Episode 177 - Cheating Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:20] David: The podcast where we put philosophy in dialogue with everyday life.

[00:00:24] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:26] David: And I'm David Peña-Guzmán.

[00:00:28] Ellie: As always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode, community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack. I wanna start, David, by talking about the Enhanced Games, which took place for the first time ever this past month in Las Vegas, because of course they did.

They're basically the Olympics for cheaters. The Enhanced Games, that is, are the first major sporting event to explicitly allow doping and to reject the policies of the World Anti-Doping Agency that govern all other international sporting events. The Enhanced Games feature professional athletes and former Olympians competing for giant cash prizes and attempting to break world records, all without drug tests.

[00:01:12] David: So I think this event is pretty wild, and needless to say, it has been extremely controversial. First of all, it was created by this Australian businessman named Aron D'Souza, who thinks athletes should be able to compete and do whatever they want within some limits of safety in order to enhance their performance. And he funded the event with investments from some sketchy people like Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr. And Donald Trump Jr. actually has a wonderful quote that I think encapsulates the spirit of the Enhanced Games.

[00:01:47] Ellie: Wonderful in what sense?

[00:01:49] David: Wonderful in that it perfectly encapsulates what these games represent for certain people politically. So he says, "The Enhanced Games represent the future: real competition, real freedom, and real records being smashed. This is about excellence, innovation, and American dominance on the world stage, something that the MAGA movement is all about," end quote.

[00:02:16] Ellie: It's giving Hunger Games, it's giving Leni Riefenstahl propaganda videos for Hitler. This is so dark.

[00:02:24] David: Well, it's also just giving this idea that only Americans can dominate in these games. Like, what if these really spread all over the place? Why are they uniquely American? And also the idea that real competition only exists where there are no rules also captures something about the MAGA movement's interpretation of capitalism.

[00:02:43] Ellie: This idea that freedom is freedom from regulation.

[00:02:46] David: Where any regulation is an imposition on your freedom, and therefore an obstacle to basically shining in excellence in every domain of life.

[00:02:56] Ellie: Well, at least if you're a man.

[00:02:57] David: Yeah.

[00:02:58] Ellie: If you're a male athlete, no regulation for you, but for the rest of us...

[00:03:02] David: So you can see why these games would be controversial, and beyond its questionable funding sources, the event has also been criticized for a number of reasons. First of all, international sporting organizations have all denounced the event across the board, saying doping has no place in sports.

For instance, the chief executive of the US Anti-Doping agency called the event a dangerous clown show, and the Olympian, Kieran Perkins, also called it borderline criminal. So there is this concern about safety and danger and risk. Now, the other line of criticism has to do with the way the event valorizes the use of steroids, and so a number of medical professionals have raised an alarm about this, saying, "Hey, we need to be a little bit more careful on the messaging that we are sending about what steroids actually do or don't do to the human body."

[00:03:57] Ellie: Yeah, it sounds like there are a lot of good reasons to be critical of this event, right? And the enhanced games have certainly raised questions about the nature of cheating in sports and whether we should think about doping specifically as a form of cheating. There's one way of reading the enhanced games as saying that doping is not cheating, and there's another way of reading the enhanced games as saying, "Oh yeah, it is cheating, and actually we don't care," which would be very MAGA, right? In line with what Donald Trump Jr. was saying, because cheating doesn't really seem to be a big concern among anyone in our federal government.

[00:04:28] David: Not when it's about dominance. There is no fairness in dominance.

[00:04:33] Ellie: The philosophy of sport has a lot to say about this question. Some philosophers have argued for treating doping as a necessary evil, and therefore taking a harm minimization approach, not unlike some more generic drug legalization policies.

For instance, in an article entitled In Defense of Medically Supervised Doping, two philosophers of sport argue that we should legalize and supervise it rather than ban it, because it's not like it's going away, and not legalizing it just rewards those who get away with it.

[00:05:03] David: Yeah. As an athlete myself, I feel really conflicted about this question because on the one hand, it forces me to think about what I think about doping in and of itself. Is it wrong? Is it an unfair advantage? Secondarily, I also have to contextualize it in relation to the prevalence of doping, right?

So if a lot of people are doping in a sport, is it wrong for another person to do it if they're trying to equalize the playing field? And so questions of fairness, questions of the spirit of sports and competition are very much implicated here. And this is all in connection just to sports, but we also have to keep in mind that cheating is not limited to sports.

Cheating is something that appears in practically every aspect of our lives. It appears in our personal relationships. It appears in politics. It appears in business. It appears in education. And so when we try to clarify the ethical principles that ought to be applied to cases of cheating, we are essentially touching on areas of life that are very disparate but that are united by this idea that a lot of people try to bend the rules to their advantage.

[00:06:18] Ellie: Today we are talking about cheating.

[00:06:21] David: Why is infidelity considered so wrong in romantic relationships?

[00:06:25] Ellie: How do we distinguish cheating from deception?

[00:06:28] David: how is generative AI changing the landscape of cheating in schools?

[00:06:42] Ellie: Last month, there were a bunch of articles on rapper Megan Thee Stallion's breakup with basketball player Klay Thompson after he cheated on her. She put him on blast on Instagram, and I'm gonna read the post for you, David, because I feel like with the rapidity of the news cycle, it might seem like yesterday's news, but I think her post is an instructive place to begin.

She writes, "Cheating. Had me around your whole family playing house. Got cold feet. Holding you down through all your HORRIBLE," all caps, "mood swings and treatment towards me during your basketball season. Now you don't know if you can be monogamous??? Bitch, I need a real break after this one. Bye, y'all."

[00:07:26] David: Oh my God, she-

[00:07:27] Ellie: Apologies to anybody actually knows anything about rap. It was meant to be an emphatic reading of this, but not actually one that would be in Megan Thee Stallion's voice, because I'm not familiar enough with the contemporary music world to have tried to do something like that.

[00:07:44] David: Well, I don't think you have the hard-hitting delivery that would be necessary to wrap that tweet. But either way, she really ate, and ate him with that tweet. And it seems like for her, there's just no real path forward here, right? Because the trust is broken with infidelity.

I mean, good for her. It sounds, at least from a third-person perspective, that there were some real issues with the relationship. You know, maybe the relationship sucked. But I do want us to explore how this speaks to something broader about our understanding of cheating, and that is that we treat cheating in relationships as the ultimate deal breaker.

[00:08:24] Ellie: Yeah, that's right. Adultery is actually the single strongest predictor of divorce, and even in non-marital relationships, cheating is widely understood as an automatic no-no. Interestingly, legal scholar Deborah L. Rhode, who wrote this book Cheating, yeah, aptly titled Cheating, which read a number of chapters for in advance of this episode, she notes that people today actually express more negative views of cheating than in the relatively recent past.

And a big reason for this is the increasing accessibility of divorce. Now that divorce is so common, people think that there are fewer excuses for cheating than when you were sort of more stuck with your partner for life.

[00:09:03] David: So that makes perfect sense to me because if you're no longer into your partner, you can just end the relationship, in this case the marriage, and find somebody else. You can go back on the dating market rather than go through the trouble of cheating on them, which is psychologically burdensome for you and also very harmful to the other person. And the same thing goes if you're not married but in a serious relationship, right? You can just get out of the relationship.

[00:09:29] Ellie: Exactly. At least that's how the logic seems to go. But in fact, this idea that cheating is an automatic deal breaker, because you could just not cheat, you could just end the relationship and then enter a new one. This doesn't really account for the reasons that people actually tend to cheat.

And so one thing I've seen time and again is people cheating not because they want out but for a variety of other reasons, many of which have very little to do with being unhappy in one's relationship. I feel like we don't take into account sufficiently how cheating is so often not about you not liking some partner you're with.

[00:10:09] David: No, I think that's right. And the reason that we stick to that narrative is, of course, because if we are the victims of cheating, we want to demonize the person who did it.

[00:10:18] Ellie: And we want to make it about us.

[00:10:19] David: Yeah, of course, and in a sense it is because we pay the price, but it makes those other motives illegible.

And in thinking about motives, I found some research that's really interesting about the differences in motivations for cheating between men and women, because they're not the same. For example, men are often solely seeking out sexual relationships in their affairs, whereas a lot of women may be seeking more emotional benefits.

And there is a kind of stereotyping potentially that could be going on here. But these are different reported motives for cheaters.

[00:10:54] Ellie: Yeah, and that's not to say that women don't seek out sexual relations, but many women report feeling more alive after having an affair just by being wanted by another person. The feeling of butterflies or excitement from being with someone new can be a self-esteem boost, and that seems to be a stronger factor in cheating among women, at least according to these self-reports.

[00:11:16] David: Yeah, and to be clear, men and women both cheat for a multitude of reasons, right? So we can't just boil it down to one. A study that was published in the Journal of Sex Research highlights eight main reasons for infidelity, and I wanna mention them because I found them to be very illuminating. These include anger, sexual desire, lack of love, neglect, low commitment, situational factors like intoxication, stress, being in a new environment, having an opening where you can maybe cheat, and finally, variety, wanting to experience new things and new people.

And what's interesting about all of these reasons or motives for cheating is that not all of them, only the one about anger really has to do with the other person. most of the time they have to do with more complex situational realities.

[00:12:08] Ellie: Yeah, like low self-esteem or being neglected, feeling a lack of love. And certainly those can reflect a dissatisfaction in one's relationship. But cheating in these cases is not an act of defiance. People don't usually cheat specifically to hurt their partner, but more to do something for themselves.

[00:12:28] David: Yeah, and one example here is if somebody has been feeling neglected in their relationship they might cheat just to feel that excitement, that boost in self-esteem. They might want to be seen. They might want to feel validated by a new person.

And that's not to say that it doesn't have an impact on their partner, but the motivation is something else. And I think for me at least, this raises the question, the philosophical question, how should we define cheating? What is cheating? In a sense, cheating is a lot easier to do nowadays because of anonymity, because there is a wider pool of potential sexual partners out there.

You can easily access that pool of potential partners through the internet, through dating apps. And so literally it's never been easier to cheat than it is today. But the line between what's cheating and what is not cheating is getting blurrier over time. Traditionally, cheating meant one thing: adultery.

But it's a lot broader now because of the rise of non-marriage based long-term relationships. And of course, adultery only makes sense in the context of marriage. And so if you are in a long-term relationship with somebody but not married, technically you cannot commit adultery. Beyond that, I think we've also just changed our understanding around what it means to cheat, and I think we see this, for example, with the rise in recent years of the concept of micro-cheating, which includes a ton of behaviors that maybe previously would not be considered cheating or anywhere close to it, but that now some people consider forms of infidelity.

So when you micro-cheat, you're doing things like sliding into somebody's DMs. You are maintaining an active dating profile on Tinder that you occasionally check even though you're in a committed relationship. Even flirting with somebody at a bar, even if it goes nowhere, can be considered a form of micro-cheating

[00:14:32] Ellie: Yeah. Well, and no, I think flirting would definitely be considered micro-cheating. I actually think flirting would for some people be considered cheating too. So I think sliding into DMs is maybe a more typical version of micro-cheating, or maintaining an active dating profile. But we asked Sophia and Aaron, two of our student assistants, about micro-cheating because it's a bit of a different generation's thing.

And they said that some would consider micro-cheating having a conversation with somebody from the opposite sex without telling your partner. And I was like, "What?" And I have to say, literally all of this, not just that situation, but also the more straightforward case of flirting with somebody at a bar, all of this is so sad to me.

I mean, I think those who know a bit about my commitments from listening to previous Overthink episodes or maybe knowing a little bit about my academic research will know that I'm very pro non-monogamy. 

[00:15:28] David: Pro cheating Ellie, let's go.

[00:15:30] Ellie: No, no. I mean, we'll get to that in a moment, but I think the idea that you would wanna inhibit a partner from having fun flirting with somebody at a bar, let alone having a conversation with somebody of the opposite sex, that is so dark to me. I just find this really incomprehensible.

[00:15:51] David: I mean, what am I supposed to do, Ellie? Like, literally never talk to another man in my entire life? And what about bi people? They can't talk to anybody at all.

[00:16:00] Ellie: Yeah, yeah. No, exactly.

[00:16:01] David: They literally have to isolate. You can only have social interactions with your partner in order to not micro-cheat on them.

[00:16:08] Ellie: So you don't have the ban on talking to somebody from the opposite sex. We're good. But you can't talk to any other men since you're gay.

[00:16:15] David: I can talk to you, but you can't talk to me.

[00:16:17] Ellie: Yeah. No, but I think maybe, maybe because you're gay it's fine.

[00:16:22] David: It's a loophole. It's a loophole.

[00:16:24] Ellie: But I think this also reveals how hetero the micro-cheating conversations are. Honestly, a lot of the cheating conversations, not all of them to be sure, but I find most of these conversations total dead ends.

I think so many of these questions just come from insecurity and our extremely weird social acceptance of jealousy and possessiveness. These are heteronormative monogamy norms that you and I both think are highly problematic.

And so for instance, the philosopher Natasha McKeever talks about how strange it is that people tend to value sexual exclusivity over almost everything in relationships. So the problem with micro-cheating is that it's seen as maybe opening the door or having something to do with a desire for sex with another person, right? But McKeever suggests, that we rethink whether violating sexual exclusivity is actually a far worse thing to do necessarily than many other things that you could do in a relationship.

She gives the example of a fictional monogamous couple, Aisha and James. This is something I talk about in my Substack course on intimate relationships as well, if you're interested in that. Imagine that James is a super neglectful partner to Aisha. He doesn't respond to her texts, he doesn't make any efforts with her family even though she really wants him to, and he barely spends any time with her.

But James is sexually faithful to Aisha, and so he considers himself a good partner. Then, one night Aisha sleeps with somebody she meets at a bar. Her action is obviously wrong, right? It violates their exclusivity agreement. But why is it so much easier for us to recognize this than it is to recognize how James' behavior is also wrong?

Why are James' friends likely to expect him to break up with Aisha immediately because of hooking up with somebody else one night, whereas his neglectful behavior over a long period of time and in a variety of ways is likely to be seen as a red flag, but not necessarily a deal breaker? Isn't James' behavior more harmful to Aisha than her sleeping with another guy one time when he's not even around?

[00:18:30] David: I would say yes, and I agree with you that this is a wonderful case study of the ethics of cheating, and it makes me think about how we often approach relationships as rule-bound, right? Like, a relationship is a set of rules that we agree to abide by together, and that is what constitutes our loving relationship.

And there are different kinds of, quote-unquote, "rules," right? Like until death do us part, like in sickness and in health. Some of these are, like, vows that people say in marriage. But there are some rules that are kind of easier to interpret and to give content to than others. And so the no cheating rule that is a feature of so many monogamous relationships, I think it's kind of easier to understand because it's about regulating certain behaviors.

So if I tell my partner, "Look, for me, this means you don't sleep with anybody else," at least there is clarity around that. Whereas some other expectations and norms of intimate relationships, like the expectation that I feel cared for, that I feel respected, that I feel supported, are harder to give concrete content to that leads to an itemized set of behaviors that you can identify as satisfying or as violating that rule.

And so I think that's why we demonize Aisha but then give a pass to James. It's because it's different kinds of rules that are getting violated, and I agree that all the rules are kind of up for debate and negotiation, but I think that motivates this.

[00:20:01] Ellie: Yeah, I just think the idea that it's more cut and dried to identify cases of sexual cheating than it is to identify other cases of bad behavior, especially with respect to neglect, not being a good partner, I think that's just a hangover from monogamy. I think for one, what we're noting is that microcheating is often not explicitly sexual, but it has some kind of relationship to it that makes it seem like it might open the pathway down to those things.

I mean, couldn't you say the same if James yells at Aisha one time, and then, like, why not say that that's opening the pathway to verbal or emotional abuse, right? And so I think so much of this just had, has to do with how obsessed we are with sex, and especially with sexual exclusivity, which is unintelligible to me outside of monogamous, specifically monogamous marriage norms.

[00:20:52] David: I think that's true, and maybe a clarification that I wanna make here is that I'm not saying that I believe that there is objectively that difference between the rules, that one is easier and the other one is not. I think that that's how they get cashed out and lived in relationships, and I think the reason for that is largely because partners are much more likely at some point to have a discussion, to talk about sexual exclusivity and what it means to them versus, hey, what are the things that make me feel loved? What are the things that make me feel devalued? And so there is a difference in clarity in the relationship in general, not universally, that creates this imbalance.

[00:21:29] Ellie: But I guess I'm just not so sure about that. I think a lot of straight couples take for granted what counts as cheating in a sexual context, and then they might find out in really uncomfortable ways that they have different ways of understanding that. And so I don't think that a lot of straight couples are sitting down being like, "Is this okay? Is this okay?" before and after the fact. And that's in contrast with non-monogamous couples. 

One misconception I wanna address here is the idea that there is no cheating in non-monogamy. I think anybody who is polyamorous or is in an open relationship knows that's not the case. It's just more a matter of not taking sexual exclusivity for granted, and instead having a conversation about what is or isn't accepted within the boundaries of a given relationship.

And so, some open relationships would say, "Okay, you can have sex with somebody, but you can't form an emotional attachment to them." I disagree with that view. I think that's impossible. That's an impossible boundary to police, and also a weird hangover of monogamy. 

[00:22:29] David: Well, and we talked about that in our open relationships episode, particular distinction between sex and emotion.

[00:22:36] Ellie: That is true. That is true. That was such a long time ago, I'm forgetting now. But yeah, that was a good episode and a popular one too. And then in polyamorous relationships, there can be cheating in the form of dishonesty, right? Maybe you start a new relationship without telling your other partners, especially if you're not practicing safe sex, that can be definitely a form of cheating.You could violate agreements. Maybe it's like agreements around certain people's privacy, like you violate the secrecy they've requested around a particular topic. Maybe you break trust, right? And so those are all forms of cheating because they are violating rules that have been agreed upon. It's just that the cheating, it's not so closely tied to having multiple sex partners.

[00:23:21] David: Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with this, that there is cheating and violations of trust in all loving relationships independently of the form they take in relation to sexual exclusivity. Of course, I'm now thinking more about what happens in those cases where two people don't agree on what cheating is, and that can happen in monogamous and in non-monogamous relationships, right?

Because it's a very, very murky space that has to do with desire, with social interactions, with the boundary between friendship and romance, so on and so forth. And I wanna think about this question through the lens of the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who basically suggests that there are these cases whenever you're dealing with rules, he calls them hard cases, self-explanatory there, where he says, "Look, we might know what the rule is. We can articulate the rule. Maybe it's even written down somewhere, but there are genuinely different ways of interpreting the rule." Imagine there is a public park, and there is a rule that says, "No motorized vehicles beyond this point." Sure, we know that your car can't make it through the park, but then there are gonna be hard cases that have to be adjudicated.

What about an electric bicycle? What about a motorized wheelchair? What about those Barbie Jeeps that children drive around when they're, like, five or six? And so in these cases, we can't appeal to the law because the law itself or the rule is precisely what is in question. And so in those cases, we actually have to have a different meta discussion in order to resolve the issue.

We have to think about our values, our principles, and the very objective of the rule in question, right? What sort of thing is a park, and why are we trying to limit motorized vehicles in them? What's the social function of public parks? And I think we can apply this kind of reasoning, even though it's about the law and legal theory, to the context of intimate relationships and cheating because I think a lot of the rules that we set in our relationships, whether it's no sex, no emotional entanglement, all produce hard cases.

And when we hit those hard cases and we come to the realization that, hey, my, me and my partner or me and my partners don't actually agree on where the line is, we do have to engage in a reflective activity of thinking, what is a romantic relationship? What is intimacy? What is love? And we have to have a discussion about those larger principles and then make a decision based on that.

Even though we just saw that thinking about cheating exclusively in terms of rules can be limited because rules sometimes lead to hard cases that need to be adjudicated, the focus on rules makes sense when we're talking about cheating because that's how we tend to define cheating itself. In fact, rule breaking is presumably what all cases of cheating have in common. Cheating in law, cheating in business, cheating in school, there's a rule that's being breached. This at least is the view of the legal scholar Stuart Green, who wrote a really great article entitled Cheating. Love a one word title.

[00:26:48] Ellie: That's the name of the book I read too.

[00:26:49] David: Yeah, I know. And there he gives us a formal definition of cheating that includes cases such as cheating in sports, law, politics, war, romantic relationships, taxes, the enhanced games, you name it.

And his definition is relatively simple, so I'm gonna share it with you, Ellie, and then I want us to think about this definition and whether we think it can work. He says, "Cheating involves two things. One, breaking a rule that is fair and fairly enforced, and two, breaking it with the intentional aim of gaining an advantage over another person with whom we are engaging in a cooperative activity that is governed by rules."

So you break a rule, and you do it in order to gain an advantage over another person in the context of a cooperative activity.

[00:27:45] Ellie: Yeah, it seems pretty narrow, this second feature, especially because it's the intentional aim of gaining an advantage over another person. I would say if we're gonna specify that cheating involves gaining an advantage, it seems unnecessarily restrictive to say we have to have an intentional aim of gaining an advantage.

[00:28:08] David: But why is that? Because is your concern about the intentional point or about the gaining an advantage point? Because he's very clear that there, at least on his view, there is no unintentional cheating. A cheater intends to cheat. That's what makes them a cheater.

[00:28:24] Ellie: Yeah, it's not just a rule violation.

[00:28:26] David: No, because then it's just a fault. That's a rule violation, but the intentional violation of the rule with the aim of gaining the advantage is what constitutes cheating. Whether or not you gain the advantage is inconsequential.

[00:28:38] Ellie: Yeah, I think I'm bumping up against this in part because we were just speaking about cheating in the context of romantic relationships, and this second condition seems difficult to translate to that case. I mean, I actually think maybe the first one too, breaking a rule that is fair and fairly enforced. I think in most cases the rule against having other sexual partners is unfair and unfairly enforced. Not in all cases, but in most. 

[00:29:04] David: Why is it unfair? I'm curious. I understand how it can be unfairly enforced in a relationship, but why is it intrinsically unfair?

[00:29:11] Ellie: I think what philosopher Justin Clardy calls intimacy confining constraints, this idea that it's acceptable to have a rule against other intimate partners, is unfair in romantic relationships.

[00:29:23] David: Even if people agree to it?

[00:29:25] Ellie: That's why I said in most cases. In most cases it's unfair.

[00:29:29] David: So that would be the difference there. If two people agree to it, then it's not unfair.

[00:29:33] Ellie: Yeah, I'm actually agnostic about that broader point, but let's just leave it with the more narrow one for now, which is that in most relationships people just assume that that's a fair rule to have, and I don't actually think it is in a lot of cases. Anyway, I feel like I'm getting us away from this Stuart Green definition.

[00:29:50] David: No, but your point is well taken that how this applies to romance is a little bit tricky.

[00:29:56] Ellie: Yeah, so I think the second point of like, you're not trying to gain an advantage over a partner that you're in a relationship with by cheating on them, at least not in most cases. I mean, as we saw, the reasons that people cheat, they don't have to do necessarily with the other partner at all. And so yeah, I guess I just find that a little strange.

[00:30:15] David: So I agree with you. I actually think this is a limit of this definition.

[00:30:19] Ellie: Maybe we just say there's no romantic cheating. Maybe we say that's a misnomer.

[00:30:22] David: Yeah, maybe we just call it something else. It's infidelity. Although I can see how you could construe cheating in romantic relationships as gaining an advantage because I guess you are gaining something that you're not supposed to get, like access to other partners.

But I do think the problem is that maybe this is modeled after competitive activities like sport or business, and so it's more applicable in that way. But I do think it matches folk intuitions about cheating, like you're getting the goods outside of the relationship.

[00:30:52] Ellie: Well, apropos of that, the philosopher Bernard Gert has a definition of adultery that I think speaks to what you're saying. He defines adultery as gaining the goal of marriage, which is an exclusive sexual partner, without abiding by the standards of the practice of marriage, which is being an exclusive sexual partner.

I find this a very strange definition of adultery because it makes it seem like the goal of marriage is an exclusive sexual partner. It doesn't make it seem that way, it suggests explicitly that the goal of marriage is an exclusive sexual partner. I'm just like, is that really? I mean, I guess traditionally, but that's super weird to me.

[00:31:29] David: Is that the goal or is that just something that's entailed by our understanding of marriage?

[00:31:34] Ellie: I mean, this is how Deborah Rhode describes Gehrt's view in The Cheating book. And the important point there though is that there is an unfair asymmetry because one person is gaining a sexual partner outside of that exclusive relationship while not being an exclusive sexual partner to the person that they have agreed to be exclusive with.

[00:31:56] David: Yeah, so there is an advantage. To go back to Stuart Green's definition, it's unclear if there is an advantage over another person, right? That's where it gets a little weird. But to be fair, despite this hiccup for the definition, I actually really like Green's definition, that it's breaking a rule with the intentional aim of getting an advantage over somebody else.

And as I read the definition over and over again to gather my thoughts about it, I became more and more interested, not just with what the definition includes, but actually with what it excludes. Because Green actually makes no reference in his definition to deception. So he recognizes that in most cases, deception is included in cheating. Like, in order to cheat, you have to deceive. But then he says that's not actually a necessary condition. you can cheat without deceiving, and it made me think of ... I started thinking, well, where can you cheat without deception? And I came up with this example. 

Imagine a husband tells his wife, "Look, I met somebody and I'm going to have sex with them, and there is nothing you can do to stop it." So they are going to cheat. It's just not based on deception. It's an honest form of cheating.

[00:33:18] Ellie: That's literally the quote-unquote "one-way monogamy" of many figures in the manosphere.

[00:33:23] David: Oh, wow.

[00:33:24] Ellie: Yeah, they have one wife or main sexual partner, and they're like, "You're gonna be monogamous toward me, but then that's not gonna happen vice versa. I'm gonna have sex with as many people as I want to."

[00:33:35] David: Yeah, no, it's repulsive the way in which that asymmetry is broadcasted to young men. But the point that I want to make here is that this definition of cheating allows Greene to really carve out how cheating differs from a lot of other concepts that often get thrown in with it, and that he says we need to be able to disambiguate it from.

So there is cheating, then there is deception, and then there are still other concepts that are maybe related but not identical to it, like promise breaking, disloyalty, crime even. And so his definition really allows him to really draw a line around what counts and does not count as cheating.

[00:34:19] Ellie: Okay, so I guess if we're thinking about cheating as distinct from promise breaking, I assume the distinction is gonna hinge on the difference between a rule and a promise. And if we're distinguishing cheating from something like disloyalty, actually I don't really know what the difference be there.

So what are the differences between these related ideas? I feel like the deception point is clear to me, but maybe not so much with respect to like these other words that are in the same family.

[00:34:46] David: Yeah. So in the case of disloyalty, disloyalty according to Greene requires a lot more intimacy, a closer relationship, say between family members or between lovers, and it entails commitment and care. Whereas cheating is a broader case of rule violation that doesn't require that. So for example, if I cheat on my partner, that is a form of cheating and disloyalty.

Both are sort of included. But if I cheat at a volleyball tournament, that's just cheating. That's not disloyalty, 'cause I don't have that kind of close, intimate relationship with my opponents.

[00:35:25] Ellie: I see. Okay, so maybe...

[00:35:27] David: I don't owe them shit.

[00:35:29] Ellie: So maybe cheating in romantic relationships is disloyalty, but cheating in these other cases might not be.

[00:35:34] David: It's not, yeah, hence the definition allowing him to differentiate.

[00:35:38] Ellie: I don't know though. I feel like even if I'm cheating when I'm driving because I'm cutting into the turn lane at the last minute, I would say I am being disloyal when I'm cutting the turn lane, maybe not to the other individual drivers, but to the social contract that undergirds our practices of driving, and also to the part of the social contract that implies that I will help do my part to keep other drivers safe.

[00:36:05] David: Okay, so I'm putting on my Green hat here, and he would say disloyalty is just the wrong term here. You're not disloyal to a contract because loyalty is about interpersonal relationships. You are disloyal to people. To speak of loyalty to this abstract social contract is inaccurate.

The term that we would have to use would be disobedience. You have disobeyed the social contract, and there the difference is that disobedience is about targeting an authority figure or a source of authority. And so in that case, it's a different term even. It's not even disloyalty, it's you're disobeying the social contract.

And so yeah, there are other terms, right? Like even crime, you are committing a crime if you violate certain rules on the road, but if you just cut in front of somebody else, you're not really violating the social contract. You're not committing a crime. You're cheating 'cause you're not waiting your turn, and that gives you an advantage over other drivers that you were not originally entitled to.

[00:37:04] Ellie: Okay, so I guess my next question has to do with how we're conceptualizing the relationship between cheating and rules, 'cause I think that's been a theme of our conversation so far. And it seems like cheating is a case of rule breaking, but not all rule breaking, of course, is cheating, right? To murder is to break a rule, but that's not necessarily to cheat. That's to commit a crime. So I think we need to specify what kinds of rules are implicated in instances of cheating.

[00:37:31] David: Good, and Greene has an entire discussion about rules because he's a legal scholar, and he says, first we have to separate this from crime. So we're not talking about laws.

And so from the beginning, there is a difference between cheating and crime, and a difference therefore between laws and rules. And he says when you're dealing with these cooperative activities, there are rules, and the rules that often trigger cheating when they are broken meet a couple of conditions. 

One, they are always prescriptive rules. They are rules that govern behavior. They're about how you should act rather than like descriptive rules about what happens to be the case.

Secondarily, they are mandatory rules rather than optional rules. So you can't cheat when it comes to optional rules because they're optional. So only mandatory rules produce cases of cheating in the event of their violation.

[00:38:28] Ellie: Okay, I wanna bring this back to sports. So even though I'm not a sports girl, I think it's a super helpful example of course here, and I have a lot of respect for philosophy of sport. So sports have rules that tell players what is and isn't allowed, and that obviously seems to fall under the category of prescriptive rules, this first thing that you just mentioned. Some of the rules are also mandatory. That's the second thing that you just mentioned. They're non-negotiable. Like you can't run with the ball in basketball, right? 

[00:39:04] David: Without bouncing it.

[00:39:04] Ellie: You have to dribble. Yeah. Thank you. But others are more optional, right? And many of the unwritten rules of sportsmanship in particular are optional, not mandatory. So if you break these, you're a bad sport, but you're not a cheater.

[00:39:20] David: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. So for instance, in basketball, there is this unwritten rule that if your team is already winning by a lot and you're almost at the end of the game, you stop acquiring new points. 'Cause it's just like you don't wanna stomp on the other team when you've clearly already won.

[00:39:38] Ellie: Okay, interesting.

[00:39:39] David: Yeah, and if you do that, if I have the ball in the last 10 seconds and I go for another basket and we end up winning 200 to 20, that's seen as a violation of one of the sportsmanship rules, but nobody could say that I cheated. I'm just kind of a dick on the court. 

[00:39:56] Ellie: Totally. And I mentioned that I read a bunch of chapters from this book, Cheating, by Deborah Rhode in advance of this episode, and she also has a chapter on cheating in sports. And one of the things that I found really interesting about that chapter is that she notes that people have been violating the official mandatory rules of sports from the inception of organized sports.

There was already cheating in the very first Olympic Games in ancient Athens. And she also discusses how since then, cheating has spread and taken on a variety of forms, including doping, which we mentioned earlier, but also violating eligibility criteria. There's a lot of cheating around that. And even cheating with equipment, you know, the infamous Patriots under-inflated ball from the Super Bowl about a decade ago. 

[00:40:50] David: Just like there have been cheaters in sports for as long as there have been sports, there have been cheaters in school for as long as there has been school. Educators across the country are concerned about the recent rise of AI and how it's entirely changing the landscape of higher education, such that what we are facing today is no longer a new iteration of an old problem, but a fundamentally new problem that problematizes the very mission of universities and their ability to achieve those missions.

And rise of readily accessible tools like ChatGPT, for example, really are putting at students' fingertips a very powerful temptation, the temptation to, with the click of a button, sidestep all the difficult work that goes into reading an article, summarizing an article, thinking about a book, writing an essay, and thereby students essentially denying themselves the opportunity to learn in school, which is the very reason that they're there in the first place.

And Ellie, you and I have had a number of discussions, both on air but also outside of podcast, about the pervasiveness of cheating and the way in which it's entirely fraying the relationships of trust between students and their professors. Last year, New York Magazine published an article and some of the things they mention here not only echo my own experience of the problem of AI in higher ed today, but I think they also illuminate how serious the problem is.

So for example, the article points out that a philosophy professor caught students in her ethics and technology class using AI to respond to the prompt, "Briefly introduce yourself and say what you're hoping to get out of this."

[00:42:52] Ellie: No!

[00:42:53] David: So students are using AI, again, not only for assignments and for these laborious tasks that we often ask them to do.

[00:43:01] Ellie: To introduce themselves!

[00:43:03] David: To say who they are. And I think one student who was quoted in the article really hit the nail on the head when they said, "The ceiling has been blown off." And I interpret this to be a reference both to how accessible the technology is, and also how difficult it is to police its use in schools, such that you have a situation where a lot of students are using a technology without a lot of consequences, and it's undermining the very activity that they're there for, which is education

[00:43:39] Ellie: Yeah, it's impossible to overstate how much of a crisis we educators are experiencing on the daily nowadays in each and every one of our classes. Because one thing that's been pointed out is that it is now rational for students to cheat. Our school system literally judges people based on how good they are relative to other students.

And when you have that kind of hyper-competitive system, and then you make the breaking of the rule, that intentional breaking of it, so easy that you can do it with the click of a button, and it's almost bad if you don't do it because other students are gonna beat you because they're doing it, then why wouldn't you do it?

And I was thinking about this a lot as I was reading The Road Book on Cheating, because one of the things that she notes, in the introduction is that repeated exposure to ethical misconduct can produce a form of ethical numbing, and that this is how cultures of cheating take root.

The more that people see others cheat, the less they regard it as cheating. And so it starts to seem like this isn't even cheating, even though to use ChatGPT to generate an essay very obviously is cheating, unless you're in a class that would allow that, which would seem very odd. 

[00:44:51] David: Well, they exist.

[00:44:52] Ellie: Okay, well, I have questions for those professors.

But in any case, the ethical numbing, I think, is really part of what's emerging, and that just gives me so much despair. The feelings of joy of reading a great essay, the feelings of frustration of reading a bad essay, all of those have to suddenly be put in question with the rise of this new culture.

[00:45:13] David: And the idea that it might be rational, I want to pick up on that idea because I think that's what's happening, especially when you think about the justification that everybody is doing it. And there is an analogy to be made here to the world of doping. So if it's true, independently of whether it's true, but if you have the perception that everybody else is doing it, then doping is indeed rational because it equalizes the playing field.

And similarly, I think a lot of students view using generative AI in that way because they often say, "Everybody else is doing it, and if I don't do it, I will be left behind." Aside from that, there are many cases where universities are actually sending incongruent messages to the student body. And at my own university, which is part of the CSU system, is a really good example of this.

So for instance, we recently amended the plagiarism code to include the use of generative AI that is not pre-approved by the professor, which I think is actually great. But then at the same time, the CSU system just signed a $17 million deal with OpenAI to give students the VIP ChatGPT technology.

And so what's the messaging here? Like, should they be using it or should they not? And I think that ambiguity also adds to the ethical numbness because there is a lack of clarity about whether this actually is immoral or not, or is it just a form of achieving efficiency?

[00:46:44] Ellie: Yeah. I don't know whether I would consider that to be part of ethical numbing, but I definitely think it has to do with a lack of clarity around what the rule is, right? And what constitutes cheating. And I think a lot of professors at various universities have just been like, "Please, administration, will you help us? Will you amend the honor code? Will you amend the code of conduct to account for generative AI?" Because otherwise it's just up to individual professors to come up with these rules for our particular syllabi. 

And one, not only is that a weirdly individualizing solution to what's a much bigger issue, but two, also because these are essentially unenforceable, we have very few ways of definitively knowing how and whether a student used generative AI, of course the culture of cheating is going to proliferate.

And this, I think, brings me to some of what Rhode says about academic cheating in particular. So she notes that social context plays a massive role in how much students cheat. Seeing others cheat and go unpunished is strongly correlated with academic dishonesty. And this has been the case in certain subcultures of universities for quite some time.

So it's very often the case that fraternities and sororities are hotbeds of cheating. They'll often keep a record of a specific exam that a professor is teaching year after year and say, "Here's, here are the answers to this." But now I think with the rise of generative AI, we see a move from specific subcultures of cheating to now just, like, a culture of cheating writ large because people are seeing others cheat and go unpunished.

And there are three main drivers of academic misconduct, Rhode notes. One is individual characteristics, second is organizational factors, and third is social context. We've just talked a bit about the social context. I don't think the individual characteristics are that worthwhile for us to discuss here. It's just like, 

[00:48:44] David: Are you a cheater?

[00:48:46] Ellie: Yeah, are you a dishonest person by nature or whatever? Okay, we'll leave that aside. But I think the organizational factors here are super important when we're thinking about academic cheating today, especially in universities. Because one thing that drives people to cheat is perceived unfairness or poor quality of instructors.

If teachers seem indifferent or permissive, or if the subject matter seems unimportant or uninteresting, if material is confusing or unfair, students feel more justified in cheating. And so, if you think that a particular assignment is mindless or confusing or unfair, that is gonna be a big predictor of your likelihood of cheating.

[00:49:28] David: So I ended up also reading the chapter on academic cheating in that book.

[00:49:32] Ellie: Oh, good. I recommended that you check it out, so I'm glad you did.

[00:49:34] David: Yeah, so I read it, and I thought it had some really good little kernels of gold here and there. Two that I wanna think about in connection to this idea of, like, what's the organizational culture, in a place that might be conducive to cheating are the argument that she makes that a lot of cheating really is situational.

People don't start their college careers thinking, "I will cheat, and I will get through college with ChatGPT." Rather, they find themselves in situations of pressure. Like, you see an opening, and then that gives you the moral license and the rationalization to cheat just this one time, and then it becomes a habit.

And I think the way in which we valorize technology in universities, like, new advancements in educational tools and so on, actually conduces students to cheat, right? This idea that learning always happens at the edge of technological innovation and that whatever technology's available is going to allow you to not only learn faster but learn better, which we know is not the case.

[00:50:35] Ellie: Totally. Can this serve as a justification for my very old school teaching methods?

[00:50:39] David: Yeah. Oh my God, I have moved to in-person writing assignments rather than take-home essays for this very reason, and I have loved it.

[00:50:47] Ellie: But I mean, I've never even used like PowerPoints. I like write on the board.

[00:50:51] David: I think we're seeing actually a switch now in higher education of students wanting to use ChatGPT so widely that professors are now going back to old methods that are a little bit more resilient to AI capture.

[00:51:05] Ellie: That's undoubted. We're that everywhere. All of us are doing that.

[00:51:08] David: Yeah, but I also wanted to mention the pressures that students are under, 'cause I think we do have to take that into account. And those pressures include taking a lot of classes when there is limited time, the pressure to get good grades, but also the pressure to perform at their highest capacity in every class.

And the reason that I mention this is because Rhode points out that there are two kinds of students in general that tend to cheat more. Now, normally we might think it's the really crappy students who are going to cheat, and that's true. It's usually the lowest performing students that tend to be cheaters, but they are only matched by the highest performing students.

And so those two are under very different pressures, but they are under pressure nonetheless. And so it's your A+ students and your D- students who are the most likely to cheat. And a lot of this also has to do with the fact that there is a moral exceptionalism that surrounds cheating, where a lot of people will say things, and she cites research for this, they will say, "Look, I'm generally a moral person. I am a good person. I follow the rules," but they exempt their cheating behavior from their self-assessment. So they will say like, "Oh yeah, I for sure have cheated, but I am a, an upstanding citizen who follows the rules." And it's almost as if the cognitive dissonance is so strong that they don't actually factor cheating as a case of immoral behavior.

[00:52:35] Ellie: Yeah, I would say in most cases actually, not all, there are three exceptions that are immediately springing to mind of students were sort of incorrigible. But in most cases where I've caught students cheating, they have definitely been like, "I hope you don't think this speaks to my character," and they've been really worried that I might think they're a bad person, 'cause they obviously don't see themselves as bad people.

For what it's worth, I don't see them as bad people either. I always tell students I'm, like, not judging your character based on this one incident, but it's an incident of cheating nonetheless.

[00:53:06] David: And that's the tragedy, that often it's very good students who, again, are under pressure and they are realizing, you know, it's Friday night and I have this due on Monday morning, and I don't wanna risk my grade 'cause my GPA might be at stake, and there is this low-hanging fruit that with the push of a button will give them a solution and allow them to move on with their life.

In a sense, why wouldn't they do it? And not only, as I said earlier, that destroys trust, but I also think it puts everybody in a really uncomfortable epistemic space, because one of the things that is unique, I think, to cases of AI-related cheating is that in other cases of cheating, when you detect the cheater and you have the evidence, then you have certainty, right?

Like, "Look, I caught you with this violation. Here is the proof. What do we do about it?" In the case of AI cheating, we actually never reach that certainty, because if you know anything about AI, you know that the AI detectors are not super reliable. And so everybody is in this really uncomfortable space of suspecting without knowing.

And even when you have a really good case to make that, hey, this student plagiarized or cheated using ChatGPT, in theory, you actually cannot prove it, and that further erodes the nature of the relationship because it opens a space for infinite plausible deniability, right? A really smartass student could technically be like, "You can't prove that it is AI," and that just puts you in a space where you're not even having a discussion in good faith.

[00:54:43] Ellie: Yes, I have witnessed at least one such case of that, that I wasn't directly involved in, but that is a story I'm not at liberty to tell. I want to bring in here the story of an app called Cluley, that when we decided we were gonna do an episode on cheating, I was like, "We have to talk a little bit about Cluley."

I know we're nearing the end of our episode, but I want to bring this in because I think it's fascinating. Cluley is essentially an AI startup that provides real time AI assistance during virtual meetings and interviews. It's obviously pretty controversial, and one of the ways that Cluley initially went viral is that one of the two founders of it, Roy Lee, videoed himself using it in an interview for Amazon. He ended up getting an offer from Amazon and he turned down the job, but then he posted on YouTube footage of him using Cluley in order to perform well on this interview and then get a job offer, and that's like part of what's made people interested in this.

And he thinks that we should just fully embrace a world of cheating with AI and actually maybe it's not even quite cheating anymore. He compares using these AI tools to calculator or a spellchecker, and is like, "Look, those things when they first came on the scene were considered cheating too, but then people eventually came to accept them and the same is gonna be true of ChatGPT and you should usemy AI system that compiles all these things and from different LLMs and helps you interview in real time." And there is a Cluley manifesto that seems almost certainly generated by AI,

[00:56:19] David: Of course, why would it not be?

[00:56:20] Ellie: Right? And so I wanna just tell you a couple lines from it and hear what you think. So he says, "We built Cluley so you never have to think alone again. It sees your screen, hears your audio, feeds you answers in real time. While others guess," the typical ChatGPT em dash, "you're already right. And yes, the world will call it cheating, but so was the calculator, so was spellcheck, so was Google." And then the end of the manifesto says, "So start cheating because when everyone does, no one is." Okay, that doesn't really make sense from a syntax perspective. 

[00:56:57] David: When everybody cheats, nobody, period.

Yeah, I mean, that's already a good indictment of AI in itself, and also extremely dystopian, with this idea that you never have to think alone again. If I were writing a dystopian sci-fi script about a future in which technology is pushed onto individuals precisely to undermine thinking, this would be the motto of the corporation at the center of the plot.

But I think to get to the core of my concern here is that they are relying on a misanalogy between AI and these other technologies, I think one important difference is that sure, we allow kids to use a calculator, but not as soon as they go to school. We still teach addition, we still teach subtraction, because we recognize that that builds a foundation that is essential for further cognitive development.

Whereas what's happening with AI, and you see it in the manifesto, is the idea that you use it in order not to have to build the foundation, which is the hard work. You never have to think alone again, period, right? It's like a substitution rather than something that facilitates a skill that's already acquired.

And I would say the same thing about the spellchecker. We spend a lot of money and a lot of time in teaching kids how to read and write, how to spell, how to sound out words in the reading acquisition of their formation precisely because we realize that when you bypass those critical early stages, you have downstream consequences that are terrible for the children and for their skills for integrating into society.

And I think unfortunately, we are at a stage with AI where we're using it as replacement without yet knowing the downstream effects. And I do think we are beginning to see those with what people call the cognitive deficit that is produced by AI, where you really do see students being worse thinkers and worse writers because they are not exercising the skill, and therefore they're not acquiring it. And so that's my issue with this analogy that, oh, this is just like the calculator. No, it's actually not.

[00:59:13] Ellie: Yeah, and ultimately they're not just cheating us, they're cheating themselves.

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