I cheated on my girlfriend with another girl for about a year. She doesn't know about it, and is very happy with me. Besides that I am a very good boyfriend, and when we are together we are happy. Now, my close friends have told me that I should tell her what I've done, because it was wrong, and she has the right to know. I agree that it was wrong, and that she indeed has the right to know; however, I also feel that at this point, it is over with. She has never known, and is all the happier. Meanwhile, I am eaten up inside every day with guilt. I knew I shouldn't be doing what I was doing, but I did it anyway; I have no excuse, and what I did was wrong. If I told her what had happened, I would no longer feel guilty, but it would crush her. I would rather live my entire life feeling like the worst person in the world, if maybe she would never have to find out and go through that. I would never do what I did again, because I learned that under no circumstances is it worth it to cheat. Am I right...

This sounds like a classic "Consequentialist vs. Deontologist" dilemma. A consequentialist defines morally right action as whatever produces the best consequences. In this case, you predict that the best consequences will be produced by keeping your infidelity to yourself and resolving never to do it again. But a deontologist defines morally right action as whatever is required by duty, and if someone has a right, then there is a correlative duty binding someone somewhere. In this case, you acknowledge that your girlfriend has a right to know, which would entail your duty to tell her. So the consequentialist "right thing" and the deontological "right thing" are at odds. Or are they? Perhaps your predicted consequences are incorrect. Your girlfriend may find out without you telling her, especially if several friends think she should know (things like this do happen, and not just in the movies). Then in addition to being crushed by your infidelity, she will be further hurt and alienated by your...
Sex

My question relates to Second Life and sex. Many people in Second Life gender-swap - that is, men create female avatars and women create male avatars. It is estimated that up to 80% of the "women" in Second Life are actually men. Some heterosexual men who engage in sex in Second Life worry about having sex with female avatars who are actually men. Is this logically and philosophically consistent? Given that Second Life is a virtual world and that nothing is real, is there any point in worrying about the real sex of an avatar? If your male avatar is attracted to a female avatar, what is the point in considering the real sex of that person? Shouldn't the relationship be taken at face value, the same as the rest of the (virtual) environment?

This is, I think, an utterly fascinating area of philosophical inquiry, and some new work is tackling this very issue. (David Velleman, for example, has a paper draft on virtual agency that considers what it means for an avatar to do things we ordinarily ascribe to real people, like "have sex" or "be attracted.") I think a virtual relationship (or a real relationship in the virtual world, which may not be equivalent) needs to be understood in the context in which that relationship exists...as you say, "at face value." But as a matter of actual fact, the reason and will behind the avatars belong to someone else, who then have a kind of derivative relationship. So we can understand what's going on in three ways: what are the avatars doing; what are the real people doing; what are the real people directing the avatars to do? The relation of these two relationships -- virtual and actual -- to each other is something that needs exploration, and this exploration may well alter our more general...

I had a friend ask me this question some time ago and we tried to talk through it but ended up still stumped. The story went: if there is a husband and wife in a happy marriage but the husband goes away on a business trip, maybe has a little too much to drink or just has a lapse in judgement, and has a one-night stand with another woman and knows it was a morally wrong act does he have the obligation to tell her even though it will devastate her and potentially end her marriage? Or should the husband keep quiet and live quietly with the shame he has brought on his marriage? If an immoral act has already been committed does it do any good to be truthful about it and bring further harm to others, as would happen if the wife were told? It just seems that if it is immoral to do harm to others than telling the wife might just be as immoral as the act of adultery.

Whether an act is moral or immoral will vary depending on the moral system that's assumed. For example, some people think morality is matter of doing one's duty, while others think it is a matter of the best overall consequences, or of building a virtuous character, and so on. I'm not suggesting that all of these moral systems are equal, but they do lead to different answers, and which system is better is a different question (a meta-ethical question) than whether a given act is moral or immoral. That being said, most moral systems would recommend the husband in this scenario not tell his wife. Confession may be good for the soul, but it's not an end in itself. It's a means to something else of moral worth: duty to God, perhaps, or character-building, or good consequences. In the absence of these ends, confession seems to be a rather selfish act. One consideration in assessing the morality of this confession would surely be whether the wife ought to know: does she have a right to this...