ABSTRACT
One initial difficulty is that the act of writing is generally witnessed only by the writer, the shame that attends it being located more in an anticipated future act of reading. While the imagined witnesses will of course include the writer, it is easy to see why PhDs and undergraduate essays are such fertile ground for plagiarism: only two or three people will read them. On the other hand, those two or three people will have read many other things, or rather, many things within the same narrow range the student is being asked to occupy. One reason why one might link plagiarism more readily to shame than to guilt is that the emotion of shame not only allows us to come to terms with our errors and omissions but is also, Bernard Williams suggests, part of the business of rebuilding a self.
