Huh? Jordan doesn’t have to be proven innocent or guilty – it was given in the OP that Jordan slept with Taylor. That’s a fact.
There is really no way to know.
What if Jordan got drunk, and Taylor was coming on to her all night? Taylor would then, in my opinion, go up above Jordan in evil rating because he already knew she was married.
What if Jordan told Taylor she was already separated and married in name only? Depending on other circumstances, Taylor might not have any blame in this case.
There are lots of possible hypothetical situations in which any party could have any evil rating.
If Taylor knew that Pat would feel betrayed and hurt and Taylor knew that the non-married relationship between Jordan and Pat was deep (as far as Pat knew) and long-standing, and that Pat would be profoundly hurt and betrayed by Jordan sleeping around, then yeah. Taylor would still be a scumbag for contributing to the betrayal of Pat (and also personally benefitting from it).
The difference is, the vegetarian only has to answer to themselves, and they only made the “vow” or “promise” to not eat meat to themselves. There is no third party (someone like Pat) in the equation.
If a single guy (or girl) has no idea that the person they are picking up in the bar is married or seriously committed, then no, of course they bear no responsibility for the hurt of the spouse or partner. But if they know there is a marriage, and they know that they are helping someone break their marriage vows (and possibly messing up a family with kids, etc.), then yeah, they are sleazy for doing that.
It should be your “responsibility” to not knowingly participate in the hurt of someone else. Especially when there are plenty of other options out there (finding an unattached person to sleep with). Sleeping with a married person is not a life-sustaining activity, and it can be easily avoided.
It should be the responsibility to not help someone else break their committment and promises. It should be your responsibility to behave in a way that you would like to be treated. Unless you really, honestly wouldn’t mind being lied to, betrayed, having someone break contracts with you (and I’m not just talking about marriage contracts or other romantic entanglements). Unless you truly wouldn’t mind having that done to you, you shouldn’t help someone else do it.
However, I do agree with the “evilness rating” thing being too high. If we are going to bring in Hitler and child molestors into the equation, then everyone else’s “evil” rating can be taken down a few notches. But such infidelity can be so hurtful and destructive (to kids, etc.) that I do think it often is evil. Just not on the level of Hitler and those guys.
It’s not wise to have sex with people who are deceitful, as Jordan is, so Taylor is making a mistake there. Not evil, necessarily. And neither is the cheating Jordan.
Obviously, Jordan is doing something wrong, but we don’t know all the circumstance or the motives.
Perhaps Jordan has been married, with unfailing hope and devotion, to a coma patient for four years, and has sex with Taylor not because she has given up on Pat but … just because she’s half-crazy with grief and wants a brief escape, who would judge her harshly?
What if Jordan is a upset because Pat won’t buy a new car and has sex with Jordan to “show him” because she has that kind of twisted inner monologue going on. That’s getting into evil territory.
Seems like many posters have forgotten the Op. Pat and Jordan are happily married. No one is in a coma or overcome with grief. They are not separated. It is fascinating reading who assumes Jordan is male and who assumes Jordan is female. Here I thought the OP went to a lot of trouble to leave all genders ambiguous. Maybe Chris would have been a better name.
To me, I don’t know that I’d call Taylor (or Jordan, for that matter) “evil”
I definitely think Jordan is tremendous Asshole. And I think Taylor, is at the very least tacky, and quite selfish as well.
And there is the rub. There seem to be people who believe that selfishness is fine. That hurting someone you have no relationship with is OK, because you’ve made no promises, and you’ve made no guarantees…And that’s true…but ya know, generally speaking, I think those who live their lives without regard to who they hurt are not-so-admirable, and I think we’d all be much happier in the long run if we all agreed to consider feelings, even of strangers. I try to, and I find that since taking on this philosophy, I’m a much happier person, AND I make others happier…which is double gravy.
To me, the joy of a good lay does not compensate for the hurt I may be causing another.
Steve
Gotta agree with yosemitebabe, and I also agree that were we to introduce children into the equation, Taylor’s raiting on the evilometer increases. I just see it as a basic moral precept that you don’t knowingly hurt other people for your own gratification.
Firstly, I call bullshit on the “happily married” thing. If they’re happily married, Jordan wouldn’t be propositioning others (assuming an exclusive marriage, of course).
IMO Ratings:
Pat = 0
-Pat did nothing. If he/she’s a completely awful spouse, Jordan’s correct and ethical course of action is to end the (exclusive) marriage, not sleep with others against their agreement.
Jordan = 7
-Jordan betrayed Pat’s trust and broke promises which Pat had every reason to assume were being kept. Jordan didn’t murder, rape or physically abuse Pat, so the rating isn’t higher, but Jordan is a pretty awful, untrustful, deceitful person.
Taylor = 1
-Taylor gets a one solely for having the bad taste to sleep with someone who would piss all over their promises. I personally wouldn’t want to be intimate with someone who was such a lying scumbag as Jordan, so Taylor gets a 1 for having such low standards.
This is the only circumstance I can imagine that would change the ‘evilness’ rating IMO. Jordan got a 7 for betraying Pat for one night. He now gets a 9 for betraying her every day of the rest of their marriage by continuing to withhold this information which would be of vital interest to Pat and Pat’s views and decisions relating to the marriage. (please note, this is IMHO, as I know many disagree with this line of thought)
That’s spot on.
Hmmm. I just noticed that my last paragraph slipped out of gender neutral terms. Sorry.
I was thinking it through from my (het female) personal point of view, not making sexist assumptions. Most cheaters I personally know have actually been female, not male, but I realise that’s way too anecdotal to mean anything.
As pointed out, Jordan doesn’t have to be proven guilty to Pat, Jordan is guilty and has themselves and their actions as proof. If someone robs a store and gets away with it, they’re still guilty of robbing a store.
I agree with the first part in most cases, but due to the “happily married” comment in the OP, I just assumed this was one of those moments where lusty desires sprang up, and in a drunken state, Jordan’s judgement was a bit impaired and they just went for it. You’re the one who talked about how some believe in appreciating and going with their lust as it appears in another thread; here could just be a perfect example of that. Of course, it doesn’t make it any less wrong assuming that Pat doesn’t have the same feelings about the situation and believes if Jordan becomes full of lusty intentions, they should come home and fulfil them in a healthy environment with Pat him/herself.
What happens if the husband cheats, but the marriage continues just as before, and the wife never finds out?
Where’s the harm?
OK, I agree with this. So, I’ll change my minimum score for Taylor to a 1 or 2, if he’s a complete stranger.
I’ve realized that my viewpoint of where the responsibility lies depends on whose perspective I look at. From Pat’s perspective, I don’t think of Taylor as having any responsibility whatsoever for Jordan’s breaking his/her wedding vows to me. If I was Pat, and found out Jordan had tried to have sex with twenty people, all of whom turned him/her down, I wouldn’t think “what a relief – Jordan hasn’t broken our wedding vows!”
However, from an external point of view, Taylor is, as you said, participating in a situation which will result in someone else getting hurt. It’s like buying stolen goods – even though they’re already stolen and you had no responsibility in the actual theft, you’re still participating in an immoral act.
You win this round, yosemitebabe. 
The harm is that the marriage is now existing with one HUGE lie between the two of them. If Jordan is the kind of person who can cheat without any sign of remorse or guilt, I’m guessing that there are a lot of emotional and communicational problems that will develope within the marriage and that the “happy couple” won’t stay happy for very long. And if Jordan is a decent human being and does feel guilt and remorse, then those feelings are going to cause a similar rift between the two. The marriage won’t continue just as before.
And even if it does, there’s still harm done. Again, I point to theft. Say you steal twenty bucks from your mother’s wallet the next time you go home (or go downstairs, however the case may be) and you take $20 from her wallet. She doesn’t find out, and you never tell her, and the next time she’s out and tries to buy something, she simply thinks “Hmm…I thought I had more money. Oh well, I’ll just go to the bank again,” and that’s that. Theft still occurred, and you’ve just been dishonest to someone you love (hopefully). Sure, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal, but morally, it’s wrong. And this is nowhere NEAR as immoral as cheating on one’s spouse.
But hey, if you’re the kind of person who wants to get married to someone who will sleep around and not tell you about it and feel no remorse, that’s your prerogative.
The hypothetical OP is eerily similar to something I went through 9 years ago.
Wife and I had been happily married for a year, then she went on a hardship tour to Korea for a full year. Fast forward 10 months to a party I went to at a friend’s house. Though I said we were “happily married”, I wasn’t happy at the time. I missed my wife terribly by this time and got quite drunk. A girl and I “clicked” at the party and we were in deep conversation for hours (and yes, I mentioned I was married).
She started rubbing my shoulders (and a bit more) and my foggy brain finally realized where this might be heading. I hastily got up, said a quick goodbye to my friend and got the hell out of Dodge. Things didn’t go well after that though, as I messed up my car pretty bad and got a DUI on the way home.
My wife knows of the DUI but not why I was out driving drunk.
My scores in that situation:
Wife: 1 (she admitted over the phone that she’d done some light petting with a guy because she was feeling terribly lonely and not a little drunk)
Party Girl: 0.5 (she was coming on pretty strong, at least my horny self thought so, and knew that I was married)
Me: 1 + 3 or 4 (1 for letting myself get into that situation, 3 or 4 for not just sleeping it off in the car outside and endangering a lot of people on the road. To tell the truth, I was pretty distraught over what had just happened and wanted to get far away. My dad’s infidelity and eventual divorce from my mom were also heavy on my mind at the time.)
Now, on to the OP…
While the genderlessness of the parties involved is a nice twist, there are some other items that need to be more explicity defined in order to score evilness.
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The type of marriage. As AHunter3 has stated, not all marriages require fidelity. The time period is important too. A hundred years ago, it wasn’t uncommon in some cultural circles for a man to have both a wife and a mistress (they served different purposes). Is this a marriage in 19th century China? A pagan marriage in 2003? Or are Pat and Jordan part of a group marriage from the free lovin’ 1960s America?
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Location, location, location. As in my story above, are Pat and Jordan able to physically access each other? Are they separated by a huge distance for years at a time? Not that distance necessarily excuses infidelity, but it can give us an insight into Jordan’s mindset and Taylor’s sympathy for the situation.
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No one has brought this up yet, but what about the genderless party of CrazyMonkey or a person who knows of the entire tawdry affair but is not one of the three directly involved? Is he/she friends with any of the others? What sort of evil rating does CM get for telling/not telling Pat about the tryst? Or convincing/not convincing Jordan to spill the beans to Pat about the sexual encounter?
So I guess I’ll just have to give answers as if this were an episode on some daytime soap (and everyone knows how “normal” those relationships are). To avoid having to write he/she several times, I’ll also assume as with several other posters that Jordan is male and Pat and Taylor are female and all of them are heterosexual, though my ratings don’t change if any of the genders or sexual orientations are different.
Pat = 0
Not a participant of the event, so no evilness has been acquired, but see below.
Jordan = starts at 6, but read on
Depending on how well he knows his wife, will she go off the deep end and threaten/commit violence towards herself, Jordan, or Taylor no matter how tactfully he tells her, or will she react more calmly and try to work with the situation as it presents itself? If he wants to save his marriage he may not want to tell her (two people get hurt), then again, if he doesn’t say anything he’s an asshole for lying through silence (only his conscience is hurt). It’s a double-edged sword that needs to be swung carefully. I guess it hinges on Pat’s mental stability, religious views, and childhood/cultural upbringing as well as on Jordans ethics, morals, and values. If this sort of thing was common in his childhood, it may not have the sort of weight that it would to us outsiders. And add 1 to Pat if the marriage survives after revealing the tryst and she uses it as a constant reminder of Jordan’s infidelity or uses it in future arguments as a sort of blackmail to get her way. Subtract 1 from Jordan if he’s smart enough and knows his wife well enough to do the right thing, or add 1 if he doesn’t. After 5 years of “happy marriage” he should know.
Taylor = 5 (or 6, read on)
I look at it like this: say I’m a recovering alcholic but I’ve had a really sh!t day/week/month and, feeling weak, walk in to a bar and sit next to you. I relay my sorry story and the fact that I’m a recovering alcoholic, plop $10 down in front of you and ask you to buy me a drink since I can’t bring myself to do it. And you get to keep the change. Do you do it? It’s not your responsibilty if I fall off the wagon, but here is a perfect opportunity to prevent it. I believe it’s everyone’s responsibility to help out a fellow human when it’s obvious help is needed and you are able to help with almost no effort. It helps create a more cohesive and closely knit society, which only benefits everyone. I’ll help people get their cars out of snowbanks if I’m driving by. I’ll yank a child out of the path of an oncoming car if I’m able. I don’t have to, but I will (and do). Another poster mentioned the Golden Rule (yosemitebabe I think) where you “treat others as you would want to be treated”, and I believe that’s exactly what applies here. Add an extra point to Taylor if she does this with malicious intent, i.e. she knows Pat and is looking to hurt her for some reason.
CrazyMonkey (or anyone witnessing this situation IRL) = 0-1
This is tough to score since we don’t know what relationship(s) with the parties involved that a random witness might have. If CM knows Pat or Jordan as a friend, some sort of step should be taken that Jordan does the right thing (as in Jordan’s paragraph above), or if he doesn’t, talking to Pat (again, taking into consideration the points mentioned in Jordan’s paragraph above). Add 0.5 if you do the wrong thing intentionally to hurt Pat or blackmail Jordan, or if Pat confronts you with her suspicion and you lie. If you’re friends with Taylor and didn’t try to stop her from leaving with Jordan, or you encouraged her to do this thing, add another 0.5. If you don’t know any of these people, you get 0. If you know any or all of them but just turn your back on everything, I guess that ought to earn you at least a 0.1 or so, but maybe not. Like I said, this one is tough to rate (and I’ve been this person before).
For the record, I like cabbages and think they’ve suffered far too long in this anti-cabbage world.
P.S. I am not a cabbage
Genderless!?!?! Them there’s fightin’ words! 
I’m innnocent I tell ya’!
This is a very interesting point – what responsibility do friends and observers have in this kind of situation? My take:
Random bar patron, doesn’t know anyone involved - 0. None of their business.
Taylor’s friends - I’d say they’re responsible for reminding Taylor that cheating is naughty (now that yosemitebabe has convinced me to raise Taylor’s rating to about 4). They get a 1 if they neglect that duty, 0 otherwise. That’s the extent of their responsibility
Jordan’s friends - same responsibility as Taylor’s friends, with the same possible ratings. Additionally, after the fact, encouraging Jordan to come clean with Pat would be the right thing to do, so 1 evil point for neglecting that duty, 0 otherwise.
Pat’s friends - similar deal. Reminding Taylor and Jordan that they are about to hurt someone is their responsibility. Encouraging Jordan to come clean after the fact is also their responsibility. Whether to go to Pat with the information after the fact is a little fuzzier. Will Pat make use of that information? Will that knowledge do Pat more harm than good? These kind of questions make the “Do I tell?” question very difficult.
If you’re wondering what I did as an observer (as you seem to be by using my name as the model for the observer in the situation), then I suppose I should mention that the situation that led to this discussion didn’t involve any actual cheating. That’s actually a pretty interesting little dilemma on it’s own, so maybe I should go start a thread on that by itself. I have been the observer in past situations, though, and here’s how I did:
When in the “friend of Jordan” role, I made sure my friends knew that I felt what they were doing was immoral, and encouraged them to do the right thing, both before and after that incident.
When in the “friend of Pat” role, I pretty much had it easy. My friends were never actually married in those situations, and it was clearly better that they knew what their scandelous girlfriends were up to, so I was never really in a moral dilemma – I spoke up every time.
I hope I’m not too evil.
Oh, and regarding the use of the word “evil” and comparisons to Hitler, etc. I would think it obvious that there is no intent to compare Jordan, Pat, or Taylor to any true evil such as Hitler, Charles Manson, or Celine Dion. The havoc that such true abominations wrought on the world in no way compare to the temptations that 99% of us face in our everyday struggles to be the best human beings we can be. I think it is safe to assume that when a 1-10 scale of evil is presented when discussing normal, human-level temptations and transgressions, that such demented souls can be considered off the charts.