“DANGER, Other Woman…DANGER!!!”

Today, syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson (“Ask Amy”) answered a query with admirable directness, properly defining the proper  use of ethics alarms for a woman who was puzzled about what to do when the answer should have been obvious. Unfortunately, Amy adopted the letter-writer’s incorrect terminology for an ethics alarm, based on the help-seeking “other woman” in an adulterous relationship writing that her relationship was beginning to feel “icky.”

As we have discussed here many times, “ick” and unethical conduct are not necessarily the same thing.  Humans naturally assume that what is strange or instinctively repugnant is wrong, but that assumption always needs to be tested by sound and objective ethical analysis. The best current example: to heterosexuals, gay sex is “icky,” but that doesn’t make it unethical or wrong. When Amy uses the term “ick-o-meter,’ what she means is “ethics alarm.”

Other than that quibble, her advice to “The Other Woman” is refreshingly direct and an ethical bulls-eye. The questioner explained that she was involved in an adulterous relationship that she deemed ethically acceptable because her lover had explained that it was a sham marriage for immigration purposes. (This would be a confession of fraud, incidentally, which should disqualify an individual from respect and trust. Unfortunately, our culture has been successfully brainwashed into believing that illegally or fraudulently achieving U.S. citizenship is virtuous, so it is not surprising, only depressing, that this didn’t set off the woman’s “ick-o-meter”). Now she has learned that the marriage was not as he had represented:

“I’m worried that our relationship is icky, especially when I think about it afterward. I spend a lot of time in his home eating meals his wife has cooked for him.I want to ask him about this point-blank, but I don’t want to risk losing this guy, who happens to be very caring and attentive. Should I walk away, ignore his texts and find someone else?”

Not to be overly colloquial, but  “Ya think??”

Amy, of whose advice I am not always an admirer, knocks this out of the park:

“Dear Other Woman: If you can spend time at the house this man shares with his wife and eat meals she has cooked — and it only occurs to you later how “icky” this is — then I’d say you need to adjust your ick-o-meter. The idea is to be icked out by things in advance of doing them. Your guy is a liar and a cheat. Walking away sounds like a good idea.”

Whatever she calls it, Amy’s ethics alarm is in working order.

NOTE: You can click here to find a great many–and varied! —situations where it was mistaken for unethical conduct.