Is Adultery Morally Wrong

The author of the piece tries to deliver an argument to why adultery is not morally wrong. This argument starts with defining what marriage is. It states that marriage is nothing but a contract between two people who decided to live the rest of their lives together based on their feelings, so it is okay if those feelings fade to break the terms of that contract and look for feelings outside that marriage.

The feelings outside marriage are basically the cause of adultery. If the feelings of a married person towards his/her spouse go away, it is only natural for them to search for feelings elsewhere. That is because humans have a sexual need present in them and once this need is not satisfied by the spouse, someone else would be able to satisfy

Since all the reasons presented by the argument have to do with satisfying needs and desires, we can conclude that this argument depends on the hedonist theory. Hedonism first says that an

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action is evaluated based on its consequences, and the consequences are assessed according to how much pleasure and pain they produce.

All the reasons presented show us that adultery helps increase the amount of pleasure a person feels:

First, if a person stops having feelings towards his/her spouse then finding another person to have feelings for would increase the amount of pleasure he has. So adultery would provide that pleasure, according to the author’s argument.

In addition, satisfying the desire to be with someone married also feeds the pleasure of an individual since satisfying any desire gives a person pleasure. This is also provided by adultery as stated by the argument.

Moreover, the argument assures that adultery is moral only if the spouse doesn’t know about it. Not knowing about it, would decrease the amount of pain for the person being cheated

It is well known that lies don’t last long, so the truth is

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uncovered even after some time. The spouse would know sooner or later about what their husband/wife did and that will lead to a big amount of unhappiness. The truth might lead to breaking the marriage up and this would affect all the members of the family.

Besides, following the pleasure the adulterer gets is a large amount of guilt that any normal person would feel after doing something wrong. This guilt is triggered by the fact that he/she lied and cheated. Not feeling guilty would mean that the person has no conscience.

In general, the points explained above show us that the amount of happiness produced by adultery is way less than the amount of unhappiness it produces on the other hand. So from a utilitarian point of view the act of adultery is morally wrong.

In conclusion, as we presented the author’s argument in an explicit and detailed manner and then presented an objection to his/her argument we saw how weak the author’s argument was. Then by presenting the other argument we were able to notice how the author’s argument was very short-sighted and didn’t take into consideration the future outcomes of the act of