Extreme hypotheticals can be useful in exploring the outer fringes of our positions, but they do a very poor job of informing our day to day conduct. I’m not averse to engaging with your “drunk wife meets sexiest person in the world” scenario, but for me to give any semblance of an answer requires me to fill in a multitude of assumptions that are too numerous to fully catalog (ex. how did my non-drinking wife get drunk? is she a materially different person when severely intoxicated? whether I went with her to the house party or not, how did my introverted wife find herself alone with the world’s sexiest stranger? did I abandon her? etc etc.). Unless I’m specifying each and every assumption I’m relying upon, it’s virtually guaranteed that you’ll hold a different assumption, which would necessarily change how you interpret my answer. I don’t understand what you find enlightening about this hypothetical.
It seems far more relevant to me to think about far more common scenarios, but I don’t know if probability is the best way to contemplate this though. I can certainly imagine scenarios where my wife is smitten by a friend/co-worker/barista/whoever and if that happens then we can end our relationship because I wouldn’t want to get in her way. I don’t think about this scenario prospectively because there’s no reason for me to care about it if it hasn’t happened. Whether the risk of this scenario happening is 1% or 99% in the future bears little relevance to what I do in the present; I’ll continue my relationship so long as it is satisfying.
Extreme hypotheticals can be useful in exploring the outer fringes of our positions, but they do a very poor job of informing our day to day conduct. I’m not averse to engaging with your “drunk wife meets sexiest person in the world” scenario, but for me to give any semblance of an answer requires me to fill in a multitude of assumptions that are too numerous to fully catalog (ex. how did my non-drinking wife get drunk? is she a materially different person when severely intoxicated? whether I went with her to the house party or not, how did my introverted wife find herself alone with the world’s sexiest stranger? did I abandon her? etc etc.). Unless I’m specifying each and every assumption I’m relying upon, it’s virtually guaranteed that you’ll hold a different assumption, which would necessarily change how you interpret my answer. I don’t understand what you find enlightening about this hypothetical.
It seems far more relevant to me to think about far more common scenarios, but I don’t know if probability is the best way to contemplate this though. I can certainly imagine scenarios where my wife is smitten by a friend/co-worker/barista/whoever and if that happens then we can end our relationship because I wouldn’t want to get in her way. I don’t think about this scenario prospectively because there’s no reason for me to care about it if it hasn’t happened. Whether the risk of this scenario happening is 1% or 99% in the future bears little relevance to what I do in the present; I’ll continue my relationship so long as it is satisfying.