Just because an act happens to be atrocious does not mean that it is not simultaneously the most humane and compassionate thing to do under the circumstances. Sometimes the alternatives are much worse.

After the fall of Okinawa in June 1945, the Japanese government prepared for the ground invasion by the Allied forces and the final battle on the mainland. Back in August 1944, the government had issued a decree, officially classifying all Japanese citizens (what’s left of them, mostly women, children, and the elderly, as all young men had already been mobilized) as military combatants and armed them all with bamboo spears. Yes, bamboo spears. Here are some contemporary pictures of women and children being armed with bamboo spears and trained to fight the enemies with them.

The women and children were told to fight the invading American ground forces with their bamboo spears till death. They were told that to surrender and be captured by the enemy was the ultimate shame and that they should die fighting instead. The national slogan at the time, propagated by the government and spread to the whole nation, was “Ichioku Gyokusai” (“100 million on a suicidal mission in honor of the Emperor”). They were absolutely prepared to die fighting the American soldiers with their bamboo spears.

Imagine the D-Day invasion in Normandy where the Germans on Omaha Beach were armed only with bamboo spears. It’s not difficult to imagine what the outcome would have been. The opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan would have looked quite different.

By his decision to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing only 200,000 people, Harry S. Truman avoided the annihilation of an entire nation and saved the lives of 100 million people. The Japanese Army had tanks, and the Japanese Navy had airplanes, so they were not impressed with the American tanks and airplanes. Repeated carpet bombings of Tokyo in March 1945 did not faze them. The only thing that would convince the Japanese people, and, more importantly, their military leadership, of the utter American technological superiority and the complete futility of resistance were the atomic bombs, which they did not have.

They would never have surrendered had we not dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would have necessitated ground invasion of mainland Japan by the American forces, which would have led to many, many more Japanese to be killed, up to 100 million. You are equally dead whether you are killed by a bullet or an atomic bomb. 100 million people killed by bullets, one at a time, over weeks and months, is much, much worse, by any account, than 200,000 people killed in a flash of a second by atomic bombs.

All of this is common knowledge for anyone who is even remotely familiar with modern Japanese history.

Not that compassion for enemies at times of war is a good thing or that, even if it was, the Japanese necessarily deserved our compassion, given a large number of atrocities committed by their army. But if it’s compassion you want, you can’t do better than saving the lives of 100 million people.

“Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality?  This article examines the evidence and concludes that the answer is no.”  Thus begins Judith Rich Harris’s ground-breaking 1995 Psychological Review article “Where is the child’s environment?  A group socialization theory of development.”

Judith Rich Harris is one of the most unconventional heroes of behavior genetics.  In 1960, she was a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University.  After receiving her Master’s degree, she was dismissed from the program by the then acting department chair, George A. Miller, who thought Harris was not smart enough to earn a Ph.D.  Thirty-five years later, while supporting herself by writing psychology textbooks, Harris worked on her group socialization theory of development and published it in the prestigious academic journal Psychological Review.  In 1997, her article won an award from the American Psychological Association, the George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article in General Psychology.  Yes, as Harris herself puts it, God has a sense of humor.

In her 1995 article, and then in her 1998 book The Nurture Assumption:  Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Harris methodically demolishes the universally held assumption that how parents raise their children is a major determining factor in how they turn out.  Harris instead argues that parental socialization has very little effect on children because they are mostly socialized and influenced by their peers.  While Harris’s conclusion was enormously controversial and widely condemned by politicians and the media alike, it is in fact corroborated by behavior genetic research.

Behavior geneticists decompose total variance in personality and behavior into three components:  heritability (genes), shared environment (everything that happens within the family that makes siblings from one family similar to each other but different from those from another family), and unshared environment (everything that happens within and outside the family that makes siblings from one family different from each other).  Behavior geneticists contend that the rough rule of thumb when it comes to the determinants of child development is 50-0-50, that is, roughly 50% of the variance in personality, behavior, and other traits is heritable (influenced by genes), roughly 0% by the shared environment (what happens within the family and is experienced by all siblings), and roughly 50% by the nonshared environment (what happens inside and outside of the family, not shared by siblings).

Of course, the precise breakdown among the three components varies by the trait in question, and also by the population used to derive the estimates.  For example, intelligence has greater heritability than most personality traits, and is roughly 80% heritable (determined by genes).  Another problem with the behavior genetic method outlined above is that the category of “unshared environment” is a residual category, which includes not only all the genuine effects of unshared environment but all the errors and unmeasured effects which do not fall into the first two categories.  It also captures how individuals with different genetic predispositions react to the same environment differently (gene x environment interaction).  However, for most personality and behavioral traits, the 50-0-50 rule roughly holds.

Harris’s work highlights the importance of the nonshared environment (in particular, peer socialization) on child development, and partly explains why siblings who share half their genes and raised by the same set of parents within the same family can often be very different, as different oftentimes as children from different families.  Of course, contrary to how the media portrayed (and viciously attacked) Harris’s work, it decidedly does not mean that parents are not important for children’s development.  On the contrary, it means that parents are enormously important because children receive 100% of their genes from their biological parents and some of the unshared environment is provided by the parents.  It simply means that, within broad limits, how parents raise and socialize their children may not be very important to adult personality.  It also explains why adopted children often turn out to be very similar to their biological parents and not at all like their adoptive parents.

Children do greatly resemble their parents in their personality, values, and behavior.  But it is mostly because they share common genes, not because the parents raised the children in certain ways.  As the late great behavior geneticist (and an old friend of mine) David C. Rowe puts it:  “Parents are often given too much credit for children who turn out well, and too much blame for children who turn out poorly.  The source of causal influence is not in rearing variation, but in the genes and in unshared environmental variation.”

P.S.  Here is a recent New York Times article, which makes the same point about the relative importance of genes, and the relative unimportance of parenting, for how children turn out, featuring the research of PT’s own Nancy L. Segal.  Thanks once again to Jay Belsky for alerting me to this article and for very useful discussions

“With me, nothing goes right. My psychiatrist said my wife and I should have sex every night. Now, we’ll never see each other!” Rodney Dangerfield.

Following my recent article “Is Chatting Cheating?”, Michael J. Formica has tried to clarify the notion of emotional infidelity; l would like to go further, and in a somewhat different manner, in elucidating this notion; I do it by comparing it to the notion of sexual infidelity. But first, let me distinguish between the related notions of casual sex, adultery and infidelity.

Ellis characterizes casual sex as “sex between partners who have no deep or substantial relationships of which sex is a component … If sex becomes an essential part of their relationship, then they are no longer just friends (but lovers) and their sex is no longer casual sex.” The most extreme example of casual sex is that between complete strangers. Adultery has an objective definition that is independent of the participants’ attitude. Adultery involves extramarital sex; it is a voluntary sexual relationship with someone other than the person’s spouse. Infidelity is related to the participants’ attitudes and to their explicit or implicit agreements; it involves unfaithfulness, which violates the spouse’s trust. There are cases of consensual adultery, such as in open marriages, where adultery is not regarded as infidelity. There are also cases in which an activity may be considered to involve infidelity although it is not adulterous-for instance, some people may consider a man attending a movie with a woman without the knowledge of his partner as a type of infidelity. It is also doubtful whether most cases of emotional infidelity can be regarded as adulterous. (see The Subtlety of Emotions)

Emotional infidelity involves having a certain emotional attitude, such as love, toward another person other than one’s partner. Sexual infidelity involves having a sexual relationship with another person who is not one’s partner. An interesting claim in this regard is that for women jealousy is primarily triggered by emotional infidelity and men jealousy by sexual infidelity. It may be the case that men’s sexual infidelity is perceived to be less emotionally loaded than women’s sexual infidelity, hence the lesser weight women accord to sexual infidelity of their male mates. An evolutionary explanation for this may be that men were primarily concerned that their partner’s offspring would be their own; women’s major concern was that their partner would continue to invest resources in raising their offspring. Sexual infidelity endangers the first concern and emotional infidelity the second concern.

The most frequent event eliciting jealousy among married people is not actual sexual infidelity, but a kind of emotional infidelity-the partner paying attention, or giving time and support to, a member of the opposite sex (or to a member of the same sex in homosexual relationship). This situation tends to elicit extreme jealousy when the third party is the partner’s ex-spouse.

Sexual infidelity is considered by many people as a greater moral violation than emotional infidelity, since it may also involve the latter and it is often expressed in greater intimacy. Emotional infidelity is larger in its scope and hence harder to avoid. However, the greater intensity of emotional infidelity may threaten marriage more than sexual infidelity. Nevertheless, emotional infidelity can be perceived from a different aspect as a more genuine attitude and hence may be more tolerated.

Many types of emotional infidelity are hard to avoid as our emotions are not fully controlled by us. In this regard it is been told that the actor Dustin Hoffman is an exception as he claimed that after meeting his wife, he felt no passion toward other women. There is no infidelity in the behavior and heart of such a true lover, since his romantic and sexual emotions are always directed at the proper moral direction. Most other people are less fortunate, and avoiding romantic and sexual emotions toward as people is impossible for them. Emotional infidelity may involve sexual infidelity, but does not have to, and sexual infidelity may involve emotional infidelity, but does not have to. Casual sex typically involves sexual but not emotional infidelity.

A distinction which is quite beneficial for people, who are less virtuous than Dustin Hoffman, is that between formal and genuine emotional fidelity. Formal fidelity adheres to formal and prevailing rules and standards, without taking into account specific circumstances and personal situations. Genuine fidelity takes into account such circumstances and situations and tries to adhere to reflective desires of our hearts. Thus, a married person could claim that while his relationship with his married lover flouts the formal rules of fidelity, he is certainly being true to his heart and this is the most genuine fidelity. Such an attitude casts doubt on the validity of prevailing rules and standards that require one to renounce one’s genuine love.
Once people make the formal-genuine distinction, they can cope better with their own (commonly regarded infidel) behavior and may be more understanding of the whole issue of fidelity. In this case emotional infidelity does not, as Formica argues, cause some degree of emotional unavailability but rather increases emotional availability in circumstances where emotional romantic attitudes are fading away. In this case, the rub is not that in emotional infidelity you are stealing from yourself-in many cases of emotional infidelity you bring back to yourself absent emotional attitudes. However, Formica is right in assuming that emotional infidelity takes place while to a certain degree one actually absents oneself from one’s primary relationship without physically (but merely emotionally) leaving that relationship.
Jealousy is likely to be more intense when genuine, rather than formal, fidelity is breached. With people who lack any formal-genuine distinction, jealousy is generally more frequent and intense. These people are more likely to consider boundaries as absolute and to acknowledge no mitigation or degree, whereas those who make the allowances required by genuine fidelity find it possible to countenance the complexity that enables them to see that fidelity might have been breached only to some degree (see In the Name of Love).

The distinction between formal and genuine emotional fidelity is not easy to formulate and it makes life, and especially the issue of maintaining boundaries, more complex. However, it more adequately describes reality. Being true to your heart often expresses genuine emotional fidelity despite its being sometimes formal infidelity.

“A man can have two, maybe three love affairs while he’s married. After that it’s cheating.” Yves Montand

Online sexual activity involves various types of activities, such as viewing explicitly sexual materials, participating in an exchange of ideas about sex, exchanging sexual messages, and online social interactions with at least one other person with the intention of becoming sexually aroused.

In a stimulating paper entitled “Chatting is not cheating,” John Portmann defends online lust and characterizes cybersex as talk about sex; he maintains that such talking is more similar to flirting than to having sex. The issue of online cheating is, however, more complex-especially when it concerns those types of sexual activities involving social interaction with other individuals.

People consider their online sexual relationships as real, as they experience psychological states similar to those typically elicited by offline relationships. Accordingly, cybersex is not merely a conversation about sex, but is a form of sexual encounter itself; it involves experiences typical of sexual encounters, such as masturbation, sexual arousal, satisfaction, and orgasm. Indeed, people consider cybersex to have a high degree of psychological reality. However, many of them do not consider it to be morally real-at least not as real as offline affairs. One survey found that over 60 percent of people having cybersex do not consider it to be infidelity. Many of them believe cybersex to be similar to pornography; it is an extension of fantasy, keeping them from physically being with other people. Consider the following statement from a 41-year-old married man: “My wife doesn’t care if I have relationships (even sexual) on the Internet. It’s like it’s not real. I can get away with it. But I’m sure she’d get upset if we were to meet for a drink or something” (all citations are from Love Online).

Some people even consider cybersex as a means not to cheat-it is something that may add spice to their offline relationship. These people believe that if they do not know the real name of their cybermate and never actually see them, their affair cannot be regarded as real from a moral point of view; it should be considered as not any different from reading a novel or other kind of mere entertainment-a way to play out fantasies in a safe environment.

Other people admit that cybersex done without the knowledge of the other partner is cheating as it involves deception; nevertheless this is a type of positive cheating: “having cybersex with someone other than one’s spouse IS cheating, but it’s OKAY cheating.” In some circumstances cybersex may help a person through rough periods in an offline, loving relationship. In such circumstances, cybersex may be recommendable, but can still be regarded as cheating. As a 29-year-old married woman, who often engages in cybersex, says: “People need to ultimately and consistently remind themselves that 99% of fantasy is WAY better than the actual reality.” When people feel trapped by their current circumstances, but they still do not want to ruin everything around them, cyberspace may offer a parallel world in which things are better. Being in that world can help them preserve the actual one, while not giving up exciting emotional experiences. Living within the two worlds is not easy and may become risky when people do not realize the limitations of each world.

Whereas people having online affairs tend to reduce their problematic nature, their offline partners often do not see any difference between online and offline affairs: the lack of physical contact and face-to-face meetings does not diminish the sense of violation of their vow of exclusivity. The fact that most of these affairs are concealed from the offline spouse is indicative of such possible harm. Consider the following reaction of Melissa: “I glanced at the screen and was shocked to find John talking to some woman about how he’d like to throw her on the bed and make wild, passionate love to her. I was furious and hurt. We had quite a blow up about it.” A similar attitude is expressed in the following message: “I recently found a love letter my husband sent to a woman via email. I know there has been no physical contact because she lives across the country, but I still feel betrayed, humiliated, and hurt.”

At the heart of moral harm is the harm we impose upon other people. Just as casual sex is not inherently harmful, neither are online affairs. They may be so, when participants are also involved in another primary offline relationship. In this regard, the following aspects are particularly significant: (a) the resources invested in such affairs are taken from the primary relationship, (b) the wish to actualize online relationship is intense, and (c) the degree of intimacy in online affairs is high. All these worries are genuine and can be found in many online relationships.

One way of reducing the weight of these difficulties is to distance the online affair from offline circumstances; for example, by refraining from exchanging personal, actual details or by having other types of limitation upon the online affair. Thus, people may agree not to develop a profound relationship, permitting themselves only a virtual one-night stand, or an uncommitted affair, or promising to tell each other about each online affair. As one woman in a committed relationship remarks about her online sexual affairs: “I’ve had this discussion with my boyfriend and we both agree that as long as it’s not with the same person more than twice, it is really masturbation. It’s like reading an erotic story and masturbating to it. I think, however, if you do it with the same person more than once there is a risk of getting attached to them.” However, the above types of limitations are extremely difficult to obey, as online boundaries are less constant and less rigid.

Generally, online affairs are easier to perform and put the agent in a less vulnerable position, as the chances of getting caught or being hurt in other ways are considerably reduced. They are also perceived to involve a lesser degree of betrayal as they involve more imaginary elements and the degree of neglecting the partner’s interests may also be lesser. The private nature of online affairs may make them less painful for the betrayed partner as well. Moreover, when online affairs are revealed to the significant other, which is done more often than in offline circumstances, it cannot be considered as cheating.

Nevertheless, since online affairs are psychologically real they often cause actual harm to the primary, offline romantic relationships. Accordingly, people are likely to be just as disturbed about their partner’s online sexual affairs as they would be if they discovered that their spouse was exchanging steamy love letters with someone else. Since people do not consider online affairs as mere fantasy or as mere interactions with an anonymous series of computer links, such affairs are highly emotional and can be harmful.