The . Philosophers’ Magazine | Philosophy Outside Europe Mind and Morality . = Lies in Public Life What's Wrong With Plagiarison? ParadoxesOpinion Intellectual Property Rights and Wrongs A disparate group of unnamed philosophers ask, what's so bad about plagiarism? It’s not uncommon for researchers to be nervous about sharing unpublished work. ‘Most academics know all too well the unset- ting experience of having their own words repeated back to them without credit. Many will have read articles where some colleague or one-time friend has quoted them liberally without quotation marks. And if the “quot- ed” work is unpublished, bereft of those vi- tal few words “Article received on...” there’s nothing to prove the victim wrote it first. ‘The feeling is an unpleasant one: a mix of anger, frustration, sadness, at the theft, at the betrayal, and ~ in more prideful mo- ments ~ at the misdirection of any accolades to someone other than you. Of course, sometimes plagiarism is ac- cidental. If you spend your time ~ as many researchers do ~ reading and re-reading the same old texts, going up and down the same avenues of someone else’s thought, those thoughts can become so deeply ingrained in your own mind it’s easy to forget they orig- inated elsewhere. Most researchers have, at one time or other, unintentionally re-pack- aged other people’ ideas, only later to find them ina favourite text read long before. It's not malice. Indeed, it is, to misquote Oscar Wilde, a form of flattery. If other people’s ideas excite you, they can quickly become a central part of your own way of thinking, and it’s hard not to sell them as such. In fact, intentional or malicious pla- giarism is quite rare in the humanities ‘The kind of industrial espionage one finds elsewhere, doesn’t translate very well onto these less “impactful” spheres. Philosophers don’t creep into each other’s faculties to ri- fle through papers and take photos of break- through moral theories. In our experience, the most explicit cases of plagiarism occur in long-term collaborations, where one or other colleague attempts light, Stalinesque re-writings of history in order to claim authorship of idea x. This can end in bit- terness. So plagiarism happens ~ but why do we care so much? Well, in the academic economy, where an individual is required to produce a cer tain amount of original research to get, or keep, their jobs, their livelihood depends on their output. If someone steals your ideas and gets credit for them, they may well get ‘your job as well, That’s one very important 16 reason why ideas are so closely guarded. Another reason is that philosophy, alongside many other of the humanities, is powerfully individualistic: lone scholars are supposed té fork in heroic isolation, craft- Atorecpiamane Fxg gute (0 BER wig 17 Intellectual Property Rights and WrongsOpinion ing their texts, refining their theories. Indi- vidual “genius” is highly prized (whatever the dubious notion of genius relates to, it’s not a property shared by a community). In particular, philosophy ~ and analytic philos- ophy specifically ~ seems to have enshrined this individualism in its method: the macho, argumentative dynamic played out in the seminar room is a function of the clash be- tween these distinct egos. The notion of a single brain squeezing out a brilliant idea is obviously flawed So there are certainly reasons to want to protect oneself from plagiarism and to con- demn it when others practice it. Butare they good reasons? You don’t need to subscribe to post-modern theories of authorship (or “authorship”) to think that the individual- istic structure of the humanities is retardant to progress. In many situations, two heads can be better than one ~and three heads can be better than two (and so on). Thinking through things as a conmunity, in open dis- cussion, can bring a variety of perspectives to bear, highlighting different issues and obstacles. Jealously guarding your ideas, be- cause they're your ideas and you don’t want to run the risk of co-accreditation, won't help in the slightest. Quite apart from this, the notion of a single brain squeezing out a brilliant idea is obviously flawed. Thac’s not how it works; ideas don’t just spring fully formed from one person’ mind, they’re the product of| the interaction of that person with other people and texts. ‘Moreover, the idea that ideas are discrete is itself kind of weird. Take this article for example: the suggestion is that plagiarism (taken roughly as the unaccredited redistri- bution of ideas) isn’t necessarily wrong. How did we come up with this? Well, someone thought that “plagiarism” might be a worth while topic for discussion. So we spoke about it. Someone else wanted to question the system in which plagiarism is a problem. This enlivened the conversation. Another 18 person thought it might be appropriate to collect these thoughts into a short paper. Someone else thought it would be worth discussing plagiarism in relation to the lib- eral buman subject, and others thought that would be too complex a debate for a short opinion piece. Of course, all of the mem- bers of the group were bringing different theories, thoughts and political agendas to the table, It not clear that any one of these contributions was more important than an- other ~and none of them would've amount- ed to very much in isolation. There is, however, one legitimate rea- son to be honest and open about sources. You might object to the way the humanities endorse individualism, you might similarly object to the proprietary (capitalist) atti- tudes towards idea generation — and doing 50, you might want to resist authorial attri- butions ~ but recognising who said what can be very important when pursuing projects of intellectual history. If you're interested in how certain intellectual trends come about, knowing the points of contact between fig. ures in these trends can offer incredible in- sight. Ie might be that forms of attribution Intellecenal Property Rights and Wrongs might be limited (and textual influences are surely, and problematically, privileged over eg. chance encounters), but the fact re- ‘mains that if you want to get any sense of intellectual currents, footnoting and other forms of citation are erucial. ‘This is, as we've said, only intended to be a short opinion piece. We hadn't thought to flesh out the thesis in detailed depth. The idea was simply to articulate some of the dif. ferent ways that plagiarism might adverse- ly affect philosophical projects; it does so, most clearly, when it distorts the appearance of intellectual developments. Outside the capitalist economy of ideas manufacturing, outside the prideful morality of academic communities, plagiarism is only a problem when it confuses the already confused proj- ect of intellectual history. Its really not — in and of itself - that bad. ‘This article was written by a dispirate group of named philasopbers.