In a debate on the Internet about divorce, someone wrote that only an idiot or sociopath will be building his happiness on someone else’s misery.
By that standard he is an idiot and a sociopath because he works in a capitalist economy, where he is competing against someone else and builds his success on their misery.
What are the correct parameters here? There needs to be a vigorous debate on this matter in many places. Much here is at stake. I particularly would like hypocrisy to be addressed. One man goes to jail for “beating up [his] wife’s fist with [his] face”; another man breaks his wife’s skull so badly that she needs 40 stitches and walks away with the child. One man goes to jail for a year and loses everything he has for getting drunk and chatting up a 16-year-old; another man rapes his daughter repeatedly since she is 4 and keeps both his freedom and his custody over the kid. The high school kid who beats up other kids and impregnates his female classmate is a stud; the high school kid who takes school seriously is a “know-it-all” and “thinks he’s better than everyone else.”
Of course wrong things get done all the time. Man-woman relationships are just one of the many things that can go wrong. So is high school. So is business. So is society. It is important to anticipat4e what can go wrong in any given situation and put in the correct antidotes to the problem.
It is also important to look at degrees of the wrongdoing. I once heard someone comparing a woman who was mildly promiscuous to Adolf Hitler because she did not fully follow conservative sexual morality. Meanwhile much greater violation – incest – was gone unredressed by him. Abuses done in the name of ethics give ethics a bad name and leads many sincere people to reject it. They don’t reject it because they are evil. They reject it because it is hypocritical. A huge social problem gets created as people who are sincere reject ethics because they identify ethics with the bullying and mean-spirited way in which it is practiced. And we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation in which the most genuine people reject conventional morality while the platform of ethics is claimed by heartless jerks.
With divorce, in many cases it is the existing partner that is building his happiness on his partner’s misery. Sometimes women divorce for wrong reasons, but that is not the only possible outcome. Once again, it is important to look at degrees. It is also important to look at the dynamics. Many relationships can, and should, be saved. But there are others that are simply ill-advised, and for the person to find herself in one – especially at a young age - should not be a life- ruining mistake.
What ethics are applicable to relationship, and what ethics are applicable to work? And is it right to support cut-throat competitive tactics of business to heavy-headed strictures exerted over relationships?
What is the correct set of moral values in each instance?
Once again, there needs to be vigorous debate on this manner.