Question A couple of months ago, I had an experience which spawned an ethical dilemma which I find fascinating. I had been in a healthy relationship with a girl for some time, but after meeting and getting to know someone else—a girl in my class whom I got to know in a perfectly platonic fashion, so I can't see any wrongs committed on my part at that stage—, I fell in love with this other girl, whilst my feelings for my girlfriend withered and died. Understandably, our relationship could not go on after that, and so we broke up. I think we are both better off now than we were. However, assuming that I had an actual choice between (a) 'giving in' to my infatuation and breaking up with my old girlfriend so as to be happy with the other girl (it seems that we're also assuming no independent will on the part of the 'other' girl!) or (b) resisting my developing feelings for this other person to preserve the relationship I was already in, also assuming that I would, in fact, be as happy as I initially was with my old girlfriend, would you say that I did have a moral obligation to opt for (b), given the probability that our breaking up would render my ex unhappy, at least for a limited period of time? Do I have an obligation to seek out the most happiness for myself in all my endeavours, or should I prioritise the happiness of others?

Accepted:
January 11, 2009

Comments

You assume (1) that you can, to a large extent anyway, choose whether or not to let yourself fall in love with someone new versus sustain the love you already feel for the person you are involved with, and (2) that you have no reason to think the new relationship will be any happier than the old (although you also claim to think that both you and your past girlfriend are better off now than you were before). You also seem to assume (3) that future happiness of your new acquaintance would be the same whether or not you allowed yourself to fall in love with her (presumably because without you she would be involved in some other, equally happy relationship). It is usually very hard to know the accuracy of each of these assumptions, but I do not find them unreasonable.

On a straightforward comparison of current happiness with probable future happiness of everyone involved, there seems to be no reason to choose one relationship over the other. You seem to suggest, however, that the transition itself would add to your happiness (because of the special excitement of something new?) while it would detract from the happiness of the person you were first involved with. Instead of giving priority to either your happiness or hers, you could try to figure out whether her lost happiness is greater than your gained happiness, and then act so as to bring about the greatest total happiness. Again, this is something that it is usually very hard to know -- both because of the difficulty of predicting happiness in general, but also because of the difficulty of measuring different sorts of happiness and unhappiness on a single scale. Still, there are certainly situations in which you can know that someone else's loss of happiness is greater than your gain, and that seems to be the situation that you were in.

Your difficulty is not simply the difficulty of deciding whose happiness matters more, however. There are many ethical considerations that depend on something other than the resulting happiness of the people involved. First, there are obligations that we incur by agreeing to certain rules or contracts -- by making promises, for example. If you make a promise to remain devoted to someone throughout your life (which is what the marriage promise is usually taken to include), then you have an obligation to do so (unless the person to whom you make the promise releases you from it) even if you and she could find greater happiness elsewhere. Second, there are ethical considerations that privilege oneself without necessarily conducing to one's own happiness -- the right to lead one's own life as one sees fit, for example. If you are drawn towards one person rather than another, that is itself a reason for pursuing a relationship with that person even if you would be just as happy (or even happier) with another. And third, there are considerations that privilege some basic needs of others that don't have much to do with happiness -- the need to retain a certain amount of self-esteem, for example. If you couldn't break with your first girlfriend without destroying her self-esteem, that would be a reason to stay with her even if you were confident that her long-term happiness would benefit from the break.

For all of these reasons, I can't provide a 'yes' or 'no' answer to your question. But I hope I have given you a richer framework for thinking about the situation you were in.