Plagiarism and causation

Suppose I write a paper and you write a paper of the same length. But then I plagiarize your paper using the following procedure. I look at the first character in our papers, and if it’s different, I erase (unless it’s a space) the character in my paper and write down the character you had in its place. And then I repeat for the second, third, and so on. I then submit the paper for publication.

It seems clear that I’ve plagiarized your paper in its entirety, even though some of the letters in my paper weren’t erased as by coincidence I originally had the same letter in the same place as you did—this will happen more often with more common letters like “e”.

But what if, by chance, your paper and my original paper were verbatim the same, and I never noticed this? Then the paper I submit for publication depends for all of its content counterfactually on the paper you wrote, but not a letter was changed from the paper that I wrote. If authorship is defined by causation, then the paper I am submitting is my own. If it’s defined by counterfactual dependence, it’s yours.

I don’t know which is the right answer.

Plagiarism and a repeat invitation

I am occasionally asked whether I am not afraid that someone will steal ideas from my blog and publish them. I'm not. If the ideas get published by someone else, that saves me the trouble of writing them up myself. Hopefully they will give credit where credit is due and it won't be theft.

Moreover, I invite anybody competent who wants to coauthor a paper with me by starting with the ideas in a post, working out the details and writing up a first draft. (Check with me first before getting to work, though.) In the philosophical profession, coauthored papers count pretty much the same as single-authored, so plagiarizing would involve unnecessary risk for very minor benefit.

Copy and paste

A colleague just asked me which dining halls were open. I pasted text from the Dining Services website into an email in response, without quotation marks or other indication of quotation. (In an academic context, the lack of quotation marks would make it plagiarism, but not in this very informal context.) The text I pasted into the email constituted assertions whose content I did not believe, simply because by the time I pasted it, I had forgotten what it said (I have no memory for times and the like). But I believed, maybe even knew, that the assertions were all true, and there was no dishonesty.

In a similar way, it is possible to assert something you know to be true, and yet be lying. Suppose I am writing my chair to convince him of some point of policy and I have an unscrupulous colleague who emails me a complex sentence that he says is false but will convince the chair. I trust the savvy of my unscrupulous colleague and paste the sentence into my email without bothering to read it. It turns out that my unscrupulous colleague was mistaken, and the sentence is true, and in fact it expresses a truth that I believe. I then send the email to the chair. In so doing, it seems that I lied to the chair, even though I asserted something which I knew to be the case.

One might think that this isn't lying. If it's not, it's something morally equivalent to it, and our category of "lying" is artificially constricted.