senordesol said:
Because I don't see anything wrong with it. I thought we'd already covered that.
So one person is doing evil and the other isn't? That don't pass the smell test.
Hardly evil, but yes, one side is doing something wrong and the other isn't.
Only one person in the affair is breaking their agreement, the other had no such agreement in the first place.
Imagine there's a group of writers writing a magazine, they sign a contract with a publishing company to publish the magazine.
Those writers then, before the contract is up, refuse to let the publishers carry on publishing the magazine and instead switch to an entirely different publisher.
Now the writers are liable to some extent, they'll owe damages to the original publisher for breaking the contract. The publisher they switched to, however, isn't guilty of a thing, they did nothing wrong, even if they knew the writers were breaking their contract.
Now you'll probably say that a relationship isn't the same a contract law. But I disagree, I see no real difference at all. If anything, breaking a contract is more often worse, as a broken relationship usually causes no more than emotional pain, while breaking a contract can cause someone's career to fail.
Ok, so you see no moral dilemma in assisting someone in breaking a promise; the result of which is likely to cause pain?
No. It's their promise to keep, not mine. As for doing an action that benefits myself but causes pain to a stranger, we all do that all the time. Have you never taken the last spot in a restaurant? Or the last item off a shop shelf?
Or, as someone said before, have you never attended a job interview?
I am not absolving the party in the relationship of responsibility, I have said before that they are, indeed, the *most* culpable. But knowingly doing your part to undermine a relationship for your own personal gain strikes you as a quite upstanding thing to do?
I never said it was upstanding, just that it wasn't wrong.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. She doesn't *get* the choice to treat me as a toy, I have too much respect for myself. It takes two to tango.
Fine, but that a selfish reason to not go after her, not a moral one.
If she chooses to betray her partner, that is her choice but it does not mean I have to be party to it.
As I say, often it's not that simple. What if she's in an abusive relationship and what she needs is an out? No amount of friends will help, as she won't admit anything. What she needs is someone else who looks like they want her in the same way so she can realise there is another option. But you refuse to even let her know you want her, and thereby refuse to give her a way out.
That doesn't seem very moral to me.
It is not my duty to sort out her relationship troubles by means of undermining them.
I never said it was, but it's not your duty to not either.
You shouldn't be offering yourself to every girl out there "just in case", but neither should you be refusing to try when you do find someone you want simply for the sake of a stranger. You don't know this stranger at all, he might not deserve the relationship he has. It isn't your judgement to make. It's hers. The only reasonable thing to do is to let her know how you feel, though words and actions, so she can make the choice for herself, fully informed.
Refusing to let people know how you feel "for their own good" is treating them like a child, not an adult.
If I knowingly and willingly facilitate immoral action resulting in pain and heartache (whether I know the person or not is irrelevant), I bear at least some portion of the responsibility.
But the action
isn't immoral. So that's moot.
I'm not saying that those who do so are buddies with Hitler, I'm saying it is not the right and noble thing to do.
I never said it was.
Most of your argument seems to be "This isn't good." while my argument is "This isn't bad."
Those two points of view are not incompatible.
