A philosophical conundrum I thought up on my way home from work, I’m sure it’s not unique.
Does being aware of cheating have any relevance on being a cheater?
For example: a baseball player does quite well in the Minor Leagues and is drafted in the Majors only to find out, unknown to him, his favorite bat has cork in it.
-On one hand games, like life, are simply a set of rules and deviance outside that (regardless of knowledge) is deemed cheating and the perpetrators cheaters. You wouldn’t get out of a speeding ticket arguing you didn’t know the speed limit.
-On the other hand knowledge is choice, a cheater egregiously choses to not abide by the rules. But what if there is no knowledge and therefore no choice. You wouldn’t say a raped woman cheated on her husband.
You may say there is a disconnect in definitions between the individual and the group so then I therefore ask where does Newtonian Physics meet Quantum Mechanics…so to speak.
I agree with your point. In order to be honest though, your hypothetical baseball player would have to renounce any awards, etc. he won and I suppose any championships won by his team would have to be revoked as well…or at least investigated. I’m not a follower of sports in anyway so I have no idea exactly how it would work…and I can see how it wouldn’t be “fair” for his team mates to also be penalized, but the game would still have been rigged regardless of whether or not the players had the knowledge.
Edit: I made this sports specific since you used a baseball player as an example, but I feel the same idea applies to any circumstance.
I think you are asking about word usage, about whether “cheat” indicates willfulness. I think it does. Looking at some dictionary definitions I see “trickery”, “deceit”, “fraud”, and other words that imply intent.
Legally, unawareness is not an excuse (I don’t think). Speed limits are posted; you have a responsibility to keep an eye out for the signs.
The baseball player didn’t cheat unless he was responsible for knowing about the content of the bat. But he is duty bound to notify officials once he knows.
Life is so much easier when you practice integrity – especially if you are becoming forgetful.
There’s a big difference between “cheating” because you didn’t know the rules and “cheating” because you’re not omniscient. Unless it’s the authority’s fault you didn’t know the rules (because they don’t make them available, or they’re too vague), your failure to try to follow the rules is always going to be considered your fault. But if you take reasonable measures to follow the rules and still get caught out, that is more forgivable.
I think this depends. In civil law, particularly in the area of patent law, damages for willful infringement can be triple the damages for inadvertent infringement (as I understand it - IANAL).
I would say no, a runner who is given steroids by their coach has still cheated, they may not have done so willingly but they are still competing outside the rules with an advantage over the rest of the field. Cheating is cheating, but its obviously a different level of fraud if someone cheats without intent.
Perhaps thats the inherent difference in level of insult between saying someone cheated and calling them a cheater. I think being called a cheater is worse because that implies intent.
I would think it is. If I go into a store and change price tags (OK hard to do in this day and age but you get the idea) and check out and pay the wrong price, it’s cheating the store. But if someone else changes the price tags and later on I come into the store and say “Wow what a great price,” and go buy the item, the result is still the same.
The store is out the money, but in the second case, there was no intent on the part of the party to defraud.
Honestly, in the specific case of corking bats, I think the efficacy of the “cheating” should come into play. There is, as far as I know, no demonstrated advantage in using corked bats. Someone who did it willfully I would simply think was an idiot. And if someone did it inadvertently, I wouldn’t think twice about it, especially not to the level of revoking championships and awards.
I think there is more to cheating than simply breaking the rules, intentionally or not. There has to be an element of unfair advantage, which is subjective. Looking at the rules objectively and saying “yes, he broke them” only tells you so much. Which is why we have words like “technicality”. Was The Pine Tar Incident a case of cheating? The rules were broken, but I don’t know anyone who thinks an extra inch of pine tar gives the batter an unfair advantage over his opponents.
What if baseball institutes a rule saying that, in order to be better role models to children, players should only eat healthy foods? Would it be cheating in that scenario to eat a candy bar before the game? Or would it only be “technically” against the rules? Don’t the Yankees have a personal hygiene code? If Johnny Damon had kept his beard and long hair when he played for New York, would that have been cheating?
My point is that cheating is in the eye of the beholder, and requires more knowledge than whether or not the rules were broken, and whether or not it was intentional. Unfair advantage is a necessary, if not sufficient, component. And that component is at least ocasionally subjective.
IMO, cheating definitely requires intent, and I have a hard time imagining using it in a context that doesn’t. Consider the case of speeding, if I get caught violating the speed limit because I didn’t know the speed limit and thought I was following the law, would you really describe it as cheating? Maybe you’d say I was cheating if I knew it was 45 and I was going 55, or I tried to use some device or methodology to get away with it, like a radar scrambler.
To use a baseball analogy, I would say someone is cheating if they knowingly use a PED or cork bat, but if their trainer spikes their vitamin supplements or replaces the bat, they don’t have foreknowledge. Yes, they’re still violating the rules in both cases, and ignorance is no excuse, but it can and should be taken into account when deciding how to handle the issue.
Or, to put it another way, I would say cheating is to breaking the rules in much the same way that murder is to killing. In either case the intent to break the rules or kill makes the infraction a lot worse, but with or without intent, the rules are still broken or a person is still dead.