I think that ethics fall out of the equation when those are the only two choices. In reality, there is a third choice: stick to all your vows, and live a life where you are emotionally unfulfilled. That third choice is the only one that truly satisfies modern ethical standards: you made a vow of lifelong faithfulness, and the ethical thing to do is to stick with it.
Given that framework, of course, it is difficult to justify marriage at all. How could someone possibly know that they will always love another person, especially in light of the large proportion of people who ultimately find that the feelings they had at the beginning of their marriage fade over time?
"Even if you systematically lie to them the entire time?"
Yes, if the situation was that the emotions that led to the marriage had started to fade. The options become:
Get a divorce or separate, because the marriage is a sham anyway, and have your 10 year old child get caught in the middle of a divorce
Do not get a divorce or separate, continue raising your children together, and possibly have an affair to satisfy your emotional needs. When your children are all grown up and living on their own, reconsider divorce or separation.
In option 1, you are forcing children who are not mature enough to understand why the divorce/separation happened to cope with the situation. In option 2, you are waiting until your children are mature enough. Which one of these options seems more sensible? Which one of these options is the least harmful?
"You're still saying you should lie and deceive for personal convenience. I'm not debating that it would be easier to set aside moral standards and lie like a weasel. As I understand it, you're posing a situation where someone hides their infidelity, knowing they would be divorced, and does it so that they won't be divorced; for their mutual good? If they know that their partner would divorce them, then it's not for the good of the family that they're hiding it."
What I said is that this is what happens. When the moral options are spending the rest of your life emotionally unfulfilled or possibly losing the ability to financially support yourself, setting some morals aside starts to look pretty damned good.
The real problem is that marriage does not properly encapsulate human emotion. It is not at all clear that humans are monogamous, nor is it even clear that humans can only feel emotions for one person at a time. Marriage is rigid, but the emotions that it is supposedly based on are not at all. The emotions that two people have are not necessarily synchronized -- one person may feel devotion to the marriage long after the other person does not. Some people develop their own solutions, like open relationships (the rules of which are widely varied), but that is not always something that people are willing to agree to.
I am not saying that it is morally right or morally acceptable for people to lie to their spouses. The original question was why would someone not just seek a divorce -- and the answer is that a divorce is not just a matter of ending the emotional aspects of a marriage, but also various financial and legal aspects.
Actually, the men in Genesis frequently took on concubines. You need to look at Exodus and Leviticus for the laws pertaining to adultery, which incidentally do not explicitly forbid concubines. Frankly, the definition of adultery in the bible remains unclear, as do most other things -- likely because the bible was not originally a single book, nor did it come from a single source.
"So it's better if the kid realizes at 16 that one of his parents systematically deceived him and his other parent for years?"
Maybe you missed the "perhaps after they have moved out" part. It is a lot less damaging for your offspring if you wait until they are no longer dependent on you for food and shelter to get divorced.
"If you stick with the marriage for financial reasons, but reasonably suspect that your partner would divorce you if they knew that you were cheating, aren't you just doing it for your own sake?"
Yes, you pretty much are. The financial aspect of marriage is not the rosy picture that the media paints for all of us, but it is an important factor, especially when someone is in a situation where their marriage might end. Perhaps it is not the moral high ground -- certainly not with the deceit involved -- but it is a relevant issue for a lot of people, and it is an issue that may be orthogonal to emotions. Someone presented with three choices, staying faithful to their marriage despite faded emotions, getting a divorce and possibly losing their entire financial base, or staying married and finding emotional fulfillment in an extramarital affair may simply set the moral standards aside, have an affair, and try not to get caught. The affair may even be a temporary thing, a phase which eventually comes to an end at which point the person returns to their devotion to their marriage (this does happen) -- would it be better for those people to get divorced to?
"You mean, emotionally other than growing up watching their parents be part of a loveless relationship filled with lies and deceit?"
Plenty of people manage to hide that sort of thing from their children, that is really nothing new. It might come out eventually, when the children are older (perhaps after they have moved out), but there is no reason for a 10 year old to know that his parents' relationship is falling apart.
"So money is more important than ethics? You sound ripe for a CEO of a major corporation. You'll go quite far!"
It is somehow more ethical to end a marriage, after taking a vow to stay with your spouse until death? Yes, incidentally, money is an important factor for someone who is considering anything related to marriage. This may come as a shock to you, but marriage is primarily a legal proceeding, with a lot of financial ramifications.
Actually, marriage has always been a legal matter; the only reason religion ever became involved is that at one time, religion was the way laws were defined. Marriage is nothing more than a way to codify family units into the law, thus simplifying things like inheritance, access to land and property, and so forth.
As for the issue of cheating, well, keep in mind that humans are not known to be naturally monogamous. People can start out a marriage with strong feelings of love and devotion, but things change. Sometimes an affair can be a temporary thing, just a couple of weeks, and then the devotion to the marriage takes over again. Sometimes the feelings that were so strong at the beginning of a marriage can fade, and sometimes only for one of the people involved. Leaving the marriage behind is not necessarily the best answer in all situations, especially in situations involving children.
I can think of a few reasons. Maybe there are children involved, and the divorce would harm the children emotionally or possibly deny one parent access to their children. Maybe there is a risk of alimony payments. Maybe there is a risk of losing a house, car, or other very valuable property.
Divorce is not like breaking up with a boyfriend/girlfriend. It is a legal process with legal and financial ramifications.
Well if you are carrying on an adulterous affair, I would assume that you would be taking measures to ensure that other people do not see you with your lover. Granted, there are a lot of idiots out there who will do things like go on a date with their lover in the same town where all their friends and family (incl. in-laws) live, and I am going to guess that those same idiots are the ones who get caught using Facebook.
As a rule though, documenting infidelity anywhere is just plain stupid, whether we're talking a bunch of emails, a compromising video, or a credit card charge at a hotel. Facebook is no different.
Well unless you have in-person contact with your lover in your day to day life, that can be a little hard -- how else will you arrange meetings and whatnot? The communication will need to happen at some point.
If I were in such a situation, I would immediately look at steganography. Cryptography is a good first try, but the problem is that it reveals who you were communicating with, which is incriminating in and of itself. Thus, steganography, possibly using some public photo sharing service (ironically, Facebook could serve the purpose here). The messages would have to be short, but that is fine for arranging a meeting or sending a love note.
Not that I really see myself being in such a situation.
Seriously, for centuries, people carrying on secret affairs would go to great lengths to maintain their secrecy. The Kama Sutra even recommends that cryptography be used, and provides a cipher, to help protect messages sent between lovers. What kind of idiot would post anything related to an adulterous affair anywhere on Facebook?
Which effectively means, don't post anything on the Internet. You never know when something that seems innocent might some day be something you would have preferred to keep private.
This is the point at which you leave your girlfriend -- if she can make such massively illogical statements, which are tangentially related (at best) to what you said, you are better off single.
Other agencies such as NSA can probably crack that encryption with ease if not instantaneously.
Doubtful, we are not talking about a cipher that was created by some guy in his spare time -- this is a cipher that has been tested by numerous experts and cryptology researchers around the world. Unless the NSA has some secret way to break the code, which is possible but they probably would not want to let everyone know about over something like this, I doubt that they could crack it.
They say IBM has double standards as if this were supposed to be shocking. Microsoft has its open source lab, Apple has made threats against open source projects while contributing to other projects, Mozilla and Red Hat leverage their trademarks, etc. Corporations do whatever is profitable, they are not some bastion of morality, so why should we be shocked that IBM fights open source projects while pushing other open source projects?
"those "fancy effects" led to the possibility of google docs, web-based photoshop elements replacements, "
Neither of which I use -- there are plenty of desktop applications, including no-cost applications, which are just fine for that and generally do more.
"online banking that doesn't take weeks to navigate"
I have never had any trouble with online banking, and I doubt it is because I am some kind of super-leet hacker.
"even legal free and low-cost on-demand video programming"
Which I saw and used prior to the existence of Youtube and similar websites.
"online classes"
Which I have seen done just fine without any Javascript
"It also allowed for the building of "community" web sites that made the whole world a lot smaller, connecting people from nearly every nation."
You know, part of the problem here is that you are failing to separate the implementation of an idea from the idea itself. Really, Javascript is only necessary to implement half the things you said on the web, and the web is not necessary to implement any of the things you said. None of what you said is even unique to the web.
Hey, you can make fun of me all you want, and claim that I am stuck in the 90s, but there is really nothing that Javascript heavy websites bring to the table except for fancy effects in web browsers.
It depends on the granularity of the switch. If the switch could only kill the whole Internet, or at least the portion of the Internet in the USA, then it would take a lot before a politician tried to use it to silence opponents. But if the switch could knock out, say, just one subnet, or just one link, or just one server...now suddenly it becomes possible to shut down political opponents, and the possibility is not all that far fetched. The FBI has repeatedly sent undercover agents to anti-war groups, socialist groups, etc.; how many people would actually listen if an anti-war group accused the government of shutting down their website?
"For example, I don't know if Google Maps works on IE6 but I wouldn't be surprised that, for something of that complexity, most of the client-side code would need to be written twice - once for the standards and once for IE."
As it turns out, Google provides a non-Javascript version of Google maps, on which all the processing is done server side and then returned to the client. So, click on "+" (which is just hyperlink text -- no CSS) and a new page loads with a zoomed in map, and likewise for the other features.
Hey, why not instead encourage people who decided to connect systems that control critical infrastructure to the public Internet to practice stronger security? Or, perhaps to not connect a critical system to a public computer network?
Slashdot Mirror
I think that ethics fall out of the equation when those are the only two choices. In reality, there is a third choice: stick to all your vows, and live a life where you are emotionally unfulfilled. That third choice is the only one that truly satisfies modern ethical standards: you made a vow of lifelong faithfulness, and the ethical thing to do is to stick with it.
Given that framework, of course, it is difficult to justify marriage at all. How could someone possibly know that they will always love another person, especially in light of the large proportion of people who ultimately find that the feelings they had at the beginning of their marriage fade over time?
Yes, if the situation was that the emotions that led to the marriage had started to fade. The options become:
In option 1, you are forcing children who are not mature enough to understand why the divorce/separation happened to cope with the situation. In option 2, you are waiting until your children are mature enough. Which one of these options seems more sensible? Which one of these options is the least harmful?
"You're still saying you should lie and deceive for personal convenience. I'm not debating that it would be easier to set aside moral standards and lie like a weasel. As I understand it, you're posing a situation where someone hides their infidelity, knowing they would be divorced, and does it so that they won't be divorced; for their mutual good? If they know that their partner would divorce them, then it's not for the good of the family that they're hiding it."
What I said is that this is what happens. When the moral options are spending the rest of your life emotionally unfulfilled or possibly losing the ability to financially support yourself, setting some morals aside starts to look pretty damned good.
The real problem is that marriage does not properly encapsulate human emotion. It is not at all clear that humans are monogamous, nor is it even clear that humans can only feel emotions for one person at a time. Marriage is rigid, but the emotions that it is supposedly based on are not at all. The emotions that two people have are not necessarily synchronized -- one person may feel devotion to the marriage long after the other person does not. Some people develop their own solutions, like open relationships (the rules of which are widely varied), but that is not always something that people are willing to agree to.
I am not saying that it is morally right or morally acceptable for people to lie to their spouses. The original question was why would someone not just seek a divorce -- and the answer is that a divorce is not just a matter of ending the emotional aspects of a marriage, but also various financial and legal aspects.
Actually, the men in Genesis frequently took on concubines. You need to look at Exodus and Leviticus for the laws pertaining to adultery, which incidentally do not explicitly forbid concubines. Frankly, the definition of adultery in the bible remains unclear, as do most other things -- likely because the bible was not originally a single book, nor did it come from a single source.
Simpler solution: don't use Facebook at all.
"So it's better if the kid realizes at 16 that one of his parents systematically deceived him and his other parent for years?"
Maybe you missed the "perhaps after they have moved out" part. It is a lot less damaging for your offspring if you wait until they are no longer dependent on you for food and shelter to get divorced.
"If you stick with the marriage for financial reasons, but reasonably suspect that your partner would divorce you if they knew that you were cheating, aren't you just doing it for your own sake?"
Yes, you pretty much are. The financial aspect of marriage is not the rosy picture that the media paints for all of us, but it is an important factor, especially when someone is in a situation where their marriage might end. Perhaps it is not the moral high ground -- certainly not with the deceit involved -- but it is a relevant issue for a lot of people, and it is an issue that may be orthogonal to emotions. Someone presented with three choices, staying faithful to their marriage despite faded emotions, getting a divorce and possibly losing their entire financial base, or staying married and finding emotional fulfillment in an extramarital affair may simply set the moral standards aside, have an affair, and try not to get caught. The affair may even be a temporary thing, a phase which eventually comes to an end at which point the person returns to their devotion to their marriage (this does happen) -- would it be better for those people to get divorced to?
"For the experts, or those with much to lose, there are lots of other options, but unless your spouse is a geek, they're overkill."
It is not the spouse that I would worry about -- it is the people the spouse may hire to go looking around.
"You mean, emotionally other than growing up watching their parents be part of a loveless relationship filled with lies and deceit?"
Plenty of people manage to hide that sort of thing from their children, that is really nothing new. It might come out eventually, when the children are older (perhaps after they have moved out), but there is no reason for a 10 year old to know that his parents' relationship is falling apart.
"So money is more important than ethics? You sound ripe for a CEO of a major corporation. You'll go quite far!"
It is somehow more ethical to end a marriage, after taking a vow to stay with your spouse until death? Yes, incidentally, money is an important factor for someone who is considering anything related to marriage. This may come as a shock to you, but marriage is primarily a legal proceeding, with a lot of financial ramifications.
Actually, marriage has always been a legal matter; the only reason religion ever became involved is that at one time, religion was the way laws were defined. Marriage is nothing more than a way to codify family units into the law, thus simplifying things like inheritance, access to land and property, and so forth.
As for the issue of cheating, well, keep in mind that humans are not known to be naturally monogamous. People can start out a marriage with strong feelings of love and devotion, but things change. Sometimes an affair can be a temporary thing, just a couple of weeks, and then the devotion to the marriage takes over again. Sometimes the feelings that were so strong at the beginning of a marriage can fade, and sometimes only for one of the people involved. Leaving the marriage behind is not necessarily the best answer in all situations, especially in situations involving children.
Things are not black and white.
"Why wouldn't they get a divorce first?"
I can think of a few reasons. Maybe there are children involved, and the divorce would harm the children emotionally or possibly deny one parent access to their children. Maybe there is a risk of alimony payments. Maybe there is a risk of losing a house, car, or other very valuable property.
Divorce is not like breaking up with a boyfriend/girlfriend. It is a legal process with legal and financial ramifications.
Well if you are carrying on an adulterous affair, I would assume that you would be taking measures to ensure that other people do not see you with your lover. Granted, there are a lot of idiots out there who will do things like go on a date with their lover in the same town where all their friends and family (incl. in-laws) live, and I am going to guess that those same idiots are the ones who get caught using Facebook.
As a rule though, documenting infidelity anywhere is just plain stupid, whether we're talking a bunch of emails, a compromising video, or a credit card charge at a hotel. Facebook is no different.
Well unless you have in-person contact with your lover in your day to day life, that can be a little hard -- how else will you arrange meetings and whatnot? The communication will need to happen at some point.
If I were in such a situation, I would immediately look at steganography. Cryptography is a good first try, but the problem is that it reveals who you were communicating with, which is incriminating in and of itself. Thus, steganography, possibly using some public photo sharing service (ironically, Facebook could serve the purpose here). The messages would have to be short, but that is fine for arranging a meeting or sending a love note.
Not that I really see myself being in such a situation.
Seriously, for centuries, people carrying on secret affairs would go to great lengths to maintain their secrecy. The Kama Sutra even recommends that cryptography be used, and provides a cipher, to help protect messages sent between lovers. What kind of idiot would post anything related to an adulterous affair anywhere on Facebook?
Which effectively means, don't post anything on the Internet. You never know when something that seems innocent might some day be something you would have preferred to keep private.
There is a reason that I cruise for girls in the math department at my university.
"What's wrong with my ass?"
This is the point at which you leave your girlfriend -- if she can make such massively illogical statements, which are tangentially related (at best) to what you said, you are better off single.
Other agencies such as NSA can probably crack that encryption with ease if not instantaneously.
Doubtful, we are not talking about a cipher that was created by some guy in his spare time -- this is a cipher that has been tested by numerous experts and cryptology researchers around the world. Unless the NSA has some secret way to break the code, which is possible but they probably would not want to let everyone know about over something like this, I doubt that they could crack it.
They say IBM has double standards as if this were supposed to be shocking. Microsoft has its open source lab, Apple has made threats against open source projects while contributing to other projects, Mozilla and Red Hat leverage their trademarks, etc. Corporations do whatever is profitable, they are not some bastion of morality, so why should we be shocked that IBM fights open source projects while pushing other open source projects?
What are these meters you speak of? I only know of the yard.
Our customers are idiots and will never realize they are paying for less, even with the occasional journalist who pushes it in their face.
"those "fancy effects" led to the possibility of google docs, web-based photoshop elements replacements, "
Neither of which I use -- there are plenty of desktop applications, including no-cost applications, which are just fine for that and generally do more.
"online banking that doesn't take weeks to navigate"
I have never had any trouble with online banking, and I doubt it is because I am some kind of super-leet hacker.
"even legal free and low-cost on-demand video programming"
Which I saw and used prior to the existence of Youtube and similar websites.
"online classes"
Which I have seen done just fine without any Javascript
"It also allowed for the building of "community" web sites that made the whole world a lot smaller, connecting people from nearly every nation."
Hm... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidonet
You know, part of the problem here is that you are failing to separate the implementation of an idea from the idea itself. Really, Javascript is only necessary to implement half the things you said on the web, and the web is not necessary to implement any of the things you said. None of what you said is even unique to the web.
Hey, you can make fun of me all you want, and claim that I am stuck in the 90s, but there is really nothing that Javascript heavy websites bring to the table except for fancy effects in web browsers.
It depends on the granularity of the switch. If the switch could only kill the whole Internet, or at least the portion of the Internet in the USA, then it would take a lot before a politician tried to use it to silence opponents. But if the switch could knock out, say, just one subnet, or just one link, or just one server...now suddenly it becomes possible to shut down political opponents, and the possibility is not all that far fetched. The FBI has repeatedly sent undercover agents to anti-war groups, socialist groups, etc.; how many people would actually listen if an anti-war group accused the government of shutting down their website?
"For example, I don't know if Google Maps works on IE6 but I wouldn't be surprised that, for something of that complexity, most of the client-side code would need to be written twice - once for the standards and once for IE."
As it turns out, Google provides a non-Javascript version of Google maps, on which all the processing is done server side and then returned to the client. So, click on "+" (which is just hyperlink text -- no CSS) and a new page loads with a zoomed in map, and likewise for the other features.
Hey, why not instead encourage people who decided to connect systems that control critical infrastructure to the public Internet to practice stronger security? Or, perhaps to not connect a critical system to a public computer network?
Also, companies like Apple and Microsoft aren't actually conspiring against open source,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents