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Everyday Ethics
Would you ever hypothetically get involved with a married person? I dont mean anyone specific, just in the kind of what-would-you-do kind of way? What about a person who was divorced, but only because they'd got caught having an affair with someone else? By someone else, I mean someone other than you, because of course if they're having an affair with you then that answers the question. And I dont mean like a guy who says all the same old lines like, Im getting divorced after the holidays and my wife doesnt understand me and you make me feel ten years younger. What if the affair was long in the past? Either person is probably a dirtbag, because they both cheated on their spouses, although one of them has at least had a chance to grow and change. And while I acknowledge that people can grow and change, I also have to acknowledge that almost no one ever actually does.
What about a person who, when they were young and single, had an affair with someone who was married? That would be slightly better, I reckon, than the first two, at least in a college-ethics class kind of way where every moral or ethical decision is relative to something completely unrelated. I mean like you could say someone beat up grandmothers for their welfare checks, but at least they never killed anyone. Which, while maybe technically true, is also total crap. This guy who had an affair with a married woman, even though single himself at the time, obviously has no regard for marriage as an institute. Which is a very common expression, "marriage is an institute," but I don't know what it means.
I mean, I hear the word "institute" and I'm thinking either a school or a hospital, or just something with a great big building with some dead person's name on it. You dont say that anything else is an institute the same way you say it about marriage. If marriage was an institute, like, say, a building, I wonder what the building would look like and who it would be named after and what would they teach and where would it be located and who all would go there. I cant really speculate on all that right now though because it would all just sound bitter and angry. I'm not sure why.
Anyway....
What about a man who was divorced, but only because he'd got caught having an affair with someone else, but only because he knew with absolute certainty that his wife was having an affair with someone else first? I would think that person was less immoral as just immature. And in a way, a person who has an affair just to get revenge, obviously doesn't care about their spouse or the person they're having an affair with.
Which one of these do you think is the worst?
What about a woman who had an affair, got pregnant, had the baby, and told her husband it was his baby? That would be kind of weird, trying to justify that. I mean I'm assuming that the husband wouldn't obviously know right away that the child wasn't his. Like if I was Charlie Brown and I grew up and married Lucy Van Pelt, and then we had a kid who played the piano and was obsessed with classical music, I would probably go over and kick Schroeder's ass.
Or if, say, Spider-Man always seemed to be pulling your wife from burning buildings. And maybe you're getting a little suspicious, like, there are millions of people in the city and why does Spider-Man always seem to know where my wife is? And why is she always in these burning buildings anyway (unless she was a firefighter)? And then you have a kid who your wife absolutely swears is yours, but then the kid starts climbing the walls and crushing bricks with his hands. That would be kind of obvious.
You couldn't go kick Spider-Man's ass, either. And you couldn't go find one of his arch-enemies and make a deal to trap Spider-Man, either. Because first of all, whatever enemy you went to would probably be insane and kill you just for the hell of it, but also you would have to consider the hundreds of people that Spider-Man saves every day who will now be dying all over the place just because you got pissed that he did it with your wife.
On the other hand, who wants to have to raise and discipline a two or three year old kid who can throw you across the room? It's hard enough raising and disciplining a normal kid who has no super-powers, just imagine one who could toss you around. Then again, maybe a Spider-Baby would behave himself better because he would have that Spider-sense to warn him of danger, like "When I go to draw on this wall with a crayon, my Spider-Sense went wild! Here comes dad!"
On the other hand, you would kind of have Spider-Man in your back pocket, like for blackmail and stuff...which is marginally better, I would think, than actually having to be Spider-Man, because, face it, he is such a total doofwad loser. Like he had all these powers and couldn't find a better job than that? Jeez, with all those powers, the guy could be a window washer and become a millionaire (as long as he got paid by the window).
It's a good thing that super-heroes aren't real, because then we would all have to grapple with these ethical dilemmas.
So, we've examined extra-marital affairs from the perspectives of:
- The married person who has an affair with a non-married person,
- The divorced person who got divorced because they had an extra-marital affair,
- The single person who had an affair with a married person,
- The divorced person who got divorced because they had an extra-marital affair but only because they knew with absolute certainty that their spouse was having an affair first, and
- The person who has an affair with Spider-Man
What's interesting to me is that, when someone has an affair and you ask them about it, they always always always say the same thing. They say "It wasn't like that".
"You had an affair?"
"Yeah, but it wasn't like that."
They say it, of course, knowing what you're thinking. You're thinking, You slept with someone who was married to someone else or You slept with someone while you were married to someone else, because that's just what an affair is, apart from whatever moral judgment we might make about it. Then they say "It wasn't like that." It wasn't like you slept with them? It wasn't like they were married? I'm not sure what this means. They say it wasn't like "that," meaning cheap motels and showers in the afternoon to get the smell of her perfume off you so that your wife doesnt find out and hiding receipts and phone bills; what it was like was moonlight and roses and fireworks like that time Bobby Brady kissed special guest star Melissa Sue Anderson on The Brady Bunch. I will leave it to your good judgement as to how much crap this actually is.
Anyway, I don't know why all this occured to me today, but anyway there it is. Have a nice day.
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