It was decades ago now that commentator Alan Keyes, responding to talk of “crises” (e.g., the economic crisis), added perspective.
The real crisis we need worry about, he warned, is our “moral crisis.”
Virtue in the people is the root of the tree. Take care of that and all else falls into place. The tree itself, and the fruits and leaves, will be healthy.
Our moral crisis has only worsened since Keyes’ pronouncement. It’s apparent in the massive support for killers Tyler Robinson, Luigi Mangione, Karmelo Anthony, and now Lindsay Clancy. And it’s evident in how, warns an academic who has taught ethics at both Harvard and the University of Chicago, we’re becoming a “society of cheats.”
Professor John Paul Rollert, writing at The Atlantic, laments that artificial intelligence (AI) has now made student cheating rampant and easy. Yet this goes beyond academia. After all, what does it bode for a society that’s graduating students en masse who believe, as Rollert puts it, “that integrity is for suckers and wimps”?
Integrity Is for Idiots?
Rollert’s essay is mainly behind a paywall, but commentator John Sexton addressed the topic Tuesday, quoting the professor heavily. Rollert opens by writing (as presented by Sexton):
Recently, I have taken to telling friends that whenever I’m on campus, I feel like I’m trapped in the middle of a crime spree. I’m not talking about an epidemic of overdue library books or out-of-control parties. I’m talking about AI and the ways in which students are constantly using it to cheat on any work that is assigned to them…
By now, there have been many articles about how undergraduates’ promiscuous use of AI will affect their intellectual development, but I’m far more interested in its moral consequences. This is partly because I’m pretty confident about the former — I’ve told graduate students who actually learned how to write papers in college that I anticipate a generation of incompetents roughly a decade behind them — but also because I teach classes in leadership and business ethics, and I’m aghast at so many young people seemingly habituating themselves to cheating as a way of life…
Students are spending a lot of time learning to be thieves nowadays, and once they receive their dubious diplomas, they will enter the “real world” with all the qualities of a criminal syndicate: a knack for cutting corners, a disdain for community rules, and an assumption that a spirit of integrity, and the sacrifices it assumes, is the reserve of suckers and wimps. We will be a society of cheats.
It’s no mystery why this is happening: The cheaters are rarely held accountable. As Rollert also tells us, citing a Harvard survey, among
2026 graduates who admitted to “using AI for an assignment against instructor permission,” 93 percent of them said their cheating went undiscovered. Of the remaining students, more than half of them said they faced no disciplinary consequences even after they were caught.
In fact, only 2.6 percent faced any consequences at all.
Sexton also cites Wharton School psychologist Adam Grant. Bemoaning his students’ expressed sentiments when he asked them to compose an essay on cheating, he wrote August 26:
Their responses shocked me. Hardly any students saw cheating as a violation of integrity. A majority made excuses: We’re under a lot of stress. Everyone else is doing it. We have no choice. They sounded like major league baseball players in the steroid era. ChatGPT was their performance-enhancing drug.
In fact, whereas students in the past expressed guilt over cheating, it’s just another strategy to today’s undergrads. Moreover, the technology is now so advanced that there’s virtually no assignment that AI can’t ghost-complete for students. Why, The New York Times reported last month that among students “studying” solely online, AI is sometimes taking their entire classes. You only need issue a command such as “log in and complete my quiz,” relates the Times.
Sexton then adds some perspective:
Getting back to the big picture, training millions of kids that cheating is a) normal and b) never meets with consequences is going to create a society that sees every barrier as unfair and creates more problems down the line. Just imagine having a doctor who cheated through his classes[,] or a lawyer.
So will it be surprising when these graduates scream for socialism? These are young people who’ve gotten everything for “free” — even their “higher” degrees (free from work, that is).
Sexton then lays the truth bare. Most high-school kids are now cheating, will cheat their way into college, and then cheat more once there, he asserts. And in the near future, concludes the commentator, the world will be
a very different place full of people who know nothing, do nothing and expect everything be handed to them anyway.
The solution to this, at least until computer chips are embedded in kids’ skulls, is simple. Remote learning has got to go. Testing and essay writing should once again all be in person, with no technology allowed (pen and paper work fine).
Cheaters of Cheaters Born
Really, though, the students in question aren’t the only cheaters here — and they’re hardly the first. In fact, they’ve been enabled by school officials, and an entire system, who have themselves cheated — on morality. My meaning?
Authority figures’ duty is to exercise authority. This includes punishing transgressors harshly enough to deter bad behavior. Failing to administer consequences sufficient to eliminate cheating is an abdication of responsibility. It is malpractice. It reflects a lack of virtue; in particular, an absence of Prudence and of a sense of Justice. Just as the students fail to do their work, these officials have failed to do theirs. Both groups have not lived up to moral standards — the officials because morality dictates they must enforce moral standards.
So the students may believe integrity is “the reserve of suckers and wimps.” Make no mistake, however. The officials are the wimps who — via sins of omission — have made the rare honest students feel like suckers.
Also note that every or virtually every professor complaining about this is, like the students, infected with today’s characteristic philosophical disease: moral relativism. As I’ve explained, this belief actually boils down to moral nihilism, the idea that right and wrong are mere illusion. Its mantras are things such as, “Who’s to say what’s right or wrong? All is shades of gray. Don’t impose your values on me!” And, of course, how could you even begin to act morally if “morality doesn’t exist”?
In other words, the elders waxed relativistic because they didn’t want to be constrained by tradition. They often wanted, for example, free sex. And it’s not surprising that younger relativists, farther down the rabbit hole, also want free degrees and free everything else. In fact, if we continue on this path, the only “free” thing we won’t have is freedom.
