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-Stanley Fish. "Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal"
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/plagiarism-is-not-a-big-moral-deal/
レポートのコピペ発見器が開発されたよセンセーたち良かったね！とかいうニュースがあったが、本質的な問題てそこなの？といぶかしく感じていたやさき、スタンレー・フィッシュが『ニューヨーク・タイムズ』紙に剽窃問題に関する論説を寄稿。論点メモ。

Whenever it comes up plagiarism is a hot button topic and essays about it tend to be philosophically and morally inflated. But there are really only two points to make. (1) Plagiarism is a learned sin. (2) Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue.

It's no big moral deal; which doesn't mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn't be punished ― if you're in our house, you've got to play by our rules ― just that what you're punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.

Single authorship, we have been told, is a recent invention of a bourgeois culture obsessed with individualism, individual rights and the myth of progress.

If it is wrong to plagiarize in some context of practice, it is not because the idea of originality has been affirmed by deep philosophical reasoning, but because the ensemble of activities that take place in the practice would be unintelligible if the possibility of being original were not presupposed.

And if there should emerge a powerful philosophical argument saying there's no such thing as originality, its emergence needn't alter or even bother for a second a practice that can only get started if originality is assumed as a baseline.

As long as the practice is ongoing and flourishing its conventions will command respect and allegiance and flouting them will have negative consequences.