Best reply ha ha
I LOL-ed as well.
Well played, TF!
lxwarr, thank you for what I assume is a serious reply. I still do not fully understand though. Facilitating the poor behavior of others also falls under someone’s personal responsibility. Let’s say I sell guns to African warlords knowing they will shoot people. Certainly, this violence is a symptom of political instability or other problems in the region, and the warlords would be more responsible for this violence than me. However, by my personal evaluation, I would still be at least partly responsible for what my arms dealing enabled.
Maybe we can introduce more gray area by saying bchad, iteracom and I are competing arms dealers. If I refused to do business with the warlord, he would just buy the same guns from bchad or iteracom. This removes the causal effect of my actions. So, the question then becomes: do I have implicit moral responsibility to not participate in perverse systems?
Comparing this to adultery: the scenario is materially different depending on whether 1) The spouse is a slut and would sleep with people even if you abstained, or 2) The spouse only wants to have sex with you. I could understand how someone might say 2) is morally wrong but 1) is not. Based on my personal values, both are wrong; we are all responsible for minute contributions to greater harm. However, for emphasis, that is just my opinion.
Since you asked, yes, my online and offline personalities are very similar.
I think its important to note there were emails and an ongoing affair. That’s substantially different than a passionate encounter. Personally I’m not morally ok with either, but the OP saying he had no control over the situation is pure BS. I could buy that if it was a one off, but it wasn’t as evidenced by his earlier posts.
I know the TS from a different forum. He told a similar story and then got booted after sending really creepy PMs to OP.
Also posted a pic of his doorknob cock
Was he hung like a lightswitch?
Yeah, like my uncle Frank’s lightswitch, here:
What does TS stand for? I thought it meant thread starter but that wouldnt make sense
Could it have been justifiable If OP new that the husband was physically abusive and was an adulterer himself?
Depends who they are, who they are fighting, what they are fighting for and how much they are paying. Assuming there is demand for my weapons somewhere else I think I would take some of what I mentioned into account. Can’t really comment though as I have no experience selling weapons.
Good point. But if the husband is abusive, it may not be morally bad, but still is likely to be bad judgement.
There are degrees of moral culpability. If the husband is abusive and an adulterer, it’s clearly not as bad as if he is devoted and faithful, but the right thing is to encourage her to get out of the situation, not go for a test drive in her tunnel of love.
Based on earlier responses, it is clear that the “eye for an eye” philosophy is generally embraced on AF. If so, then cheating on an abusive or adulterous husband would be less morally wrong, or might even be morally positive if you believe that punitive actions ultimately promote moral behavior.
However, this exceeds the scope of the original scenario. We have no reason to believe that OP’s former boss was amoral. Furthermore, the question, which has mostly been unanswered, in my later response was whether it is amoral to simply facilitate actions that arise from the amoral intentions of others.
you just have to pay for the consequences…
that’s why people should not cheat and commit adultery.
no “best of luck” for you…
While I agree with your morality vicerally, these situations are all far too simplistic. If you know that the government kills children in warzones and you pay taxes which support the military, then you are directly contributing to the murder of children. You should move to a country that doesn’t do these things or you should stop paying taxes and face the consequences.
You may say that it is different since you are compelled to pay taxes, or that the taxes do some good. If you are compelled to murder personnally in a totalitarian regime, are you absolved of moral responsibility? True, with taxes in the US you are not committing the act personnally, but the risk you assume by not paying taxes in support of child killing is also much less than in Soviet Russia.
In real life, situations are never as cut and dry as we make them out to be when talking about philosophical morality, just like when we try to use economics to predict behavior.
Yes it exceeds the original scope of work.
I did not say that we can or should completely abstain from amoral activity. This would be virtually impossible. In addition, an action’s morality should be determined based on its total effect. By allowing the existence of the US government, we allow it to commit certain acts with negative effects. However, this does not mean that we should abolish the USA; the loss of US contributions to global culture an commerce would be overwhelmingly negative.
Indeed, the real world applications of morality are often complicated to discuss and difficult to comprehend. For this reason, it is useful to analyze the concept of morality based on a simpler models: for instance, the choice of whether or not to profit from the actions of a warlord. As you surely know, simplified models are widely used in social sciences, like economics, to explain concepts which are not always completely realistic, but can still help explain things in the real world.
The OP’s scenario is another conveniently simple example given the lack of extraneous variables. If we were to add unstated factors, such as the husband’s infidelity, psychological trauma, impaired judgment due to alcohol, or others, the scenario would become more complicated. OP does not provide this additional information though.
reminds me of a scenario I heard back in school:
There is a runaway train. On the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are too far to rescue them, but you are standing next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. Unfortunately, you notice that there is one person on the side track.
What do you do?
(1) Decide not to be involved, and the trolley continues forward and kills the five people on the main track.
(2) Get involved, pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it kills the innocent person there.
Right, like if the husband got off on cuckold fantasies it would be fine. Alas, OP does not provide this info. Here is a scenario: if you knowingly waste somebody’s time discussing ultimately meaningless morality scenarios is that immoral? What if they want to waste some time?
@Itera: their is no “right” answer, but I would pull the lever.
No, the emails were after the event. You do not make love to a woman and assume it never happened, do you?
Or I would have pretended nothing happened?
Of course it didn’t happen this way, it is naive to think so - I can be graphic and explain in details.