- "Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same"
George - Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
Reading articles (mostly from a pretty conservative, Christian perspective) about why polyamory is not an ethical choice, the assumption seems to be that ethical rules about sex and relationships are absolute. Albert Mohler fears that accepting polyamory as normal will lead to 'moral confusion' and Matt Slick believes that ethical nonmonogamy is no more possible than 'ethical bank robbing, or ethical embezzling'.
It is moral and good to be sexually faithful to your partner, and therefore having more than one concurrent sexual relationship is immoral, the logic goes. This is literally begging the question, because the immorality of nonmonogamy comes purely from the assumption that monogamy is moral.
I doubt many of us who are happy without monogamy give much time to this line of thinking. Personally, I believe what is ethical within a relationship depends more on the people within it, than assumptions from the world outside it. Making someone a peanut butter sandwich could be a kind and generous act, or an attempt at murder depending on who you're giving it to. Avoiding other sexual or romantic encounters could mean you are making good, moral decisions based on a sound ethical framework, or it could be pointless denial, depending on your partner.
If you and your partner have agreed to a 'don't ask, don't tell' approach to non-monogamy, then telling them about your other sexual partners could be an unfair and intrusive. Whereas if you have a policy of full disclosure and withhold the information, this could be an unethical breach of their trust. And if you agree to keep what happens in the bedroom with one partner private, but agree to tell another partner every detail of every one of your sexual exploits, then you have made at least one promise that you cannot keep, and so are no longer practicing ethical nonmonogamy at all. Some behaviour that a few of my previous partners would have considered unfaithful and hurtful is now happily within the ethical framework of both of my relationships. And, even more trickily, what is and isn't ethical differs even between my two partners. The assumption that non-monogamy is immoral, and therefore relationships that permit it are necessarily unethical is nice and simple, but may or may not be true for your relationship.
The difficulty with accepting a set of ethical rules for relationships wholesale, as the two articles above are asking us to, is that you might be sticking to a rule that doesn't benefit you or your partner, and so is wasted effort. The difficulty with throwing up society's accepted rules is that you've got to figure out what's ethical for each relationship from the beginning, every time.
