As I noted in this post, I am slogging through Showtime’s ethics series “The Affair ” (2016-2021) again after catching much of it pre-streaming. One of the issues raised during an episode was discussed here. At the climax of the second season, a wildly contrived scenario that determined the course of the whole thing occurred. I write ethics hypothetical for a living, and I could not come up with one filled with more ethics conflicts, dilemmas and rationalizations.

Here’s the set-up: The four parties involved in “the affair” are Noah, a late forties, insecure, narcissist writer; Helen, his wife of 25 years with whom he has had four children; Alison, a young, clinically depressed former nurse whom Noah encountered in a chance meeting at Montauk restaurant, The Lobster Roll,” while his family was vacationing, and who subsequently engaged in a mad, impetuous affair with him that broke up his marriage and hers; and Cole, her ex-husband, who ran the family ranch and dealt drugs on the side.

At the point when the incident in question occurs, Noah and Helen are divorced, as are Cole and Alison. Alison and Noah are now married but estranged because Alison just informed Noah that what he thought was their infant daughter is in fact the result of an impulsive post-divorce one-time-only moment of passion with Cole when they were both drunk and depressed. (Everyone drinks a lot in “The Affair.”) Helen and Noah have finally agreed to share care of their kids, especially after Helen having a DUI with her youngest daughter in the car made her case for full custody untenable.

Stipulated: all members of the shattered couples have lingering intense feelings for each other.

Clear so far? Okay: Cole is marrying again, a “good illegal immigrant,” a “Dreamer,” in a Montauk beach wedding. Cole (understandably) hates Noah, but Noah and Helen are guests at the wedding because the bride is the daughter of the long-time housekeeper for Helen’s rich, horrible,Super-WASP parents. Alison is also a guest because she has partnered with Cole—purely business now <cough>—to buy the tourist trap local restaurant where Noah and Alison began their affair. Also at the wedding: Scotty, Cole’s drug-dealing, perpetually angry, sociopathic, coke and alcohol-addicted brother, who is fresh out of rehab but gets drunk at the reception anyway because he was the one who originally wanted to buy the restaurant and is furious at his brother and Alison for cutting him out of the deal. Oh! I almost forgot! Scotty also got Noah and Helen’s ridiculous daughter pregnant when she was only 16 while the family was in Montauk . (She had an abortion). Noah attacked Scotty at the Planned Parenthood offices, saying that he would kill him, and that moment was captured on video.

The wedding over, the guests then gather at a drunken wedding reception at the Lobster Roll. As the party winds down, Noah offers to drive Helen, who is drunk, to the hotel where they both are staying. She wants to call a cab and tells him he shouldn’t drive either because he is also inebriated, but Noah says it’s just a short drive and she relents. It is misty out ( we’re by the shore, remember) and these are the unlit beach community roads I remember so vividly from my summers on Cape Cod. Noah is suddenly having visions of running Alison down with his car (she just told him that “their” daughter wasn’t his, and there was a murder scene like that in his recent best-selling novel inspired by their affair), and pulls over, telling Helen he feels more drunk than he thought he was. She, reluctantly because of her DUI, agrees to take the wheel.

Meanwhile, Alison is walking back to her Montauk home along the same misty, unlit road, and encounters Scotty. He confronts her and demands to be given a piece of the Lobster Roll. She refuses, and tries to continue walking. Then he attempts to extort her: for reasons not germane to the upcoming incident, Scotty knows that Alison’s infant daughter is Cole’s, not Noah’s. Cole does not, however, and his new wife can’t have children. Scotty says he will tell Cole the truth, triggering chaos, if Alison doesn’t give in to his demands. Then Scotty adds an additional demand: he wants to have sex with Alison, right there and then. He begins forcing himself on her, and she pushed him away, hard.

He stumbles backwards…right into the path of the car driven by Helen, and is killed instantly.

Noah gets out to check what Helen said she thought was a deer. He glimpses Alison, hiding behind a tree. She mouths, “I pushed him!”

Now what is the ethical course for each of the three principles here?

Noah feels that he is responsible for Helen driving. She is also the mother of his children. He is still feeling guilty about blowing up their family with his selfish affair. Alison is his current wife, and caring for the child he believes was his until that night. He knows that Scotty’s demise is a boon for everyone he knows as well as well as the world in general.

What would you do?

The “book” answer is, of course, to go to the police and explain that it was an accident, with all parties accurately describing their role in Scotty’s death. The one individual who is in the clear is, ironically, Noah. Alison can justifiably claim self-defense, and that she was not trying to push Scotty into the path of a car. Helen, meanwhile, hit and killed someone driving while inebriated, though the situation was pure moral luck: a sober driver couldn’t have avoided hitting Scotty. The negative consequences to the purely ethical approach would affect not only Noah’s first wife, whom he made drive against her better judgment, but his current wife, and five children.

Noah tries to cover up the accident, and tells Helen to say she took a cab,. He doesn’t tell her about Alison’s involvement (Helen hate Alison). Alison wants to go to the police, but Noah tells her she must not because of Helen (Alison also feels guilty about what the affair did to Helen and her children). A scenario where Noah’s wife just happens to push the man Noah threatened to kill into a car Noah was driving seems just a little bit suspicious, but so does the same man being killed by a car driven by the mother of a teen he had statutorily raped.

Spoiler alert! Noah eventually pleads guilty to vehicular manslaughter.

Was that ethical? Is there an ethical way out of this mess? Ethics zugzwang occurs when a situation requires action, but any action, including doing nothing, is arguably unethical.