It is wrong for students to plagarize term papers

“It is wrong for students to plagiarize their term papers…”


According to Aristotle, the above statement could be rationally justified quite easily. A student’s role in the world is to study and learn to enrich his or her own life; when a student fails his/her role by plagiarizing, he/she is acting wrongly. Hume, on the other hand, is a hopeless skeptic, arguing that absolutely no moral rule or value judgment can be shown to be true or false. People are not driven by reason or what they believe to be morally right and wrong, they are driven by their emotions and passions. Students who plagiarize their papers know it is wrong to do so, but their passions drive them to go out and party and have fun instead of writing the paper themselves.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (pg. 55-93) states that there is no functional definition of good or bad; the meaning depends on the function, thus, a person is defined by what they do. If a student plagiarizes a paper, he...