democracy

To be honest, I too have always been puzzled by the fact that in our society, infidelity between partners is seen as a normative matter (with a wink), even on a moral level and certainly on a legal level. After all, there is a breach of contract here and harm to another person. It is true that if there is consent from the other party, then it is permissible from a moral and legal point of view. In my opinion, the cheater should be allowed to be sued in court for breach of contract and an appropriate penalty should be imposed. Although it is impossible to bind a spouse to their spouse by force, it is a breach of contract and there is definitely room for a sanction to be imposed for it. In any case, unlike you, I don’t see this as something like murder or theft, which are direct harms to the body or property of another person. Here I did my own thing and the other person was harmed anyway. In a certain sense, this is harm by omission (not exactly, of course) and not by action. Beyond that, and perhaps more fundamentally, the harm here is the result of a breach of contract and not of a fundamental right. A person’s right to their property and body is a fundamental right that is not based on a contract, and therefore the obligation to protect it is incumbent on every person in the world. In contrast, the right to fidelity of a spouse is based on the contract between them (and therefore it is incumbent only on the spouse), and therefore I think this is contract law and not something criminal.