| | So many of the comments on this thread only dealt with the first two paragraphs. The problem was, the first two paragraphs were supposed to be a lesson in what not to focus on. The point of the article was that you shouldn't put yourself into these bad situations in the first place. Rand warned against lifeboat scenarios in ethics. Ethics is supposed to be primarily concerned with living a normal life. This bad marriage example is a lifeboat scenario, and is distracting from the real lesson in ethics. It might be more fun to argue over and think about, but its lessons are not generalizable.
Let me provide another such example. Imagine you've murdered some people. The police know it's you, and they're looking for you. Now you find that you can't get a job to acquire the food you need. You might need to kill or steal in order to get it, and you have to fight whenever someone recognizes you. Now, given rational self-interest as your moral standard, what should you do? Please don't answer! If rational self-interest was really your moral standard, you wouldn't have murdered the people in the first place. Once you have, you're screwed. There is no harmony of interests between you and others. There is only death and conflict.
The real lesson here is that you can really screw up your life to the point where you're not left with any good choices. You can make a mistake that you just can't fix. If you violate someone's trust, there's no guarantee that they'll ever trust you. If you hurt someone, they may not want anything to do with you. If you screw up in life, there will be consequences.
Those who think morality is a game you play by applying abstract rules to stupid situations may get a kick out of all of this. But it's not for me, and it's not the point.
Now let me respond to some of the specific posts.
Thanks to everyone who liked it, and especially those who liked it for more than just the first two paragraphs.
Lance, I agree that the relationship was screwed up before the affair.
Luke, my thinking about things seems to be so different from your own, it's hard to communicate it. The first paragraph in your Post 6 is easy. Hank and Dagny were being dishonest. Hank was more guilty, since he cared if they got caught, whereas Dagny didn't. So Hank lived in fear of getting caught, spent time and energy sneaking around, etc. One of the lessons he learns towards the end was how incredibly stupid he was to be dishonest about it. Ultimately, it was used against him many times. This is in line with the fact that Hank was screwed up in a lot of ways, and he slowly understood the problems as the book progressed.
The second paragraph is where we have problems. You talk about blaming the wife for not living up to her end of the marriage contract, or at least the possibility of it. That's alien to my way of thinking about it. A relationship isn't supposed to be about duties and owing good behavior to the other person. It's supposed to be that both sides do it because they want to. That's just one more problem with marriage...it turns choices into obligations, and values into duties.
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