Some specific known health issue could be another input, along with the one I mentioned: what if any relationship do I have with the couple? Again before inserting the specific health variable, I have trouble taking seriously the idea I’d look up the spouse of some person I only vaguely know to begin with, and don’t know the spouse at all, to tell them of cheating if I happened to find out. If it’s somebody who has a reasonable expectation that I’m some kind of friend of theirs, I can more readily see the argument it’s betraying that relationship to remain silent.
Again, if you knew of some specific health issue that could be another factor pushing toward getting involved. And it would tend to go together, not so likely I’d find out that somebody I barely know has herpes. I don’t find the generalized health issue, that sexual promiscuity tends to spread disease and condoms aren’t a magical solution, very convincing about me getting involved in the very personal business of people I hardly know.
Also I’d note that if people go far enough on the theme of adultery as something every member of the community has a responsibility to act against, why not just go back to making it a crime? Then it’s simple, if you know of a crime, you should report it to the authorities.
In the VERY least, I’d be talking to my friend about how completely shitty it is to drag a friend into a moral dilemma like this.
My best friend cheated on her fiancee about ten years ago. I was close to both of them at the time. My best friend saw that act of infidelity as the harbinger of doom for the relationship, told her fiancee what she’d done and broke up with her immediately. Then she fell in love with the woman she cheated with.
I did not mince words with my best friend about what a shit fucking thing she did to her fiancee. She wanted me to invite her lover to our wedding (which was planned around her and her fiancee as a couple in the wedding party and would have been really fucking awkward so soon after such a terrible thing) and I told her no fucking way.
But she’s still my best friend, and I was at her wedding when she married said lover, they’ve been married almost as long as I have been now. I accept what she did, I accept her flaws and all, and I love her wife, but if secret infidelity was some kind of lifestyle choice for her, we’d be having some *words. *
I don’t think anyone is advocating anything like that other than the ‘MYOB’ attributing it to people who disagree with them. As far as criminal charges go, there’s a big difference between ‘X is wrong to do’ and ‘X should be a crime’ for most people. And a huge difference between ‘tell the people involved in the situation’ and ‘bring the police into it’.
FYI, in a number of states adultery is a crime still on the books, prosecuted, and factored into divorce proceedings, so it’s not really a matter of ‘go back to…’
But a lot of what rationally distinguishes ‘[I think] X is wrong to do’ and ‘X should be a crime’ is a perceived need for all members of the community to act against X. There’s a much smaller difference if one insists it’s the obligation of everyone who finds out X is being committed to notify those potentially involved, with the purpose of stopping X.
IOW you’re taking the unconditional case, ‘all things I think are wrong to do’ v what should be a crime (I agree, big difference there), and applying it to wrongs not directly involving me the anti-MYOB’s are saying I have an obligation to get involved in trying to rectify and things that are a crime (much less difference there). Crimes are wrongs we agree the whole community has a responsibility to thwart.
It’s a matter of degree of how anti-MYOB. I’m just pointing out the logic, I think, that if you push too far in the direction of a supposed responsibility for third parties to get involved countering a wrong, you’re pretty much defining what makes something a crime: a wrong that’s everyone’s business.
My friends are my friends. I do not turn my back on them. Nor would I inform on them to a 3rd party.
But I owe them a duty to help them get on the right path. As friends, we owe that to each other. Were this my friend, I would not co-sign his bullshit, I would get in his face and tell him what I thought of his actions. I would tell him what I though needed to be done. If his wife were also my friend, I would be even more insistent.
But regardless of the outcome, I would still be his heir friend.