Rationalization? No. There's no rationalization going on in my head. I just don't care.

But if people are going to argue about it? Sure, I'll raise a counterpoint.

You should care. It is your responsibility to care from the point on when you've decided to take a part in these events. You shouldn't have initiated with them if you wanted to be so careless.

There's no nice way to say this, but you might be a sociopath.

Is stealing from stores that don't have good security also useful to society, by bringing future competition to the industry? And if so, does that make stealing moral?

The difference is that diplomas are not fungible but most products bought from a store are.

I don't understand how that changes the reasoning. If something is immoral, I argue that it is still immoral even if everyone is doing it. Why would that change if that something immoral involved a non-fungible good?

My second sentence was not a justification to the first one, just one of the intended consequences on society of what he did.

How did his action compares to stealing ?

I thought your second sentence was meant to be a justification of the first. So what is your justification for why what he did is morally right?

The students lied to their professor, he just sold them the text so I don't see any wrong doing on his part.

Can you justify why it would be bad to ghostwrite ?

Cheating is immoral. Helping someone do something immoral is also immoral. Therefore, what he is doing is wrong.

Do you disagree with the first sentence or the second?

There can be shades of everything of course. If a cheater uses a legitimate ghostwriting service, maybe doesn't rise to the level of 'immoral'.

But that might not be the case here?

I'm not sure what cheating means here, it is about lying to professors.

   Helping someone do something immoral is also immoral. 

Depends on the circumstances

Cheating means to use dishonesty to receive something you do not deserve. Like stealing the answer key to a test and just copying the answers blindly instead of learning the material. Having someone else write as essay you were assigned is a clear example of cheating. It is also an example of lying to professors, but cheating is a more clear term. This isn't like telling a professor you like their shirt when you think it is ugly, this is fraud. If you are caught cheating in college the penalty is at least failing the class and can often lead to being expelled from the school. People caught cheating in law school can be rejected from the Bar (meaning they can't practice law) even if they pass their exams. This is a very serious thing, and I don't want to conflate it with a simple lie.

Can you explain under what circumstances you don't think my reasoning that "Helping someone do something immoral is also immoral" would not hold? And how those circumstances apply to this case?

It would hold or not hold depending on the specifics, what "helping" mean in that case. I could take an extreme case and ask you if the engineers designing the computer that "helped" them cheat are also morally responsible ?

And I don't care about the consequences for the cheater, as long as it doesn't fallback on someone innocent or who did not voluntarily agreed to be part of the scheme

> It would hold or not hold depending on the specifics, what "helping" mean in that case. I could take an extreme case and ask you if the engineers designing the computer that "helped" them cheat are also morally responsible ?

The case we are talking about is the OP, who knowingly helped people cheat. Students asked him to write their essays for them and he did so. This isn't like making a computer that someone could potentially later use to do something immoral, the OP knew in advance what would happen.