If you inch towards suggesting that people who do something other than monogamy might not be miserable or that they might have some advantages, they were just so hostile to that. I found that really fascinating.
Terri Conley
August 4, 2020
How One Psychologist Upended Everything We Know About Women, Sex, & Monogamy
[As well as being fascinating I think making people uncomfortable with clear factual data is great fun! I love doing it with the stupidity of gun laws as well as human psychology.—Joe]
Pure advocacy. This is similar to saying that open (“honest”) piracy is superior to being hypocritical about theft. Only the pirates and hypocrite thieves are being studied. The leftists really love these kinds of arguments. It allows the blatant criminal to feel superior to those hypocrites who advocate for morality but never live up to the standard.
When those are your two examples, the two choices being studied, then eventually, calls to defund the police become inevitable. The “honest” criminal, being superior to the hypocrites including the hypocrite police, eventually rules the world. He will put down the hypocrites like they’re rabid dogs.
And anyway; if you’re looking for statistical proof that observing the Ten Commandments makes your life either better or worse you’re missing the point altogether. For one thing, right now the most blatant thieves in the world are living high on the hog. Statistically then, I have no doubt that you could put together an argument in favor of open and “honest”, wholesale thievery. Certainly murder, including mass murder, is being justified using similar arguments, and even upheld as virtue.
You are comparing crimes with victims to actions with no victims.
I was talking to a woman about this a few months ago. She and her husband were both virgins when they got married. Both were Sunday School teachers for years. Then, nearly 20 years later, they both decided they would like to experience different sexual partners. They found other married couples with similar interests and realized their fantasies. I asked how she resolved their activities with “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. Her reply was, “It’s not adultery if we are doing it together.”
“It’s not adultery when I do it.”
“It’s not theft when I do it.”
“It’s not a sin when I do it.”
Infantile ethics.
You’re missing Joe’s key point. Marriage is a mutual promise (contract) between two people. There are standard terms, but there is no reason why the two parties involved can’t alter those terms by mutual agreement.
Theft is not an action involving mutual agreement. That’s the essential difference.
Adultery is more about gaining advantage at the expense of trust–The term cheating encapsulates this–cheating meaning bending the agreement to gain advantage while the other partner is held to the previously agreed rules of the relationship.
Marrying with a lively sexual relationship then removing bits and pieces of the “fidelity” of sexuality from the relationship previously engaged with earlier is just as much infedility as getting your kicks with someone without allowing your partner to do the same. The damage to trust between the scenarios may be different though.