Earlier this month (August 2010), Stanley Fish addressed the question of what it is to plagiarize & what’s wrong with plagiarizing in his Opinionator blog. Fish understands plagiarism to be using “words that were first uttered or written by another without due attribution”; and he understands that act to offend against the code of behavior that belongs to a particular guild. The guild in question is the academic one, where attribution is expected. There’s no moral question about the offense, any more than there is about breaking the rules of golf while you’re playing. Neither the rules of golf nor those of the academic guild have moral weight; they simply describe what you need to do if you want to perform that activity.
This is all abundantly & elegantly correct, in the usual Fishian deflationary mode. It should be borne in mind by Catholic thinkers, who have a tendency to get morally over-excited about this topic. It should also encourage us (we Catholics, that is) to ask whether the nature of the intellectual work we are called to do, in the methods & goals of which we should train our students, requires us to forbid & penalize plagiarism, defined as Fish does, with the same degree of enthuiasm as does the academic guild. It seems to me that we should not: a properly nuanced understanding of tradition, & of our capacities for thought, speech, & writing as gift, leaves little room for the categorization of plagiarism as an offense. It should & could be one of the distinctives of the Catholic intellectual life that we are altogether less exercised about plagiarism than our pagan counterparts.
There is a nice & deeply Catholic point here. Fish is not a Christian, even though he knows more theology than most Catholics, and understands it better. His clarity about what plagiarism is & what’s wrong with it (& especially about what’s not wrong with it) helps us Catholics to see with greater clarity than we likely otherwise would the lineaments of our own intellectual practice. As always, the Church needs the intellectual work & witness of those outside herself as stimulus to provoke and lead her to a fuller understanding of what she is and does.
(this post was plagiarized from paul j. griffiths) (I just couldn't do it straight, so I created a logical conundrum instead!)
