genq what are the actual reasons that plagiarism is bad apart from profit and prestige?
so there are two main angles i usually think of here, which ultimately converge into some related issues in public discourse and knowledge production.
firstly, plagiarism should not just be understood as a violation one individual perpetuates against another; it has a larger role in processes of epistemological violence and suppression of certain people's arguments, ideas, and labour. consider the following three examples of plagiarism that is not at all counter to current structures of knowledge production, but rather undergirds them:
in colonial expeditions and encounters from roughly the 14th century onward, a repeated and common practice among european explorer-naturalists was to rely on indigenous people's knowledge of botany, geography, natural history, and so forth, but to then go on to publish this knowledge in their own native tongues (meaning most of the indigenous people they had learned from could not access, read, or respond to such publications), with little, vague, or no attribution to their correspondents, guides, hosts, &c. (many many examples; allison bigelow's 'mining language' discusses this in 16th and 17th century american mining, with a linguistic analysis foregrounded)
throughout the renaissance and early modern period, in contexts where european women were generally not welcome to seek university education, it was nonetheless common practice for men of science to rely on their wives, sisters, and other family members not just to keep house, but also to contribute to their scientific work as research assistants, translators, fund-raisers, &c. attribution practices varied but it is very commonly the case that when (if ever) historians revisit the biographies of famous men of science, they discover women around these men who were actively contributing to their intellectual work, to an extent previously unknown or downplayed (off the top of my head, marie-anne lavoisier; emma darwin; caroline herschel; rosalie lamarck; mileva marić-einstein...)
it is standard practice today for university professors to run labs where their research assistants are grad students and postdocs; to rely on grad students, undergrads, and postdocs to contribute to book projects and papers; and so forth. again, attribution varies, but generally speaking the credit for academic work goes to the faculty member at the head of the project, maybe with a few research assistants credited secondarily, and the rest of the lab / department / project uncredited or vaguely thanked in the acknowledgments.
in all of these cases, you can see how plagiarism is perpetuated by pre-existing inequities and structures of exploitation, and in turn helps perpetuate those structures by continuing to discursively erase the existence of people made socially marginal in the process of knowledge production. so, what's at stake here is more than just the specific individuals whose work has been presented as someone else's discovery (though of course this is unjust already!); it's also the structural factors that make academic and intellectual discourse an élite, exclusive activity that most people are barred from participating in. a critique of plagiarism therefore needs to move beyond the idea that a number of wronged individuals ought to be credited for their ideas (though again, they should be) and instead turn to the structures that create positions of epistemological authority under the aegis of capitalist entities: universities, legacy as well as new media outlets, and so forth. the issue here is the positions of prestige themselves, regardless of who holds them; they are, definitionally, not instruments of justice or open discourse.
secondly, there's the effect plagiarism has on public discourse and the dissemination of knowledge. this is an issue because plagiarism by definition obscures the circulation and origin of ideas, as well as a full understanding of the labour process that produces knowledge. you can see in the above examples how the attribution of other people's ideas as your own works to turn you into a mythologised sort of lone genius figure, whose role is now to spread your brilliance unidirectionally to the masses. as a result, the vast majority of people are now doubly shut out of any public discourse or debate, except as passive recipients of articles, posts, &c. you can't trace claims easily, you don't see the vast number of people who actually contribute to any given idea, and this all works to protect the class and professional interests of the select few who do manage to attain élite intellectual status, by reinforcing and widening the created gap between expert and layperson (a distinction that, again, tracks heavily along lines of race, gender, and so forth).
so you can see how these two issues really are part of one and the same structural problem, which is knowledge production as a tool of power, and one that both follows from and reinforces existing class hierarchies. in truth, knowledge is usually a collaborative affair (who among us has ever had a truly original idea...) and attributions should be a way of both acknowledging our debts to other people, and creating transparency in our efforts to stake claims and develop ideas. but, as long as there are benefits, both economic and social, to be gained from presenting yourself as an originator of knowledge, people will continue to be incentivised to do this. plagiarism is not an exception or an aberration; it's at best a very predictable outcome of the operating logics of this 'knowledge economy', and at worst—as in the examples above—a normal part of how expert knowledge is produced, and its value protected, in a system that is by design inequitable and exclusive.
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