- You grant that cheating happens, get over it, and that deprives Fuji of his tactic of saying leave him alone everyone cheats.
Now you're being dishonest, that is not quite what I said. What I said was that it's inappropriate to have moral imperatives that most people violate. As an extreme example, it would be inappropriate to have a moral principle saying that it was immoral to sweat. We all sweat. It's part of the human condition. Making it immoral is life-denying, by asserting that who and what we fundamentally are is immoral.
The claim is not "everybody does it leave me alone", the claim is that it is inherently human, like breathing, therefore it cannot be immoral.
- You note the universal moral principles against rape and sexual violence, and that deprives Fuji of his tactic of presenting sex as such a moral code no-go zone that surely nothing can be said against him and that anything goes with sexual conduct.
You are again dishonest. I've answered this. I've said that I agree universal principles apply. I simply pointed out that there is no universal principle against cheating, or against lying, or against any of the other components of infidelity. There are moral imperatives against those things
in specific contexts, but not as a general rule. For an obvious counter-example, it's not immoral to deceive someone as part of a practical joke, and it's not immoral to tell your wife that she does not look fat, when really you think she does. However in some specific context we agree that lying is immoral--for example, lying to someone purely for financial gain is considered fraud, except of course when it happens during a game of poker. Violence, on the other hand, is immoral no matter whether you commit it for a sexual purpose, a business purpose, or to win a game of poker.
Fuji won't agree that sexual relations are subsets of human relations and thus infused by moral codes
Again not true. I don't agree that you can invent new moral codes just for sexual behavior merely because they are a subset of human behavior. You can apply the universal moral principles, like prescription against violence, but you cannot say "oh it's a subset of human behavior therefore it's OK to make up any rule I like."
I have argued persuasively that it's inappropriate to generate moral rules that try and regulate sexual behavior specifically, as opposed to violence generally.
But there is a crucial assumption in that argument that has gone completely undemonstrated and unverified. In any sexual relationship, who is to say that each party to it wants and/or needs exactly the same thing or things?
It doesn't matter whether people want the same or different things. It will remain the case that one person in the relationship will be able to extract more of what they want from the other, meaning extract more concessions from the other party, while making the fewest concessions of their own.
This boils down to mundane things like the couple that always does what the wife does on a date, because the husband doesn't have "the balls" in the relationship to say no, actually, he'd rather watch the action movie. In more extreme cases it's the couple where the husband is able to extract concessions from the relationship which enable him to cheat, while imposing on the wife conditions which prevent her from doing so.
In an unfair relationship WHATEVER it is you desire from the relationship, which will no doubt be different from what someone else desires, you will get more of in a relationship in which you have more power.
Fuji is likening sexual relationships to the pursuit of commodities that cannot be evenly split, in that when multiple parties strive for the commodity the only options are none versus zero (a split bus does not drive far) or more versus less (one can own more busses than a competitor). You can think of your own examples to illustrate.
No, it's not quite like that, because in a sexual relationship the commodity
is the other person and has a will of their own. Thus you are no dividing up some third item, you are dividing up each other, negotiating the dynamic that will govern your interactions with one another.
This is easy to illustrate, just by supposing one case in which a sample sexual relationship proceeds more like a bargaining exchange
I'm OK with this approach if you don't take it too far. I sense you're verging back into Victorian territory here, in that you're going to attempt to model sexual relationships as a bargaining process, and then make simplifying assumptions to try and draw some conclusions as to how they'll go. I will have a problem with your simplifying assumptions, as I have argued that participants in sexual relationships do everything they can to increase the complexity of the relationship.
So while I agree generally that there is a sort of bargaining going on there, the participants are going to do everything they can to avoid following any "rules of bargaining" you propose.
For example, the theory of negotiation as it's generally taught in a formal sense proposes that you can strengthen your bargaining position by understanding what your BATNA is, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. So if you're negotiating for a house, your negotiating position is stronger if you know how much you would have to pay for your 2nd choice, if you walked away from your 1st choice. This is somewhat like the person who enters a sexual relationship knowing that they have a little trim on the side if they want it--it's much easier for them to walk away from the relationship as they've got a plan B, and that should increase their power: They can make ultimatums with more confidence, for example, and more easily stare down ultimatums made against them.
So has theory of negotiation taught us something useful about sexual relationships here? No not in reality. In reality a sexual partner will seek to act outside the model to defeat any strategy brought by the other partner. In the case of the trim on the side the participants can and often do invasively look for any signs that the other partner is even trying to
assess BATNA and punish that act in extremely severe ways. So for example, some women (or men) will act in apparently outrageous ways just because their partner looked at another woman (or man) in public. Why? To send a clear message that even any attempt to assess the availability of an alternative will in and of itself be dealt with harshly, even unreasonably. Will their partner stand idly by and accept this constraint? It depends... and so the complexity grows.
Thus normal approaches to dictated by the theory of negotiation break down, as the existence of BATNA in and of itself itself becomes part of the sexual battleground, and the contest rises above the "rules of negotiating" into sexualized attack by both partners on the nature of the rules themselves, for a partner who can alter the rules in a way that enables them to assess the availability of alternatives, while denying the other partner the ability to do the same gains an advantage in the sexual relationship.
This is why you can't make simplyfying assumptions, because the rules themselves are subject to debate.