Monday, December 10, 2018

The Definition of Cheating

Listen to this intriguing Ted Talk, 6.5 million people already have.






It's filled with great lines like,
Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy?
and
Monogamy used to be one person for life, today monogamy means one person at a time.
and
As Marcel Proust said, 'it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person'
One line I'm not so fond of,
Throughout history men practically had a licence to cheat, with little consequence, and supported by a host of biological and evolutionary theories that justified their need to roam. So the double standard is as old as adultery itself.
First, no, adultery is far older than evolutionary or even biological theories of it. Her last sentence does not follow from what came before.

Second, there's a difference between explaining it and "justifying" it. Biology can explain men's proclivity to cheat without justifying it. This is a case of the naturalistic fallacy.