Ask the AI Ethicist
Questions based on submissions to the NYT’s “The Ethicist” column (see source links). Responses here generated by LLMs.
Source here.
My husband and I have been happily monogamous and very much in love for 12 years—the kind of couple who argues about whose turn it is to buy oat milk and then makes up by reorganizing the spice drawer together.
About nine years ago, he got sober (which I’m proud of him for, genuinely), and ever since then his libido has felt like it moved to a remote cabin and stopped returning my letters. We’ve done the whole sincere, responsible menu of “solutions”: couples counseling, calendar-based intimacy (complete with color-coding), and role-play. The role-play has been… inventive. We’ve tried everything from “strangers who meet at a hotel bar” to “two rival antique appraisers forced to share a booth at a regional fair.” It works for a week or two and then we drift back into our normal, where I’m often standing there with my desire like a party horn that no one else can hear.
I coped the way many frustrated people do: too much porn, too much reading about sex, and the sort of late-night internet wandering where you start out looking for “communication tips” and wake up three hours later learning about an entire subculture devoted to things that sound like either a kink or a niche form of municipal zoning.
Somewhere in that spiral, I realized I’m drawn to kinks that are not remotely his vibe. To be clear, I’m not talking about anything dangerous or illegal—more like scenarios and dynamics, and some specific physical elements. Think: skin contact in some cases (no genital contact, no exposure), and in other cases genital exposure (but no touching). The problem isn’t that I’m trying to turn our bedroom into a circus; it’s that I’ve discovered there’s a part of me that wants something precise and specific, and it keeps tapping me on the shoulder like, “Hi. Remember me? Still here.”
For about 18 months I tried to outthink it. I tried to “wait it out,” tried to convince myself it was a phase, tried to turn the volume down through sheer moral determination. Spoiler: my libido does not respond to stern lectures.
Eventually I told him, carefully, with all the gentleness and disclaimers I could manage. His response was basically: not interested, not my thing, but we can “keep revisiting.” Historically in our relationship, “keep revisiting” has meant “I am hoping this quietly dies in the yard without me having to actively bury it.”
So here’s what I’m wrestling with:
Is it ethical to ask to revisit our relationship boundaries in a real, concrete way—and propose consensual nonmonogamy so I can explore these kinks elsewhere, with everyone fully informed and consenting?
If he truly can’t (or won’t) participate, is there any ethical way to frame certain kink exploration as “nonsexual” and therefore not a violation of monogamy? I realize this sounds like I’m trying to win an argument with semantics, but I’m genuinely trying to understand whether there’s a line that isn’t just “anything that feels exciting counts as cheating.”
In short: I don’t want to bulldoze a good marriage. I also don’t want to quietly shrink into a version of myself who is permanently managing disappointment. I’m trying to find a way that is honest, kind, and not built on loopholes.
-
Responses + absurdist wit: GPT 5.2 Thinking, Gemini 3 Pro
Straight response: Claude Sonnet 4.5
Source here.
Last August, in our little “weekenders-only” enclave up the Hudson—where everyone pretends they don’t know everyone while actively tracking each other’s grill choices—I started seeing a man who, on paper, looked like a minor miracle: charming, thoughtful, the kind of person who remembered my dog’s middle name and could parallel park without a prayer.
About a month after we became intimate, he sat me down on his screened porch (next to a suspiciously ceremonial stack of back issues of The New Yorker) and confessed that he was technically married. He insisted the marriage was “over-over,” that they’d been separated for a year, and that the only reason he hadn’t divorced was because his wife “had cancer” and needed to stay on his health insurance. He spoke in a hushed, earnest tone, as if the hydrangeas were microphones. He added that she’d recently had surgery and was “in recovery,” and I—like a normal human with a pulse—felt immediate compassion. I told him I wouldn’t pressure him and tried to proceed carefully.
But as the summer wore on, the story began to feel like one of those articles that keeps changing its lede. Details didn’t align. Timelines wobbled. Every time I asked a gentle question, he produced a new explanatory paragraph that somehow answered nothing. Eventually I ended it, not with a dramatic scene, but with that quiet internal click that says, I’m being managed.
Later, I mentioned the situation to a friend who also knows him (and, because this is our community, knows his recycling schedule, his preferred bagel order, and his opinion on outdoor shower etiquette). My friend looked at me the way people look at a menu item that clearly shouldn’t exist and told me: he is very much still with his wife. Not “complicated,” not “on-and-off,” but together-together. And—here’s the part that made my stomach drop—she is healthy. No cancer. No surgery. No fragile insurance lifeline. Just a lie, delivered with the confidence of a man who assumes no one will compare notes.
I’m still reeling. Part of me wants to warn his wife, if only because I would want to know if my spouse was presenting me to women as both tragically ill and conveniently absent. Another part of me worries that inserting myself will turn me into a footnote in their marriage, or worse, make me look vindictive.
Complicating this further: they’re both journalists. They make a living (at least in theory) off accuracy and truth-telling, and I keep thinking: surely veracity should matter in their personal lives, too.
So: do I contact his wife and tell her what he’s been doing—and what he’s been saying about her? Or do I take this as a grim lesson, keep my hands clean, and let their household fact-check itself?
-
Responses + absurdist wit: GPT 5.2 Thinking, Gemini 3 Pro
Straight response: Claude Sonnet 4.5
Source here.
My wife and I have one child, a 24-year-old son, and he has always operated as if the rest of us received an instruction manual that he somehow missed (or refused on principle).
When he was little he was bright, literal and easily overwhelmed. We tried home schooling for a while because the average classroom felt like putting a feral cat in a marching band. Eventually we relocated to a smaller school district where the noise level was lower and the teachers knew what to do with a kid who could memorize train schedules but couldn’t find his shoes. By high school he was doing decently, and medication for attention problems seemed to give him enough traction to finish assignments and keep his temper from igniting every time reality asked something of him.
Then came his senior year: the great Zoom-and-sweatpants era, when school became an endless video call and he decided—without telling anyone—that he was “done being managed by pills.” His grades collapsed and so did anything resembling routine. He stayed up all night “researching” (mostly arguing with strangers online about whether certain words are “objectively annoying”), slept through the day, and began treating us like we were hostile landlords rather than parents.
We moved again, partly out of hope and partly out of desperation, so he could attend a nearby community college and live at home with some structure. The pattern repeated as if it were scripted: initial optimism, then missed classes, then missing work, then missing basic reality. His behavior toward us worsened right alongside his study habits, and eventually we insisted he move out. We explored a program designed for neurodiverse students that actually sounded ideal—coaching, social support, accountability—but he refused on the grounds that he didn’t want to be associated with “those kinds of people.” (He says this while refusing eye contact and speaking in an outraged whisper because the refrigerator hum is “aggressive.”)
Instead he enrolled in a state university, convinced he would thrive once he was free of our “micromanagement.” He failed every class because he did essentially no work. He returned home with the air of someone who has been personally betrayed by syllabi.
He found a job at a big-box store and, for about three weeks, we allowed ourselves to exhale. Then he was fired for working too slowly. He has obsessive-compulsive tendencies and would get stuck in loops: checking dates, rechecking dates, comparing the dates to other dates “for consistency,” and then returning later to make sure the dates hadn’t “changed.” He described this as “quality control.” His manager described it as “you have been staring at the yogurt since Tuesday.”
At home his oppositional streak and casual dishonesty became intolerable. He could look you in the eye, swear he had paid a bill or applied for a job, and then—when confronted with proof—pivot instantly to “Well, I was going to.” He was also increasingly volatile. After an especially ugly episode, we rented him a small apartment with the understanding that he would work and contribute what he could, even if it was modest. We were not asking him to become a self-made success story. We were asking for movement in the direction of adult life.
Eighteen months later, he has no job and, frankly, seems unable to keep one. He lives on food stamps and Medicaid. His apartment has become a kind of stagnant terrarium. He rarely bathes. He has not brushed his teeth in more than a year and a half. He refuses basic self-care as if soap is a political opinion. When pressed, he says he “doesn’t see the point” or claims brushing is “sensory torture” or insists he is “fine” despite the obvious evidence to the contrary.
We tried to put guardrails around our support. We drafted a simple agreement—nothing legalistic, just clear expectations. We would continue paying for housing if he kept himself and the apartment reasonably clean and agreed to see medical, psychiatric and dental providers (we would cover costs). He refused, disappeared for a night, and we later learned he slept outdoors behind a shopping plaza “to prove he could survive without us.” He returned the next day, signed the agreement dramatically, and then proceeded to treat it like a menu: interesting concept, no intention of ordering.
Almost nothing has changed. If anything, he has become more entrenched in the belief that the world should accommodate him without requiring anything from him in return. Any suggestion that he seek care is met with accusations that we are trying to “control his narrative.” Any mention of hygiene produces a lecture about how society is “obsessed with appearances.” (This from a young man who will spend three hours arranging his canned goods by bar-code symmetry.)
Here is the unpleasant part. At this point we believe he may never be able to care for himself. I am 70. My wife is 61. We are trying to plan not just for next month, but for the decade after we’re gone. The idea of him drifting from one crisis to another until he becomes someone else’s emergency keeps me awake.
My view is that if we are providing housing and financial help indefinitely, then he should have a vasectomy. I don’t say this lightly. He admits, in his clearer moments, that he cannot care for himself, let alone a child. He is also lonely, impulsive, and eager for validation. The idea of him fathering a child—creating a new human who would immediately be pulled into this cyclone—fills me with dread. When I brought it up, he rejected it outright and called it “eugenics,” which is a word he learned recently and now deploys like a fire extinguisher anytime we mention responsibility.
I told him that when his lease expires, I will not continue supporting him unless he agrees. I am weary of the constant battle. I am ashamed to admit this, but I have reached the point where I can picture him permanently homeless—or dead—and feel a grim sense of relief at the thought of the fighting finally stopping. That sentence makes me sound like a monster. It may also be true.
Even if he agreed to the procedure, he would still need to change his behavior for us to arrange stable, affordable long-term housing and support. He will never live with us again after he threatened my wife during an argument about whether we might cut off his phone payments. My wife is hesitant about making sterilization a condition of support. She believes it crosses a line, even if the alternative (an unplanned child) seems far worse.
So here we are: two aging parents, one adult child who refuses care, and a future that looks like a long hallway with the lights going out one by one. Is it ethical to draw this boundary? Or am I letting fear and exhaustion turn me into someone I don’t recognize?
—
Responses + absurdist wit: GPT 5.2 Thinking, Gemini 3 Pro
Straight response: Claude Sonnet 4.5
