Mark D. White

Mark D. White

No economics here (not obviously, anyway)–just a topic I'm interested in, the ethical aspects of marital relations, infidelity, and divorce.

From The Wall Street Journal last week comes an article by Alicia Mundy titled "Of Love and Alzheimer's" regarding the ethics of adultery on the part of spouses of Alzheimer's sufferers. It details the emotional withdrawal that that a person goes through when his or her spouse gradually succumbs to the disease, as he or she forgets details of their life together, perhaps no longer recognizes them, and loses the ability to provide emotional support and companionship. While continuing to provide care and company to their patient-spouses, the well spouses have needs as well, and often seek friendship and intimacy (sexual or not) with other people, to some controversy:

Caregivers often face a stark choice: Either start an extramarital relationship and risk estrangement from friends and family—not to mention their own guilt—or live without a real companion for many years. The trend is prompting religious leaders, counselors and others to rethink how they define adultery.

I think it really is a matter of how you define adultery (or, more generally, infidelity). If you define it as violating the (marital) exclusivity of romantic or sexual activity, regardless of any realized negative impact on one's spouse, then clearly there can be no exception for infirmity of any kind; this may excuse the adultery, but it cannot justify it. But even such a duty, derived from a general prohibition on promise-breaking, can be overridden by another duty, such as the duty of self-preservation of the part of the well spouse, who must care not only for the patient-spouse but also for him- or herself. As the article notes, spouses of Alzheimer's sufferers are more likely to die with a year of their partners than are spouses of people suffering from other diseases such as cancer; one would assume the difference is the mental deterioration involved with Alzheimer's (a cancer patient can express love for his or her spouse while an Alzheimer's patient often cannot). If affection and intimacy are taken to be essential human needs, they should not be sacrificed simply to adhere to a rule prohibiting adultery regardless of circumstances, which would be a tragic case of rule worship.

If you include in your definition some concept of the realized harm from the infidelity, then the picture is slightly different. If some aspect of the true wrong in adultery lies in the feelings of deception or violation it creates, rather than in (or in addition to) the act itself, then extramarital activity when one's spouse is (relatively severely) mentally incapacitated may be justified. If the well spouse still spends time with the patient, and doesn't neglect him or her to spend time with the new partner, then the wrong in the situation is more difficult to see, as the patient is not being harmed in any apparent way, especially if he or she is not cognizant of the other relationship. (At the risk of giving credence to the normal adulterer's excuse that "I did it for the good of our marriage," one may even imagine that, in providing much-needed emotional support for the well spouse, the affair may have secondary benefits for the patient, who cannot provide the same support previously given.)

The morality of adultery is never clear-cut; while usually wrong, of course, there will always be situations, and not always uncommon ones, in which mitigating factors exist that any reasonable ethical system will recognize. Being married to an Alzheimer's sufferer in advanced stages of the disease is certainly one of those cases, and an intensely tragic one at that, since both spouses are lacking the emotional connection on which they relied on for years, one directly due to cognitive decay and the other indirectly. But the other, the well spouse, can do something about it without (apparently) imposing harm on the patient. Personally, I appreciate that the people in this situation struggle with the morality of their actions, but I would hope they (and their children, their friends, and so forth) can come to terms with the tragedy of the entire situation, and give their blessings to the person trying to balance caring for the patient and him- or herself.