In this weekly series, I explore thought-provoking ethical dilemmas drawn from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions. These questions have no easy answers—only personal truths we must each confront in our own way.

This Week’s Question

Last week, we explored what you might do if you discovered your mother having an affair. This week, we flip the scenario: What if you’d discovered your father doing the cheating?

Does the gender of the parent change our ethical calculation? Should it? In reversing the roles, we’re forced to examine whether our moral intuitions remain consistent or if subtle biases influence our judgment when confronting parental infidelity.

The Ethical Crossroads Revisited

As with last week’s dilemma, this scenario places us at the intersection of competing moral principles:

Truth vs. Compassion: The fundamental tension between honesty and mercy remains. Would you prioritize your mother’s right to know the truth about her marriage, or might you weigh the potential devastation that revelation could cause?

Loyalty vs. Justice: Now your allegiance is tested in the opposite direction. Do you feel the same obligation to inform your mother as you would your father in the reverse scenario? Or do cultural attitudes about male versus female infidelity subtly influence your response?

Intervention vs. Autonomy: The question of whether adult children should involve themselves in parents’ marital issues remains relevant. Does your father’s gender or role in the family affect your sense of appropriate boundaries?

The reversal of roles invites us to examine whether we apply our ethical principles consistently, or if societal attitudes toward male and female infidelity might unconsciously influence our reasoning.

Gender and Infidelity: A Cultural Lens

Historically, societies have often applied different standards to male and female infidelity. While these double standards have diminished in many cultures, their echoes persist in subtle ways. Research suggests people often judge women’s infidelity more harshly than men’s, despite similar actions.

This societal backdrop raises important questions: Do we unconsciously hold mothers and fathers to different standards of marital fidelity? Do we perceive the same betrayal differently based on the gender of the betrayer? And how might these unconscious biases affect our response to discovering a parent’s affair?

While cultural context matters, ethical consistency demands that we apply the same moral principles regardless of gender. If truth, loyalty, and family integrity were our guiding values when considering our mother’s infidelity, they should remain our compass when facing our father’s similar actions.

Philosophical Perspectives

The core philosophical frameworks we explored last week apply equally to this scenario:

Consequentialism still asks us to weigh outcomes: Will revealing your father’s affair lead to better or worse consequences for the family system as a whole? Would your mother be better served by knowing or not knowing?

Deontology maintains that moral duties—like truth-telling or promise-keeping—don’t change based on who is involved. If honesty was an imperative in the previous scenario, it remains so now.

Virtue ethics continues to ask what a person of good character would do. Does the virtuous response change when it’s your father rather than your mother? Should it?

Care ethics focuses on maintaining relationships and meeting the needs of vulnerable parties. This approach might consider whether power dynamics within the marriage affect your ethical calculation.

The Impact on Family Dynamics

Family systems are complex networks of relationships shaped by history, power, and emotional patterns. When infidelity enters this system, it doesn’t just affect the marriage—it ripples through all family relationships.

As the child who discovers the infidelity, you occupy what family therapists call a “triangulated position”—caught between your parents in a way that can strain your relationship with both. This position remains uncomfortable regardless of which parent is involved, though the specific emotional dynamics might differ.

Children often have different relationships with mothers versus fathers, influenced by attachment patterns, family roles, and personal history. These differences might affect the emotional impact of discovering a father’s infidelity versus a mother’s, even if they shouldn’t influence our ethical reasoning.

When Fathers Become Human

Just as last week’s scenario forced us to confront our mother as a complex individual with desires and flaws separate from her maternal role, this week’s question demands we see our father in his full humanity.

For many, fathers have traditionally occupied different emotional territory than mothers—perhaps more distant, authoritative, or idealized in different ways. Discovering a father’s infidelity might challenge different aspects of our family narrative than discovering a mother’s.

The revelation might also trigger different emotional responses. Some might feel more anger, others more disappointment, and still others might experience a complex mix of emotions they struggle to name. These emotional responses, while natural, shouldn’t necessarily dictate our ethical choices.

My Answer

If I discovered my father having an affair, my approach would be identical to the one I outlined last week: I would give him one week to tell my mother the truth himself. If he failed to do so within that timeframe, I would tell her myself.

This consistency reflects my core belief that infidelity represents a profound betrayal of trust regardless of who commits it. Gender does not mitigate or aggravate the ethical breach. In my value system, deception in a committed relationship is equally wrong whether perpetrated by husband or wife, father or mother.

My initial reaction would still be anger and disappointment—emotions that would persist long after the immediate situation was resolved. However, I believe my approach still reflects a logical assessment of the ethics involved rather than merely an emotional response.

By giving my father the same deadline, I would be:

• Respecting his agency to address his actions directly
• Ensuring my mother receives the truth she deserves
• Removing myself from the position of primary messenger
• Setting a clear boundary about my unwillingness to participate in deception

I recognize this approach creates significant pressure and may seem harsh. However, I believe it represents the fairest balance of competing ethical obligations. What happens to their relationship after the truth emerges would remain in their hands, where it belongs.

The Question of Consistency

What this week’s variation really challenges us to examine is the consistency of our ethical principles. Do we apply the same standards regardless of who is involved? Or do subtle biases—about gender, about our relationship with each parent, about family roles—influence our moral calculations?

Ethical consistency doesn’t necessarily mean identical responses to every similar situation. Context matters. But the underlying principles should remain steady. If truth was paramount in one scenario, it should remain so in the other. If compassion guided us before, it should guide us again.

Yet true consistency requires honest self-examination. We must ask ourselves: Would I really respond the same way? If not, why? Is the difference based on relevant moral considerations, or on biases I should challenge?

Family Loyalty in All Directions

This scenario, like last week’s, highlights the complex nature of family loyalty. Loyalty runs in multiple directions—to mother, to father, to the family unit as a whole, and to one’s own moral principles.

When these loyalties conflict, we must prioritize. Is loyalty best expressed through protection or through honesty? Is it more loyal to honor an explicit request for silence or to uphold what you believe to be the implicit expectations of a loving relationship?

True loyalty may require different expressions in different contexts, but its core—a commitment to others’ genuine well-being and to the integrity of our relationships with them—should remain consistent.

Beyond Gender: Other Variables

While we’ve focused on the gender reversal in this week’s question, many other variables might influence our response to discovering parental infidelity:

• The state of the parents’ marriage prior to the discovery
• The relationship between the child and each parent
• The apparent seriousness or casualness of the affair
• The potential consequences of revelation (financial, emotional, practical)
• The age and vulnerability of the betrayed parent
• Family history with similar situations
• Cultural and religious contexts that frame infidelity differently

While these factors might inform how we approach the situation, they shouldn’t fundamentally alter our core ethical principles. Contextual sensitivity isn’t the same as ethical inconsistency.

The Cost of Secret-Keeping

As discussed last week, keeping secrets exacts a psychological toll on the secret-keeper. Research in family systems theory suggests that maintaining a “family secret” often creates invisible barriers to authentic connection among all family members, not just those directly involved.

When a child becomes the keeper of a parent’s secret, it can distort the natural parent-child relationship, creating an unhealthy reversal where the child feels responsible for protecting the parent. This dynamic can be damaging regardless of which parent’s secret is being kept.

Moreover, secrets tend to grow heavier with time. What begins as a temporary silence may evolve into a long-term deception that erodes your relationship with both parents and compromises your own sense of integrity.

What Would You Do?

As you consider how you would respond to this week’s question, reflect on:

• Would your response differ depending on which parent was involved? If so, why?
• How might your personal relationship with each parent influence your decision?
• Do cultural attitudes about male versus female infidelity play any role in your thinking?
• What values remain constant for you regardless of which parent is involved?
• How would you maintain your own integrity while navigating this family crisis?

There is no universally “correct” answer to this dilemma. Each response reveals something about our moral compass, our conception of family obligations, and our approach to navigating conflicts between competing goods.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Would your response change if it was your father rather than your mother? What factors would weigh most heavily in your decision?

Next week’s question: “Someone close to you will die in a few months unless you donate one of your kidneys to them. If you knew that your chances of surviving the operation were excellent and that your life expectancy wouldn’t be appreciably reduced, would you give up the organ? What if the operation were risky?”