If cheating became widespread, there would be consequences
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But wait. If all the students are consequentialists, then they’ll all decide to cheat, following the same logic as the first.
Emphasis mine. A consequentialist student will see that the consequence of them cheating is “everyone cheats → draconian measures → worse off overall”. So they won’t cheat. Or they will cheat in a way that doesn’t cause everyone to cheat—only under special circumstances that they know won’t apply to everyone all the time.
edit: It may seem a cheap trick to simply wave it off as consequences that will be foreseen. If in every single situation where consequentialists would lose, I simply say that losing is a consequence that consequentialists would take into account and avoid, then I’m not really talking about consequentialists so much as talking about “eternally-correct-decision-ists”.
This trick isn’t one, though, in this situation (and many others). I am putting all the difficulty of moral decisions purely on determining the consequences (not a moral activity). This situation (and other stag hunt / prisoner’s dilemma / tragedy of the commons style situations) is easy enough for a student to model and predict. If all the students were dumb enough to be incapable of figuring out the draconian consequences (possible, as they are resorting to cheating!) then these students fail worse than nonconsequentialist students.
I would like to say that is a fact about the student, not a fact about consequentialism. But it is a fact about consequentialism that it doesn’t work for bad modelers; if you can’t predict the consequences accurately, you can’t make decisions accurately. I think that is the strongest point against consequentialism at the moment: the claim that good performance from consequentalism requires intractable computation and that feasible consequentialism provides worse performance than an alternative.
Or they are there to actually learn something. I don’t know about you, but I have yet to see any way to learn by cheating. Cheating is often, in more than just learning, non-productive to the potential cheater’s goals.
The view that secondary level education is about instilling desired behaviours or socialising children as much as it is about learning is very common and somewhat well-supported—and to the extent that schools are focused on learning, there is again a somewhat well-supported view that they don’t even do a good job of this.
The view that tertiary level education is about obtaining a piece of paper that signals your hire-ability is widespread and common.
To the extent that potential cheaters have these goals in mind, cheating is more efficient than learning.
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Emphasis mine. A consequentialist student will see that the consequence of them cheating is “everyone cheats → draconian measures → worse off overall”. So they won’t cheat. Or they will cheat in a way that doesn’t cause everyone to cheat—only under special circumstances that they know won’t apply to everyone all the time.
edit: It may seem a cheap trick to simply wave it off as consequences that will be foreseen. If in every single situation where consequentialists would lose, I simply say that losing is a consequence that consequentialists would take into account and avoid, then I’m not really talking about consequentialists so much as talking about “eternally-correct-decision-ists”.
This trick isn’t one, though, in this situation (and many others). I am putting all the difficulty of moral decisions purely on determining the consequences (not a moral activity). This situation (and other stag hunt / prisoner’s dilemma / tragedy of the commons style situations) is easy enough for a student to model and predict. If all the students were dumb enough to be incapable of figuring out the draconian consequences (possible, as they are resorting to cheating!) then these students fail worse than nonconsequentialist students.
I would like to say that is a fact about the student, not a fact about consequentialism. But it is a fact about consequentialism that it doesn’t work for bad modelers; if you can’t predict the consequences accurately, you can’t make decisions accurately. I think that is the strongest point against consequentialism at the moment: the claim that good performance from consequentalism requires intractable computation and that feasible consequentialism provides worse performance than an alternative.
Or they are there to actually learn something. I don’t know about you, but I have yet to see any way to learn by cheating. Cheating is often, in more than just learning, non-productive to the potential cheater’s goals.
The view that secondary level education is about instilling desired behaviours or socialising children as much as it is about learning is very common and somewhat well-supported—and to the extent that schools are focused on learning, there is again a somewhat well-supported view that they don’t even do a good job of this.
The view that tertiary level education is about obtaining a piece of paper that signals your hire-ability is widespread and common.
To the extent that potential cheaters have these goals in mind, cheating is more efficient than learning.