A person in love with you is likely to be vulnerable to you, easy prey for your abuse and exploitation. Your first responsibility toward the person you have made fall in love with you is the responsibility not to take advantage of this person's special vulnerability to you. This responsibility is all the harder to deny because it does not require much effort on your part. You can just be -- gently -- honest about your feelings and then keep your distance. If you were rather active and deliberate in making the other fall in love with you, then you may in a sense be and/or feel responsible for her unhappiness. And this may seem to be a reason to show care and concern for the other, even at some cost to your own life and ambitions. But then you must also ask yourself whether you can be confident that you (of all people!) can make a real contribution toward helping the other get over the unhappy situation. Without such confidence, it may be best just to make do with the above simpler responsibilities:...

This would really depend on the expectations one's conduct gives rise to. These are initially the expectations that it would be reasonable to have in the society and subculture in question. Thus, if a college student from Montana is spending spring break in Florida and there dating someone from Oklahoma, for example, then the reasonable expectation would be that the relationship is a fling that will not lead to a long-term relationship. On the other hand, if two young Amish people from neighboring villages in Pennsylvania are dating each other, then the reasonable expectation would be that they are contemplating a life-long bond. Most cases obviously are somewhere in-between in that it is somewhat unclear what counts as normal in the relevant context. It is helpful here that, as the dating proceeds, the two persons may learn a lot about each other and, in particular, about each other's actual expectations. These may differ from the reasonable expectations, which are (roughly speaking) based on...

You capitalize the word "act", so maybe what you are wondering about is whether hiding something can be classified as an act or whether it should always be classified as an omission. This question of classification could be important if you give weight (as most do) to the distinction between (actively) harming someone and (passively) failing to benefit them. I can see two ways of reaching the conclusion that, in some cases, hiding a secret is active. Sometimes a failure to act comes on the heels of an explicit or implicit undertaking to act. Here it can be natural to look at the combination of the undertaking and the failure to live up to it as one act. For example, a rich guy invites the guests on his yacht to take a swim, assuring them that he'll throw them a rope when they'll have enough so they can climb back on board. He then fails to throw that rope and they drown. In this case, failure to throw the rope (or the combination of reassurance followed by this failure) should be classified as an...

The existing situation is bad in at least two ways. First, your lover is deceiving her husband and the father of her child who is, as you put it, a reasonable man. He deserves better. If his wife does not love him, he should know this and have a chance to plan the rest of his life in light of this knowledge. Second, your affair is likely to come to light at some point, and this might have much worse consequences for all involved, including the child, than a frank confession. I see two potential ways out of the problematic situation. First, you can agree to end the affair. You can still write each other, see each other occasionally, perhaps, but you should then try to meet the husband and make quite sure that there is no return to a romantic relationship. If this is unworkable, this first option would call for a complete end of the relationship. Second, you could agree to marry each other after a divorce. You write that this was not workable earlier "because of the social issues". I don't know...

From the description you give, it does not sound to me like your husband is, or ever was, in love with you. You might at least consider the possibility that his insistence on marriage -- "he could not be my friend without marring me because he was in love with me" -- was driven more by his immigration issues than by any combination of love and religion. Should this be the case, then you have no substantial obligation to stay. You are under no obligation to marry someone to help him get a desired citizenship. Nor do you have strong moral reason to stick to a commitment you once made to him if in making it you relied upon deceptive or misleading statements by him. Even if he is, in some sparkless way, in love with you, you are not in love with him. You should have a real chance to be an A student again, to fall in love, to have a bright life with sparks. What you are missing seems rather more substantial than the benefit he derives from your sacrifice. Moreover, by deciding against giving even more...

Your examples are good ones. Still, I doubt that hatred always presupposes love in the way you suggest. Consider a girl born into slavery, separated from her mother at birth, and abused by her owner. She may come to hate this man, it would seem, even if she never loved -- never really had a chance to love -- anyone or anything. You may respond that she hates the man, and the abuse he inflicts upon her, only because she longs for, and loves, living unabused. As an empirical claim about human psychology, this is dubious. The little girl may not have enough of a conception of what life without abuse would be like to be said to love such a life. To get around such worries, in this and all other cases, someone might say that it is part of the meaning of hating that one loves some enemy or opposite of what one hates. In this way you can win your case by showing that every proposition of the form "A hates X" presupposes a proposition of the form "A loves Y (e.g., not-X)". But if we...

Even if the question suggests rationalization and some self-deception, there is still the more philosophical question of why this affair is wrong (if it is wrong). Contrary to what you suggest, the fact that the wife does not know is probably sufficient to make the affair wrong. She stuck to this man throughout his serious illness and thereafter, because she believed and still believes that they have a certain relationship with each other which she values highly. She does not in fact have such a relationship -- her husband feels no attraction for her and is in love with you. If she knew that her life in fact lacks what she values highly, that her husband describes her to his lover as abusive, that he stays with her only because she looked after him when he was ill -- if she knew all this, then she would very seriously consider leaving her husband to try to build a new relationship of the kind she values. The deception deprives her of this opportunity and leads to her life failing miserably in a...

In this question, the words "can" and "love" are difficult. Take a simple understanding of what it means to love someone: to admire (at least some features of) this person and also to care greatly about his/her flourishing (eudaimonia, the quality of a human live comprehensively conceived). And take a narrow understanding of "can" in terms of conceivability. Then the answer is affirmative: It's quite conceivable that you might admire, and care greatly about the flourishing of, another, even while you have no admiration for yourself and do not care much about your own flourishing. The affirmative answer holds up when we take a broader sense of "can" as psychological possibility. Most people love themselves (in the sense specified), but a fair number do not. So it's psychologically possible not to love oneself. And I don't think lack of self-love makes it psychologically impossible to love another. To be sure, persons who do not love themselves may be depressed and less likely to love another. But it...

It is logically possible to consider yourself Dracula or Cleopatra (people do it), and considering oneself in love after three weeks is surely no less possible. Some consider themselves in love with Schwarzenegger and have never met the guy! So I assume the question you're really interested in is whether it is actually ("empirically") possible to be in love after knowing someone for merely three weeks. Of course, this depends on what it means to be in love. Let me propose that being in love does not mean having built a relationship of love together, but merely something weaker: being emotionally ready and personally committed to build such a relationship with this person. This can surely happen in the space of three weeks. For one thing, you may easily have spent 100 hours together -- more than you spend with your closest friends in the space of a year. And many of these hours may have been extremely intense (compared to shooting the breeze or watching a movie or going swimming...