Topics Ethics

Question Your marriage of 10 years is "in a bad place" and you find yourself seeking "compensatory" emotional gratification through extra-marital sex, with a) an acquaintance and then b) briefly, while drunk, with the spouse of your sibling. You realise your mistake. You tell no-one, out of cowardice, but also out of sorrow that it has happened and a knowledge that you love your spouse and you know that your spouse would be devastated by what you have done. You return to the marriage with determination to do better and the behaviour never reoccurs. You devote yourself to loving and caring for your spouse and you both enjoy a deepening relationship in which both parties commit and contribute wholeheartedly. Over the next ten years your spouse becomes progressively more sick and eventually dies without ever discovering your earlier treachery. Almost simultaneously, your sibling's marriage breaks up and the "in-law" behaves shittily, claiming that the break-up of the marriage is entirely the fault of your (innocent) sibling who is baffled by, and distraught about the break-up. You know that the "in-law" has been serially un-faithful to your sibling but your sibling is unaware that their spouse's infidelity involves you. Question: How do you come to terms with the universal goodwill that comes your way for your apparently self-less care of your dying spouse throughout the long years of illness, when you look back and realise that for you, it was but a poor penance for the wrongs you committed in secret? Does your love for your spouse have any meaning now? And their love for you? And should you confess your sins to your sibling, knowing that your children may ultimately discover what you did? What "ought" you to do????? And why? I am so sorry for the clumsy pronoun use - I did not want a gender-biased answer (as if that could happen here of all places!!!) I so need help with this - I am in agony...

Accepted:
February 25, 2010

Comments

Some approaches to ethics hold that dishonesty can never be the correct policy, on the ground (very roughly, for brevity here) that such a policy could never be recommended generally (or universally), and/or because dishonesty is in itself and inherently wrong. One can understand some sympathy for such a view but still not be completely convinced by it in some given case. So much as we might well have serious misgivings about dishonesty generally, we should also be extremely wary of the potential for a given case of honesty to amount to unwarranted (and unjustifiable) cruelty.

You feel guilty. Well, you should! But you obviously don't need me to tell you that, because you're "in agony" over what you have done and what some of the ramifications are now. But what to do about it?

First, the situation with your spouse sounds like, once the wrongdoing ceased, you handled things about as well as you could, given that you changed the relationship in fundamental ways and permanently by your wrongdoing. Would your spouse have had a better life if you had told your spouse the truth? Maybe, but we'll never know now, will we? Most spouses would insist that they would prefer to know the truth in such cases, and that should matter to us, but I also think that if you asked their friends and others who loved them, you might get different advice--the truth can be very destructive. So, as a matter of fact, I am an example of a spouse (and now, in advising you, of an advisor) who would argue in favor of good judgment and concern for who you tell damaging secrets to. Sounds like you did pretty well in the relationship the rest of the way. Human life is imperfect, but it would be hard for me to say that you handled the aftermath badly on this one. You recovered and built on the love in that relationship, and yes, that sounds very meaningful to me. The only one really hurt by your guilt was...you, who had to live with it all those years, and still. OK, sounds right to me!

Now, with the sibling. The sibling is feeling devastated. Now try to imagine, please, how your sibling would feel if you added to what they already know by including your own name on the list of the spouse's indifelities. So how many relationships have been destroyed once you have 'fessed up? And how many would be destroyed if you didn't 'fess up? And who gets damaged when these relationships are destroyed? This isn't to praise dishonesty or keeping hurtful secrets, it is, rather, just to say that good ethical judgment should certainly involve taking consequences seriously. Here is another question to ask yourself: What sort of person destroys a relationship with a sibling just to relive himself or herself of guilt? My own aswer would be: a very selfish person, and we have already seen that you can exemplify that particular vice at times, right? So will you do it again in these circumstances, or will you just live with your guilt (much-deserved as it is) but not allow it to stain others in damaging ways?

You worry that your children might find out. I suppose your sibling's ex-spouse could try to expose your nasty little secret for malicious motives. But the truth is that if no one has yet found out about this, from so many years ago, you are in a situation where it is one person's word against another, and the ex-spouse is not in a very credible position at the moment.

So my advice is to swallow your guilt and try to be the best parent and sibling you can be--in other words, to act now in much the same ways as you did with your own spouse. It seems you are not the same person as you were those many years ago. That's already an improvement! (And by the way, if I were your spouse or sibling, I really, really, really wouldn't want you to share your dirty little secrets with me!)