I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough.
But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's protecting deliberate bad behavior.
We can make mistakes in our ongoing behaviors. Nobody's perfect.
The question is simply how you balance loyalty to the institution vs loyalty to a friend.
A lot of people will think that cheating in a context where a lot of other people cheat too, is just not a big deal. That it's certainly not worth losing a friendship over. Like, are you going to end a friendship because someone jaywalks? Because they habitually speed 5 mph over the legal limit? Because they sometimes take illegal drugs? Because they deducted things on their tax return that you know weren't actually business expenses?
The size or importance of a moral violation matters, when weighing up conflicting moral obligations.
I guess this really comes down to differences in morality.
I think cheating is pretty serious. It qualifies as self-harm, and it harms your classmates by devaluing their eventual degree.
Jaywalking and minor speeding are not even immoral at all, in my view. I don't mean they're insignificant, I mean they're outright not morally wrong to me, so that comparison suggests that we have a pretty strong difference in what we consider to be morally good here.
It's very easy to argue speeding is immoral: it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle. So you can speed to rush to a hospital, for example, but everyday speeding is immoral both because it breaks the morally legitimate democratic law and increases the chance of physical harm.
For many people, cheating on a test is little different from speeding. Calling it "self-harm" is a stretch, and there's zero direct harm to your classmates if it's not graded on a curve (which I haven't seen in a long time). And you could easily argue that the marginal difference it makes to the value of everyone's degree from that institution overall is basically as negligible as the marginal difference it makes to public safety as speeding by 5 mph does.
Also, different exams are different. Fewer people will be bothered by cheating on a freshman year calculus exam, whereas cheating on a final qualification to become any type of emergency responder is far, far more serious because somebody could directly die as a result of your lack of knowledge.
> it's immoral to disobey any law or regulation passed by a democratically elected government if these is no other conflicting moral principle.
I have to say, this is not the sort of attitude I expected to find on this site. Especially from someone defending cheating on exams. Anyway, I'm sure I won't convince you to change your mind on this, and you certainly won't convince me.
You misread me. I never said cheating is fine. I responded to someone who said that cheating is "obviously" bad, implying ratting out a friend is not. The only thing I've done is to say they're both bad, and that it's not obvious at all that the former is worse than the latter.
And I find it somewhat bizarre that you seem to think there is no moral value in following the law? Especially when I added the caveat "if there is no other conflicting moral principle", which means you believe there is nothing bad about the law?
Or is it the caveat you disagree with, and you think the law must be followed no matter what?
I didn't say you said cheating is fine. But you are defending it by minimizing its consequences.
No, I don't see any moral value in following the law. Following the law can be and often is morally good by coincidence because the law encodes some piece of morality, e.g. the laws against theft or murder. But if the law says I'm only allowed to cross the street at designated locations, and I can safely cross at a different location, there is no moral issue with doing so, in my view. If speeding is immoral it is only because of the safety concerns, not because it's illegal. If I refrain from speeding on a road where I believe it's safe to go significantly faster than the limit, it's only because I want to avoid the potential consequences of breaking the law, not because I think it's somehow wrong.
> No, I don't see any moral value in following the law.
Just so you know, that's not a position most moral philosophers take, as long as the law is decided by sufficiently democratic procedures.
The fact that you belong to a group of people, and the people decide on rules, means that violating those rules is a moral violation against that community of people.
To say that has no moral weight at all is a pretty extreme position. Now obviously if there's a conflict with another principle, there are times that other moral principle should win. But to say that there is no moral value whatsoever in following the law is not something I think many people will agree with. And thank goodness.
Who determines what's "sufficiently democratic"? Do most moral philosophers really believe that being one vote out of many thousands to choose one representative to send to a legislative body of dozens is sufficiently democratic to obligate me to follow a pointless law that was written long before I was even born?
Not that it's going to change my view, but I'm curious if that's really the position they take.
I could buy the argument if the friend had a moment of weakness, regretted it, won't do it again, and please don't report it. They've learned their lesson, that's enough.
But if they do it and they're fine with it and they're going to do it again and what's the big deal? Refusing to report that isn't loyalty anymore, it's not sticking with someone who made a mistake, it's protecting deliberate bad behavior.