If You Knew You'd Never Be Caught

Opening

Perfect opportunity.

Nobody will ever know.

No messages. No mutual friends. No pregnancy. No infection. No suspicious receipt. No colleague who gets drunk at Christmas and says something catastrophic.

Your partner will never discover it.

Would you cheat?

It's an artificial question, obviously. Real affairs have consequences and secrets have a habit of becoming less secret than advertised.

So make the thought experiment impossible.

You cannot be caught.

Now what?

The idea

A lot of moral behaviour comes with practical incentives.

Don't steal because you might go to prison. Don't lie because you might be found out. Don't cheat because you might lose your marriage, your home, time with your children and the respect of people whose respect matters to you.

Those are excellent reasons not to do stupid things.

But remove them and another kind of reason has to do the work.

Perhaps you wouldn't cheat because you love your partner and the act itself would feel like a betrayal, even if she never experienced the betrayal directly.

Perhaps the promise matters because you made it, not because somebody is checking whether you keep it.

Perhaps you simply don't want to become the man who knows he did it.

That last possibility is interesting.

If nobody else can ever know, there is still one witness left.

You.

Character is an unfashionably grand word for what is often a collection of tiny private decisions. Most of them will never become stories. Nobody applauds you for the affair you didn't have. There is no medal for closing the hotel-room door and going downstairs.

Which may be precisely why the thought experiment works.

It removes reputation.

What's left?

What changes when you look at it this way

There is a complication.

Perhaps somebody answers yes.

If the partner can never know and can never be harmed, what exactly is wrong with it?

That question deserves more than outrage. It forces you to decide whether fidelity is valuable only because infidelity produces consequences, or whether fidelity has value inside the person making the promise.

A strict consequentialist could construct an immaculate secret affair with no external damage.

Human relationships are not usually lived as immaculate thought experiments.

Promises alter what actions mean. A wedding ring does not physically prevent sex with another person. It represents something somebody voluntarily said they would do.

So the question becomes less about sex than integrity.

Do your commitments exist when nobody can verify them?

Are you faithful to your partner, to your promise, to your idea of yourself, or to some mixture of all three?

There is no need for a sermon.

Just keep the impossible guarantee in place.

Nobody will know.

Nobody except you.