Further Thoughts on the Monogamy Police

My last post on being the Monogamy Police spurred a lot of responses, many of which were excellent and thought-provoking (and some that were not, but alas). A lot of people brought up practical considerations, which I almost entirely agree with. In my actual life, I do not sleep with women in monogamous relationships, both because that would invite way too much drama into my life, and also because I’m generally not interested in people who are monogamous and/or don’t share a deep commitment to honesty (and also for social fabric reasons - see below). I agree with all the people who said some version of “I would not get involved in this situation for personal reasons.” If I’d asked “was this wise?” the only reasonable answer is “hell no.”

I also want to stress that my criticism is limited to how we view so-called homewrecking. Other bad things are still bad. The ethics of sexual consent still apply. Especially in a situation as emotionally fraught as an affair, partners should make sure everyone enthusiastically consents. If your model of the wife would want you to refuse (and especially if she’s previously indicated that she would want you to refuse), the virtuous thing to do is to refuse. Taking advantage of a moment of weakness to talk her into sex is still scummy. If she’s been drinking, or taking drugs, or otherwise in an altered state of mind, and her sober self would want you to refuse, you should refuse. All of those things are bad to do irrespective of whether she’s cheating or not, and are especially unvirtuous to do in an infidelity situation, as the stakes are higher than usual. Infidelity is not an excuse not to care about your partner.

Those considerations aside, the conversation I’m trying to have is about what people see as the ethical duties of the parties in different situations. (I’m a moral non-realist so I view people’s ethics as equivalent to personal preferences, but they are still interesting in that capacity.)

My original theory was that people value monogamy more than other things a couple might agree to, and I think the results bore this out pretty well. I got many comments about the value of monogamy, how we need it for society, and how it’s Right and Good for promises to be monogamous to have a privileged position over other promises. I (obviously) disagree with that take, but I find it to be a consistent position.

I also identified a number of other areas of disagreement that I find interesting to explore:

People view autonomy differently than I do

Throughout the conversations, it became clear to me that my disagreement with a lot of people had nothing to do with monogamy or honesty and had everything to do with our views on paternalism and agency. Many people made comments to the effect that I should turn down the wife’s request because it would ruin her life and she would regret it later. That argument doesn’t sit well with me because I strongly value autonomy.

One of the few things that makes me apoplectic with rage is when people make decision on my behalf that I’m perfectly capable of making myself. If you think I’m making a mistake, it’s fine for you to think that, or even say that, but it’s not ok for you to deny my ability to make that decision for myself. You don’t know my life. You don’t know the situation I’m in. What looks like a mistake to you could make perfect sense if you had all the information. Or maybe your risk tolerance is different from mine. Or maybe you don’t understand what my goal is. The only one qualified to make that decision is me, and I resent any effort to force me into a different decision “for my own good.”

Likewise, a load-bearing part of my opinion in the OP is that the wife is the only one qualified to decide if she’s making the right decision. Unless she’s asked for my help keeping her monogamous commitment or there’s some other reason why her decision-making capacity is in doubt, refusing on her behalf is infantilizing. I don’t know her situation. You don’t know her situation. She could be in a situation where cheating is the best option. Speaking of which….

People view the typical cheater differently than I do

Most respondents implicitly assumed that the cheating wife was doing something not just wrong, but obviously and egregiously wrong, to the point where she should be categorically condemned. They seemed to be picturing a woman in a good, loving relationship that’s just stepping out because she wants an evening of fun and doesn’t give a shit about her husband. I’m sure that happens sometimes, but that is not the person I picture when I think of a cheating wife.

Most women do not want to cheat on their husbands. For it to get to the point where she’s actively propositioning me, something deeply wrong must already be going on. When I try to imagine the typical cheating wife, I picture someone in a desperate situation who thinks cheating is the best of a slate of bad options. Maybe she wants to be honest, but her husband is abusive and beats her when she brings it up. Maybe she’s stuck in a sexless marriage, but stays for the sake of children and is losing her mind without some kind of physical connection. Maybe she feels ugly and disgusting, and only stays with her husband because she’s convinced nobody else on Earth will ever want her, and a night of feeling sexy and wanted will restore enough of her self-worth to make necessary changes. Maybe she desperately wants out, but her life is wrapped up in a coercive subculture that strongly discourages leaving. Maybe her husband cheats all the time. Maybe she’s just incredibly lonely and craves a moment of genuine connection with another person, and can’t get that in her marriage.

Some followup polls suggest that people are much more supportive of breaking promises when circumstances suggest the promise was coerced or otherwise not fully voluntary. People were almost universally supportive of me secretly driving a former child bride to visit her sister in defiance of a marital agreement, and (in a Jacob Falkovich poll), supportive of a woman having sex with a closeted lesbian in defiance of a promise to her parents.

My impression is that the modal cheating wife is not someone in an otherwise happy and functional marriage who just want to get her rocks off. Research on this question is mixed, with most studies finding infidelity is linked to low marital satisfaction, but one survey of Ashley Madison users finding that

affairs were not primarily motivated by poor dyadic/marital relationships, their affairs did not seem to have a strong negative impact on their relationships, and personal ethics did not play a strong role in people's feelings about their affairs.

None of these studies seem particularly well done (the first one is just a survey asking people if they’re likely to cheat; the second one surveys Ashley Madison users, which is inherently suspect and subject to huge sampling bias), so I’d be interested in seeing more data about this. Anecdotally, the stories I’ve heard about cheating, especially by women, reflect what I’ve written above, but I’m very open to changing my mind if there is better data.

People value sex and intimacy much less than I do

As the charity example showed, most people will support assisting/enabling a wife to break a promise to her husband if it’s for a good cause. I’m sure a lot of the difference is that people think breaking the “no charity” promise is likely to cause less harm than sexual infidelity, but some commenters confirmed that the difference to them was that in the charity example, unlike the infidelity example, good is being done to offset the badness of the dishonesty.

I ran a few followup polls to see how people felt about different situations. People seemed very comfortable with me giving chocolate to a wife who has an agreement with her husband not to eat it, whether it’s part of a BDSM dynamic or not, or being alone in a room with a woman who told her husband she wouldn’t do that. They were also very supportive of me taking a divorce client in secret, even if it would absolutely crush her husband and tear apart her family

So far, these differences are consistent with either the idea that sex is worth little or that sexual infidelity causes greater harm than other broken commitments. So I asked a couple of other questions directly involving sexual infidelity. Supermajorities were comfortable with me selling condoms to a man who intended to use them to cheat on his wife and, in what I found to be the most interesting result, a sex worker taking a monogamously married client.

I find this result somewhat baffling. This suggest that in my original hypothetical, 2/3 of people would think I’m morally in the clear if I said “I’ll do it, but only if you pay me.” As far as I can tell, the functional difference between the two situations is that in the OP I’m getting “paid” in sex and the sex worker is getting paid in money. It’s very hard for me to see how the latter is better than the former.¹ If anything, hiring a sex worker is worse because it’s not only cheating, it’s secretly spending family money!

My only explanation for this is that about 1/3 of people think enabling cheating is ok for pleasure, 1/3 think it’s not ok regardless, and 1/3 think it’s ok to do for money, but not for pleasure. To those people, I say this:

An evening of intimacy is a precious and singular experience. While not every experience goes well, the right one can be transcendent and life-changing. Even if it doesn’t lead anywhere, it can be a treasured memory that all parties keep for the rest of their lives. One of the saddest parts of this discussion for me is hearing people talk about sex as if it’s tawdry and cheap, and results only in paltry physical gratification. I see immense value in novel sexual experiences, and I think a lot of the disagreement here is that people don’t see giving up that opportunity as much of price, whereas I see it as far more valuable than $1,000 to charity or whatever a typical sex worker is getting paid. It can be truly priceless.

People see a huge difference between cheating and attempted cheating

People pointed out that what tends to happen when a person breaks a monogamous commitment is extensive heartbreak, families torn apart, and ruined lives.

There was an assumption from a lot of people that if a relationship ends, that’s tragic, and it would be much better if the couple stayed together. I was somewhat surprised by the number of comments which seemed to take that as an implicit premise. From my perspective, if a wife is actively attempting to secretly cheat on her husband, a breakup seems like a good outcome, regardless of whether she’s actually successful.

In my original 2012 post, I said

once the proposition has been made, the harm has already been done. By turning down the proposition, you're turning a cheater into merely an attempted cheater. Is that really any better? To my mind, it is not. When someone attempts to cheat, the betrayal has already occurred. By preventing the "actual" cheating, all you're doing is perpetuating the fraud that they are in a monogamous relationship. You're actually doing more harm to the relationship by turning down the cheater, because you're making it easier for both of them to pretend no betrayal actually happened. Chances are, unless you tell (more on that later), the other partner will never know about it, so most of the effect will be on the cheater. You're just making the cheater feel less guilty and less likely to come clean.

I still find that reasoning compelling. When a person tries to cheat, but fails, the partners are no longer in a monogamous relationship. From a consequentialist perspective, it’s far from obvious that the “attempted cheating” situation will turn out better than the actual cheating.

We’re LIVING in a SOCIETY

The most compelling argument was made by several people, but said best by @surlygopher:

I believe “high trust” societies have benefits & that we all have a shared duty to enact at ways to help nurture & maintain high trust societies & if anyone tries to undermine societal trust, we should say, “that’s bad, I don’t want a part of it.”

The argument, as I understand it, goes that, regardless of one’s personal ethics, homewrecking is taboo in our society, and breaking any taboo, especially if it predictably causes harm to someone, damages the social fabric. It causes people to trust their fellow community members less, which wears away at all the benefits of a high-trust society. If I go around sleeping with married women, monogamous people will not just distrust me, but will have less trust in general, and start seeing everyone as a potential threat.

I find this argument very compelling, and I think it’s a good and sensible reason to refuse an invitation to enable cheating. My problem with it is that it’s a fully general argument against ever trying to change things. Lots of different societies have had taboos that we now rightly consider to be fine. Just in the US, things that were previously considered taboo society-wide included being gay, interracial marriage, hiring the Irish, getting divorced, playing that new-fangled rock & roll music, men with long hair, women wearing pants, premarital sex, and like a million other things that we now consider somewhere between fine and actively good. At various points in history, people could (and very often did!) reasonably make the argument that doing any of those things damaged the social fabric and contributed to a low-trust society.

The way to thread the needle, I think, is to Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness. The way I interpret this is to advocate for the social rules to change, but to be nice and follow them until enough people agree to change the rule. When it comes to enabling cheating, that means I will defend the practice, but not participate in it myself, at least until/unless the wider culture becomes more tolerant of it.

1. Though see this tweet from Agnes Callard, which I found fascinating. Apparently in her culture, paying for something absolves the seller of any responsibility for the consequences of giving it