Question Dear philosophers, I have a question about keeping secrets. Can hiding a secret from the person you love most (which is something in your mind and not in connected to your behavior) be an immoral ACT? If yes, in which ways? Thank you very much in advance.

Accepted:
March 2, 2011

Comments

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 active killing rather than merely an instance of letting die. Similarly, suppose you promise you'll speak up for your friend next time others will tease her about her teeth but, when she does get so teased a little later, you remain silent. This conduct could be described not merely as a (passive) failure to protect your friend but also as an active misleading of her. This is relevant to your secrets case because you may have actively led the person you love most to rely on your not keeping certain secrets from him/her -- not through some explicit promise, perhaps, but through other things that passed between you.

Sometimes the hiding (as with Easter eggs) is itself active. You may steer the conversation away from certain topics, you may express disapproval of some character in a novel for hiding something from her close friend (perhaps something similar to what you are hiding from the one you love), thereby reinforcing your loved one's belief that you would not do such a thing, and so on. In short, you may consciously or unconsciously engage in various forms of active hiding, and these would constitute acts rather than omissions.

Now when a hiding is an act, can it be immoral? Sure. Suppose the person in question is your mother. You find out, but she does not, that your father has engaged in some extra-marital sex tourism and is now HIV-positive. He begs you not to tell your mother, largely because he has been living well thanks to your mother's well-paying job and does not want to be reduced to his own much weaker earning potential. You realize that your father is a rogue, but you have a soft spot for him and also dread the blow-up that you would surely trigger by informing your mother. So you collaborate marginally in your father's deceit, help explain away his visits to the doctor and let him keep his pills in a pill container with your name on it (so when your mother sees the container, she thinks that, in accordance with the label, these are some antibiotics you occasionally use). Here you would rather obviously be acting immorally.

This answers your question. Hiding a secret can be an immoral act. But it is important to add that even active hiding of a secret may not be immoral. To give another example, suppose the person in question is your husband. He's had quite a conservative upbringing which included strong normative expectations that women (and perhaps men as well) ought not to have any romantic experiences before marriage. You come from a somewhat different background and, when you were 15, you reenacted a movie kiss with a boy you were close friends with. The kiss wasn't much of a kiss because neither of you really knew what you were supposed to be doing, and you gave up after half a minute with the conclusion that adults are strange creatures. Loving your husband and knowing him intimately, you know that this sweet innocent story (and the erstwhile boy is quite distant now emotionally and geographically, and there was nothing else until you met your husband) would be difficult for him to cope with. He would understand and forgive and reassure you that there really isn't even anything to forgive but, given his upbringing, the story would haunt him and thereby your relationship. As this case shows, hiding a secret -- even from the person you love most, and even with some active misleading -- can be perfectly alright, morally.

Question Dear philosophers, I have a question about keeping secrets. Can hiding a secret from the person you love most (which is something in your mind and not in connected to your behavior) be an immoral ACT? If yes, in which ways? Thank you very much in advance. Accepted:March 2, 2011

Question Dear philosophers, I have a question about keeping secrets. Can hiding a secret from the person you love most (which is something in your mind and not in connected to your behavior) be an immoral ACT? If yes, in which ways? Thank you very much in advance.

Accepted:
March 2, 2011