-taking-away-food rule, most rules exist to remind us that we live in a community. Doing something that benefits me may have adverse repercussions for other people. We tend not to think about other people, which is why effective rules and laws have to include consequences that apply directly to us.
When you think about it, the consequences of most rule-breaking are entirely artificial. If I drive too fast, the real consequence is that I’m putting other people in danger. But that’s too abstract to stop most people (including me, sometimes) from doing it. So the law has to provide a penalty that’s specific to me: If I’m caught speeding, I have to pay a fine. There’s no inherent connection between my rule-breaking and my having to pay a fine; it’s not as if my parting with my money is in any way reducing the danger that I created for other people. And yet we tend to accept this cause-and-effect as perfectly natural.
I have a problem with this when I’m the one making the rules. If I’m teaching a course, I want my students to complete assignments on time, so I impose a penalty for turning work in late. In part, that’s because late work causes real problems for me: I have to take make time to grade each straggling assignment, when it would have been much more efficient for me to grade all of them at once.
But what if, as sometimes happens, I’ve procrastinated on grading for a couple of days? That means that if a student turns in an assignment a day or two late, it really doesn’t matter; I can still grade it along with all the others. Yet I still have to deduct points for lateness. I can see why it’s important to do this — I need to be consistent in enforcing rules; I need to teach students that there are consequences for missing deadlines — but penalizing the student in a case like this still bothers my conscience. It feels wrong to create artificial consequences for an action that has no actual consequences.
Looking at my feelings in that situation makes me realize that there’s another aspect to rules and rule-breaking that has nothing to do with consequences: plain old morality.
I’ve never cheated on a test — not out of fear of getting caught, but just because I know it’s wrong. I’m just not the kind of person who cheats on tests, even if it were possible to do so with no risk of punishment.
Where does this sense of right and wrong come from? As I mentioned in “Only Just,” that question is the only thing that leads me to believe in anything like a deity. But regardless of where it originates, I don’t think it’s something that can be taught, at least not past early childhood.
If I’m trying to persuade my students that plagiarism is a bad thing, it doesn’t help to tell them that it’s just wrong. If they don’t believe that already, nothing I say is going to give them that belief. The only thing I can do is talk about the consequences. And the only consequences I can talk about are artificial ones — failing the course, possible expulsion from school — that are in no way direct results of the act of plagiarism itself. They’re just things that we invented to discourage students from committing an act that we believe to be immoral.
Ideally, doing something wrong would have its own inherent consequences. I guess that’s what makes people believe in karma, or “what goes around comes around.” But those beliefs seem to be used more in judging other people’s actions than guiding our own.
For practical purposes, the only way our society seems to have of limiting people’s behavior is to make rules and provide artificial consequences for breaking them: fines, or imprisonment, or execution, or — for some people — punishment after death (such as going to hell). How strange it is that the concept of right and wrong has such a prominent place in our culture, and so little power to actually change anything!
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