I asked high school students if they would cheat on an exam or plagiarize an essay? What if the class is graded according to a bell curve, such that your getting a good mark in this way will lower other students’ grades? To make this more tempting, I said that you would never get caught and no one but you would ever know what you’d done. Is honesty the best policy in a world where everyone seems to cheat in one way or the other, and even gets amply rewarded for it? Read on….

“It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

-Noel Coward, Blithe Spirit. 1941

Let’s begin by paying homage to Ben Franklin’s contribution to childhood mythology: a penny saved is a penny earned; a stitch in time saves nine; honesty is the best policy. But this last saying, absorbed through the generations as another of Franklin’s clever prescriptions for ethics, is not actually a piece of Ben’s wisdom after all. According to Franklin’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, as well as John Updike, it does not appear in Poor Richard’s Almanac, despite the many sources that assumed it did.

So who wrote it, and who really cares? All over the Internet, those “50 best quotes by Shakespeare” sites include ““honest is the best policy; If I lose my honor, I lose myself.” Well, that gets you part marks. In Antony and Cleopatra [III:IV], Antony proclaims, “If I lose my honor, I lose myself.” But Shakespeare does not precede this with the phrase, “Honesty is the best policy.” Why does this matter? Why so picky?

Maybe in that cut and paste job, we get the key to an entire contemporary mindset when it comes to the actual non photo shopped truth. Though common sense would tell us that honesty is almost always contextual, the gradations among my students about when to be honest, and when they are perfectly warranted to avoid the truth—this, as opposed to lying—are subtle indeed. Cheating is the next stop. Stealing a bit further down the line.

“I might do it, and I think almost everyone else here would too, and if they say they wouldn’t, they’re lying,” announces Kyle bluntly. I do not think he means to be ironic or clever; indeed, he seems quite righteously impassioned. Being honest about being dishonest has him worked up today.

“So you don’t see any problems with this?” I ask.

“Like what problems?” he counters.

“You are using other people’s work and passing it off as your own, “ I say, “All their thought, all their preparation, all their sweat and blood and creativity, it’s like you did all that. Doesn’t that seem like cheating?”   

“But everybody cheats a little bit if they can,” says Alexa.

“Yeah” says Kyle. “Why why pick on us? Lots of people cheat.”

Kyle’s logic may be self-serving, but it is also unassailable. Lots of people do cheat; the egalitarian nature of dishonesty is where democracy really gets to strut its stuff. Everyone’s in on the act. Men, women, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, young, old, rich, poor, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, New Age, libertarian, humanitarian, LGBTQ, traditional, postmodern, carnivorous, vegan, eco-conscious, Wall Street, Main Street – nobody wants to miss out. We live in what author David Callahan terms `the cheating culture.’ Athletes taking banned substances; CEO’s padding their golden parachutes; politicians cozying up with lobbyists; adultery as a national sport; best selling writers making up their supposedly `true’ stories (hmmm…); media printing stories out of context or unsubstantiated; even South Korea’s stem cell genius Hwang Woo Suk confessed he faked his data. And as of late, a baseball team–the Houston Astros–may have cheated all the way to a World Series title.

As Steven Levitt points out, teachers cheat, as do venerable Sumo wrestlers in Japan. Is it a wonder that some of my students think of substituting someone else’s essay as their own as a minuscule infraction of an increasingly non-existent code of behavior? Why are we surprised or outraged when they do cheat? 

Don McCabe, who the founder of Duke University’s Center for Academic Integrity, spent many years conducting surveys about cheating in college and high school. His work shows a consistent rate of 66 per cent of students engaged in some kind of cheating on written work. (Professor McCabe does not address whether his respondents were entirely honest in filling out his surveys). More striking is how little wrongdoing they ascribe to cheating, if any, and the flexible manner in which plagiarism was now understood: “For example, although most students understand that quoting someone’s work word for word demands a citation, they seem to be less clear on the need to cite the presentation of someone else’s ideas when the students present them in their own words.”

I have seen many teachers from the `twentieth century world’ taken aback when faced with a `twenty-first century’ notion of authorship and intellectual property. The anthropologist Susan Blum reports on this new conception of the ownership of ideas in her study of plagiarism in college, in which one interviewed student conveys the blurred lines between what is mine and what is yours: “I don’t think people take direct quotes and that happens much…But I think in terms of taking people’s ideas or taking other people’s thoughts, that happens all the time…I don’t think people even realize they’re doing it. I think people look at something and say `Oh, that’s a great idea.’ And then they throw it in their paper, as if it was their own and it’s not.”

Many other polls echo the findings of Professors McCabe and Blum. Call it the pressure to `get ahead’; or a weakening of society’s supposed `moral fabric’; or doing what everyone else does. But if adults expect some kind of moral indignation from teenagers about cheating–that it is unequivocally wrong; that we would never do it; that we want to succeed `honestly’–then they clearly have not spent much time in high school or college lately. Does everyone cheat? Of course not. But do the majority see cheating as wrong in all circumstances? Hardly.

Many of our children would have carefully noted the lessons of adults all too well – that it is a fiercely competitive world out there, whether it is to get into the right university or for the jobs afterwards; that you do what is necessary `to win;’ that nobody remembers the lovable losers; and that many a moral failing is viable as long as one does not get caught. And even then, forgiveness is always possible. As one student put it to me, in thinking about university: better marks=better school=better job=better life. An equation that may or may not seem simplistic when you are fifty, but not when you are seventeen. Honor? A lovely concept, last relevant around the time of the Knights of the Round Table, but not when competing in a global economy.

In thirty years of talking and teaching about ethics, I have noticed how there is always a quick qualifier—”I’m not saying it’s right”–almost immediately after, or just preceding, an impassioned defence of why a certain act is really not so bad in the grand scheme of things.

We’ve all gotten used to silently defusing our more questionable moral decisions by placing them on a universal scale. Sure I stole twenty bucks from someone else’s locker, but hey, how does that stack up against the bombing of Hiroshima and the killing fields of Cambodia? Yeah, it’s true, I cheated on my wife, but look, the Nazis conducted hypothermia experiments on unwilling subjects that froze hundreds of people to death, not to mention the other stuff… Ok, I shouldn’t have taken my monthly paycheck and blown it all at off track betting when my electric bill is way overdue and my kids have nothing to eat, but did you see how in the fifties the CIA infected unknowing black sharecroppers in Alabama with syphilis?

  All of us have experienced this annoying brand of logic. Termed by some “the fallacy of relative privation,” it deflects an argument or a criticism because of other problems in the world that are ostensibly far more serious. But is that the only ethical defence we have left?

Attitudes towards honesty reflect increasingly instrumental ways of thinking. The question is no longer “is cheating wrong?” but rather “how will being honest impact on my goals and success?” What was almost never raised by any student, even after countless discussions about honesty, is whether one had a duty to another not to cheat, whether students “owed” one another or themselves that promise.

When I was eight years old I went to the corner store a few blocks from home. I walked around, pretended to look at stuff, lingered for a few moments near a display of firecrackers, and—quite surreptitiously I thought—closed my hand over a few firecrackers and slipped them into my pocket. Then I left the store, furtively, and went home. Why did I take them? Did I really need them?

Although my family did not have much money—small apartment, no car/washing machine, but food on the table always–perhaps I could have asked this one time for a dollar to purchase them. I didn’t even like firecrackers. I think I probably threw them out after a day or two. A few days later, my dad said he had received a call from the store owner, a very nice man with a wizened face and an encyclopedic knowledge of the inventory of every last item in his store.

There was no family discussion, nor a sitting down to gently illuminate me about the ethical dubiousness of stealing. Instead, I got very briefly whipped. It is long ago now—a half century—and I do not remember the instrument of that quick but very painful discipline. But I do remember it happening. It preempted any thoughts I might have developed of a career in absconding with things that did not belong to me.

My father’s memorable lesson in curbing theft and preserving family honour has stayed with me. And I have thought long and often about the actual value of honesty. Is it important? What is the overall value of truth in modern life? What about lying to the people we say we love? And I wonder now if a large part of dishonesty has to do with something deeply internal, about being satisfied with the life I have and the person I am. Something about staying within my actual boundaries, within what is my life, and not reaching beyond what is really mine. Do not covet. Ancient language, words that we no longer use but act out all the time nonetheless.

“For we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.” (1 Timothy 6). This most spare of messages, of the existential facts of what we really have or can maintain in the eyes of eternity, casts a strange shadow on the question of getting ahead by appropriating someone else’s property or their mind. Or hiding what we are or what we have done by lying.

Is honesty too disadvantageous–or dishonesty too chaotic–to risk? Even the founding father had his ambivalences when it came to upright actions. As Mrs. Franklin found out, honesty did not preclude her husband from serial adulteries. Students hear the ideal about honesty but also are surrounded by the realities of duplicity, some of which can be very profitable. What future generations will understand about the value of honesty may hinge on how they distinguish between the world as they often think it is, and the world as they have been taught it ideally should be.