This was weird; I wonder if The Ethicist (his friends call him Kwame Anthony Appiah, or just “Professor”) just felt like slapping down someone despicable. When I read the creepy question posed, I immediately thought, “Who needs an ethicist to answer this?”

“Name Withheld” (that guy writes an awful lot of questions to The Ethicist) wrote in part,

“….Many years ago, my wife had a one-night stand with a male friend of ours. She admitted to it to me a couple of months later because she couldn’t deal with the guilt… [I] agreed to forgive and forget, and 50 years later we are still together and happy. But I always felt that I owed her one, and I did have sex with a customer three times….[and]never breathed a word about it. My wife has always been very insecure…I don’t want to hurt her in any way. I know that to discuss it would be traumatic… The second indiscretion involved my theft of a few thousand dollars from my employer by getting kickbacks from a vendor. He would overcharge my employer and give me a percentage of the invoice amount. There were many reasons I stole this money. We were ‘‘keeping up with the Joneses’’ in a wealthy community and were constantly cash-strapped; our kids were in college…There’s no excuse for what I did, but I think I was somehow of the mind that stealing from them wasn’t the same as stealing from a church or an individual.

“I am religious, and do have a close relationship with our pastor…”

He wants to know if it’s okay to unburden his conscience to his wife and pastor. It would make him feel better. He has a guilty conscience.

Well, KABOOM! He felt he “owed her one,” so he got even with his wife after supposedly forgiving her by banging a customer three times? (I thought he just owed her “one.”) He robbed his employer because he was “trying to keep up with the Joneses”? I’m surprised this guy can spell ethics. How many people are like this? Don’t tell me; I’m depressed and disillusioned today already.

The Ethicist barely restrains his own disgust, at one point writing, in a masterpiece of understatement, “I confess that I don’t view things quite the way you do.” He concludes, “[Y]our thinking reflects the mistaken thought that two wrongs make a right….The main thing is to recognize that you let yourself and others down, and that explanations are indeed not excuses. It would be selfish to confess to your wife out of a concern to clear your record, so to speak, rather than out of a concern for her. With respect to your former employers, you don’t have relationships to maintain or repair. Instead, you owe them money…. It’s to your credit that, all these years later, you do feel guilt. Don’t add to it by causing further injury.”

I don’t give him any credit at all. In my experience, this isn’t real guilt. “Name Withheld” is a toxic narcissist as well as a sociopath, and he believes that he is a wonderful person, all available evidence to the contrary. Wonderful people are supposed to feel guilty when they do bad things, so he’s decided that he does.