Plagiarism is a kind of theft, but it is also a question of honour

Any concept that has a history, philosopher Michel Foucault tells us, cannot have a fixed definition.

Plagiarism is a concept with a history, as the subtitle of Roger Kreuz’s Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots reminds us. But it might be close to perennial.

Review: Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots – Roger Kreuz (Cambridge University Press)

As a term describing literary, artistic or intellectual theft, “plagiarism” is derived from one of the epigrams of the ancient Roman poet Martial:

Quintianus, I commend you my little books – that is, however, if I can call them mine when your poet friend recites them. If they complain of harsh enslavement, come forward to claim their freedom and give bail as required. And when he calls himself their owner, say they are mine, discharged from my hand. If you shout this three or four times, you will make the kidnapper ashamed of himself.

The Latin word for “kidnapper” Martial uses is plagiario, which gives us the English term “plagiarism”. Other Roman writers, like Cicero, already familiar with the phenomenon of literary theft, used different terms like furtum (a trick) and surripio (taking something secretly), which cover a range of connotations.

The Statute of Anne

Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether the ways we understand plagiarism are continuous with the classical notions that gave us the term, or whether there has been a rupture (or several).

The most often cited candidate is the Statute of Anne (1710), the first effort by a government anywhere to codify copyright and make it enforceable under the law.

Copyright, the argument goes, emanates from the rumbustious commercial culture of Restoration England. It encourages us to think about literary texts as a form of capital, valuable for their ability to generate income for their creators and their creators’ descendants.

Medieval and early modern attitudes towards appropriation differed from later ones. Witness the massive profusion of Aristotle’s ideas throughout medieval philosophy, for instance, or Shakespeare’s avid lifting of plots from historians Holinshed and Plutarch.

But, equally, who would deny the enormous ingenuity that transformed Aristotelianism into the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, or the chronicles of Holinshed into King Lear?

There is an important slippage here, the one telegraphed in Kreuz’s subtitle: from plagiarism to appropriation. Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon railed against the “idols of the theatre”, his name for dogmas derived from ancient philosophy, assented to only for their antiquity. But Bacon was not accusing anyone of passing off Aristotle’s texts as their own.

Inspiration, allusion, influence, all the textual chains that make up a tradition or a culture: these are complex. They take time and patience to disentangle. Yet plagiarism, as literary critic Christopher Ricks is at pains to remind us, is simple: it is an act of dishonesty. And it has been deprecated as such at every stage of literate culture.

The Statute of Anne did not invent a new understanding of plagiarism grounded in copyright, though it was responding to the new salience of literary theft, as the world of print made the practice easier and, seemingly, more widespread. The great threat to authors’ livelihoods at this time was the pirated edition, rather than theft in the sense of fraudulent attribution (although this took place as well).

Far from representing a rupture with the classical tradition, copyright accentuates a dimension of plagiarism present from the start. It adds a literal theft to the moral injury that Martial’s “kidnapping” characterises as a metaphorical theft.

Ricks underscores another facet of Martial’s tenacious metaphor. The plagiarist does not deprive the originator of the work itself, in the way a thief deprives its owner of the stolen object. In Ricks’ words, the plagiarist “hopes to gain honour from a dishonourable practice”.

For Ricks, this dual aspect of plagiarism is apt to lead us astray. To the extent that we rely on judicial determinations and judicial remedies, we tend to neglect the original sense of moral injury.

The problem of intention

Such is the outline of a historical account of plagiarism. What do we learn from it?

We learn that plagiarism is a simple concept with an unusual degree of historical consistency, but that its connections with neighbouring concepts, such as influence and copyright, can be complex.

We learn that a legalistic or procedural approach to the problem of plagiarism leaves an important dimension of it unaddressed.

A more fine-grained account would also reveal that authors tend to be perpetually in crisis over plagiarism’s perceived prevalence.

For Kreuz, however, plagiarism is an example of what he and his fellow social scientists would call a “fuzzy concept”. He cites a lack of consensus around whether insufficient attribution amounts to the same thing as plagiarism (yes, if the intent was to deceive) and how much copying counts as plagiarism (conceivably any amount, again depending on the intention).

Intention, famously, is hard to establish. As Ricks reminds us, however, this doesn’t make the concept of plagiarism itself unclear.

Questions of allusion and influence, and the point at which knowledge leaves the preserve of its discoverer and joins what Karl Marx called the “general intellect”, are nigh on impossible to legislate in advance. The point was made by philosopher G.W.F Hegel two centuries ago, when he argued that, because such questions “cannot be precisely determined” in strictly legal terms, plagiarism ought to be a “matter of honour, and honour should deter people from committing it”.

How, then, does Kreuz propose to advance our understanding beyond this durable-seeming consensus? He has amassed a database of some 4,600 incidents of plagiarism drawn principally from “journalistic accounts”.

That database has been well used: the substance of the book is a seemingly interminable series of vignettes, drawn from a variety of national contexts (but mostly American), professions and periods. These include, for instance, the infamous 1976 ruling in a music publisher’s case against George Harrison over his song My Sweet Lord, which was found to be an “unconscious plagiarism” of the Chiffons’ 1963 hit He’s So Fine.

Another example is Joe Biden reproducing certain phrases and arguments from a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock during the Democratic presidential primaries in 1987. The revelation derailed Biden’s campaign.

But it is unclear what these vignettes are supposed to teach us about the nature of plagiarism, the traits of plagiarists, the nature of originality, and the place of influence. None of the important issues are adjudicated on, or even expanded upon. Instead, they are merely gestured at, before we move swiftly on to another anecdote.

Dishonourable times

The slippage between “plagiarism” and “appropriation” in Kreuz’s preface is constant and neither term is defined. Is the former a subset of the latter? It takes until page 192 for us to learn that plagiarism is a “fuzzy concept”, leaving us to wonder what rules governed inclusion in the database underlying the project.

The book’s marketing and subtitle suggest it tells us something urgent about plagiarism and appropriation in the age of AI. This is false. Its final sentence is another equivocation – namely, that those water-muddying cultural norms might be shifting again in the present.

How? Should they? Kreuz doesn’t say.

Those of us working in the universities have seen, since 2022, the venerable essay virtually obliterated as a form of assessment by the promiscuous use students make of AI. AI cheating is a form of plagiarism: these students have tried (usually successfully) to deceive their teachers that they are the authors of computer-generated prose.

The legalistic, procedural response seems futile. AI detection software is widely judged unreliable. Academic dishonesty procedures are producing insuperable amounts of bureaucratic work, beyond even what even the distended administration of the modern university can absorb.

All that remains is the moral dimension. It would probably do little good to insist to anyone who passes off AI-generated work as their own that they are dishonouring themselves. But that is because we live in a society determined to exterminate every measure of value apart from self-interest. Hegel’s “honour” is at best a quaint vestige of a vanished world.

If we really value intellectual originality, artistic creativity and human excellence, we have to do more than develop better detection tools and oppose AI companies’ pilfering of art, literature, and thought. We have to try to build a society that fosters these values for everyone, not one that tries to commercialise them at best and extirpate them at worst.

Yes, there is often a legal dimension to plagiarism, but there is an irreducible moral dimension as well, and the whole tendency of our society is toward the procedural and legalistic, to the detriment of every other consideration.

Hegel was right: plagiarism has to be a matter of honour. But we live in dishonourable times.