While there is debate about the right moral theory to apply to cheating, what makes the behavior cheating is that a person in a committed relationship is engaging in sexual activity with a person outside of that relationship. As such, cheating involves three main factors. The first is that the cheater is in a relationship that is supposed to exclude cheating. The second is that there is sexual activity. The third is that this activity is with a person outside of the relationship.
These factors would, on the face of it, exclude sexting and “cheating” in virtual environments (such as video games) from being real cheating. After all, sexting is the exchange of texts and in current virtual environments, there is no sexual contact. For example, if two players in World of Warcraft decide they are going to have a “virtual affair”, the most they can do is chat, strip down to their virtual underwear and awkwardly bump their characters together. I will address more “robust” virtual interactions in an essay to follow. These virtual and textual realms preclude the possibility of cheating in the traditional sense: at most, one is bumping code rather than bumping body parts. That said, there is intuitive appeal to such virtual cheating being real cheating in a moral sense. The challenge is making the case for this.
Since the physical infidelity aspect of cheating cannot occur in virtual cheating, the obvious focus is on emotional rather than physical fidelity. That is, the commitment is not just to sexual exclusivity but also a certain type of emotional exclusivity. This does require being careful about specifying the boundaries of this exclusivity. To use the obvious analogy, just as sexual exclusivity does not exclude all physical interaction with others, emotional exclusivity does not exclude all emotional interaction with others. Physical cheating, obviously enough, is easier to define and there are reasonably clear boundaries between sexual and non-sexual behavior. While there are some grey areas, the boundaries are adequate for this general discussion, and I will leave the precise boundaries of cheating to the relationship therapists and divorce attorneys.
Emotional cheating is more difficult to define, although the focus is on emotions connected with sex and romance. There is a broad area of concern about emotional fidelity which is the question of what is appropriate to feel about people outside of one’s committed relationship. Fortunately, the discussion is focused not merely on feeling, but the expression of feelings through sexting and virtual behavior. While I am aware of the problem of other minds (one never knows what another is really thinking or feeling or if they are thinking or feeling at all), it is reasonable to take the emotions expressed in sexting and virtual behavior at face value unless there are grounds for doubt.
While it is always reasonable to consider that a person’s feelings and thoughts might not match their behavior, this is more of an epistemic problem than a moral problem in this discussion. So if a person is expressing emotions via sexting and virtual behavior that should be exclusive to their relationship, then they are engaged in virtual cheating. This rests on the reasonable assumption that the expression of romantic and sexual feelings should be confined within the committed, exclusive relationship. The next obvious point of concern is why virtual cheating matters.
Traditional cheating runs the risk of the usual harmful consequences: unplanned pregnancies, STDs, questions of property rights and inheritance, emotional damage, physical damage and so on. While virtual cheating cannot cause STDs or pregnancies, it can cause emotional damage and thus could be morally wrong on utilitarian grounds. If the people in a relationship have agreed to emotional fidelity, such cheating can also be a violation of a person’s rights or moral rules. There is also the practical concern that virtual cheating can lead to physical cheating. To borrow from Plato’s arguments about the corrupting influence of art, even if someone starts out just “joking around” with sexting and virtual behavior outside of their committed relationship, there is a clear psychological path in which that “kidding around” can lead to real infidelity.
In the next essay I’ll look at the ethics of cheating in more “robust” virtual realities.