I ask the question, not to throw doubt on the premise, but to clarify its moral ingredients. Adultery is condemned, sometimes, as cheating on one’s partner. As a species of cheating, adultery would be wrong on that score.
It would be wrong because it violates the rules by which the players agree to play the game. But cheating may be a less than adequate way -maybe a superficial way -of assessing adultery.
For one reason, two people may agree to an open marriage; if they agree that their marriage contract will allow for sexual friendships outside their marriage, the only rule may be that adultery be open and above board. In this case, adultery would not be cheating on one’s partner. {But is such marriage justified and passable?} From another reason, judging adultery as a form of cheating would be putting it on the same level with cheating on the budget. A wife could stash away part of the food budget and spend it on liquor; this is cheating. Adultery and cheating on the budget would be wrong for the same reasons, neither having anything to do with sexual intercourse or liquor.
But adultery may be a special form of cheating in a sense that touches uniquely on marriage and sex. Paul talks about the rights that married people have to sexual intercourse.
This puts coitus in the unsentimental arena of justice: a wife has a right to sexual intercourse. “For the wife does not have rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does”.
So sexual intercourse is not only a matter of erotic desire but of just due. There is such an old fashioned thing as “conjugal Sex as an obligation may grate on romantic feelings.
No contemporary manual on the joys of sex is likely to capitalize on sexual intercourse as an obligation owed. But there is more to sexual life than most romantics Perceive.
The right to sexual intercourse is not a property right: St Paul makes this clear by saying each partner bestows the right on the other.
This happens, at the beginning, in the contract both make: a commitment to marriage is commitment to a sexual union Whose beating heart I felt in sexual intercourse.
There is no marriage without sexual intercourse (the very reason why a marriage which is ratified and consummated cannot be dissolved by any human power or by any cause other than death.
Medieval scholars turned marriage into a sacrament that was climaxed at the high altar; the partners were fully married while still virgins”. But St. Paul believes that only with sexual intercourse do two people become the “one flesh” of marriage. And it is to a life of sexual intimacy, as well as to a galaxy of other facets of life-union, that people contract themselves in the wedding ceremony.
Now, since sexual relations lie at the center of marriage, the contract to give up rights to one’s body to the spouse implies giving them exclusively to the spouse.
A man’s wife not only has right to his body; she has sole rights and vice versa. So cheating is, after all, a basic ingredient in the morality of adultery. We must not sentimentalize everything. Marriage and sex are covered by more than erotic desire, romantic longing, and personal attachment. They are covered by the demands of justice.
