This time, I’d like to concentrate on the answer “The Ethicist” gave to a question more than the question itself. Prof. Appiah was asked by a woman (or man) who had been sexually molested by his (or her) father whether it was time to finally inform family members about the abuse, now that this son or daughter has decided to cease contact with the father for other reasons as well as the obvious one. He or she says the mother and siblings think the decision to cut off Dad is cruel, and that the father should have a chance to make amends—but they don’t know the whole story.

“If I were to share these details with my mother, I’d risk destroying a decades-long marriage in a single conversation,” the inquirer writes. “If I were to tell my siblings, I’d do irrevocable damage to their relationship with our father. Should I continue my silence to protect the rest of my family from emotional harm? Or do I owe it to them to tell them the truth? As I write this, I’m also painfully aware that if I break my silence, he will try to manipulate them into believing that none of this is true, that I’m delusional — he has done it successfully before.”

I’m not a nuanced kind of person regarding situations like this. My reaction: The truth shall set you free. Would I want to know if my spouse or father was a monster? Absolutely. That the information would be painful doesn’t mean I’d rather live in contrived ignorance. The writer has no obligation to protect his father, and it’s not protecting the mother or siblings to enable a lie.

Here’s the philosophy professor’s answer, in a few bite-size chunks:

“Now, an immediate issue is whether your father could be in a position to repeat his crimes with other children — that there aren’t others suffering in silence. If that’s the case, staying silent isn’t an option. You don’t raise this as a concern, but you need to be confident that it isn’t one.” 

And how exactly could that confidence be justified? It can’t be. The writer has already stated that this man has managed to fool his entire family for decades. The rest of “The Ethicist’s” answer is superflous: “staying silent isn’t an option.” A man who molested his own child isn’t trustworthy, and never can be.

Suppose you told him that you’ll keep quiet if he tells the family that he accepts that you don’t want to see him owing to a serious wrong he did to you. The problem is that questions would arise about the nature of that wrong, and that he may not be willing to deal with them. Nor is it obvious that keeping the details vague would leave your parents’ relationship intact. Besides, your father doesn’t sound like the sort of person who could be talked into taking responsibility.

Never mind that: bargaining with the damaging information comes to close to extortion for my ethics alarms.

Even if you reveal the truth, he may be confident, rightly or wrongly, that he can get people to believe you’re not to be trusted.

So what? Don’t be a weenie. Tell the truth, and if the family chooses to believe the abuser, that’s their problem, and their tragedy.

Whatever you decide, though, you shouldn’t be motivated by the thought that you owe this truth to anyone. It’s not that there isn’t reason to care that they know the truth. Many people in your family have relationships predicated on ignorance. They might even feel, were it to come out, that you should have told them before, precisely because we want to live a life in which our important relationships are not based on a failure to understand what our intimates are like.

Yet these reasons to disclose what happened don’t impose a duty on you of doing so. You may judge that they are outweighed by the fact that sharing the truth will cause pain and disruption to many lives without doing enough compensating good. Nor are you obliged to subject yourself to the pain and disruption that your father’s manipulations may bring you.

I disagree completely. There is no duty owed to the father to keep the ugly truth from the family, but the family has a right to know.

“Which brings me to my final thought: Taking measures to protect your well-being isn’t selfish when you are, objectively, the wronged and wounded party. Will your well-being be best protected by your admittedly painful policy of steering clear of both your father and the tumult of disclosure?…”

“It’s OK to be a coward if that’s the easiest path for you.” Again, I disagree.

The last point I have to make is that I doubt very much that the mother doesn’t know about the abuse. Spouses of child-abusing parents almost always either know or are in denial.