My former husband is a brilliant and accomplished man who developed a crystal-meth addiction that recently led to the end of our 30-year marriage. Not long ago, he was arrested on drug-possession charges. He has substantial resources, and he hired a couple of lawyers to fight the charges. I wrote to the judge directly requesting leniency and treatment rather than prison time, highlighting his positive qualities and potential for recovery.
When the case was reassigned to a new judge and my ex discovered my letter, he was furious, feeling betrayed. He insists his lawyers’ sole purpose is to clear his name and prevent punishment. I’m now questioning both the ethical duties of his legal team and my own role.
I struggle between wanting to help my former husband and respecting his wishes. Do his lawyers have any moral obligation to address his addiction, or should they focus solely on legal victory? How can I help him get rehabilitation without overstepping boundaries? I’m desperate to find a path that leads to his healing, not just his freedom. — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
Your ex-husband is right about his lawyers. We don’t want legal advocates making their own independent decisions about how their clients should be penalized or processed. Our particular offices and roles come with particular priorities. If you’re an art curator, you can’t decide to shut off your museum’s climate controls out of concern for the planet and let the paintings in your care mildew — or to sell off a painting because you think Oxfam needs the money more than the museum needs the canvas. If you’re in charge of a nurse’s union, you cannot make your primary goal the containment of our nation’s health care costs. A large and indefinite number of things are of ethical significance; our professional roles entail that some have priority over others.
But he is wrong about you. You’re not his lawyer, paid to keep him out of prison, and he shouldn’t treat you like an extension of his legal team. You saw someone you care for struggling with addiction and hoped the system might respond to his situation with treatment rather than punishment. Your letter wasn’t an act of betrayal; it was an act of compassion.
This doesn’t mean that you should expect him to be grateful for your intervention. It’s problematic that you don’t seem to have gone through regular legal channels. (Judges are typically prohibited from considering private communications about a case outside the knowledge or presence of both parties.) What’s more, the criminal-justice system may not be well calibrated for delivering him the care that he requires. On your own, you decided to lobby for leniency, evidently assuming that the choice was between prison and treatment. Your former husband saw, perhaps correctly, a different set of options.
However commendable your desire to help your ex, it may be time to accept that your role in his life has fundamentally changed. Crystal-meth addiction is notoriously devastating, both to users and to those who care about them. Although I can’t say whether he will be able to move on from meth, I suspect it will be best, at this point, if you moved on from him.
Readers Respond
Last week’s question was from a young man with a particular “type.” He wrote: “I’m a straight white dude and recent college grad who has very progressive beliefs and is looking for a committed partner who, in time, can equitably raise a family with me. I have almost zero honest-to-goodness physical preferences. I’ve dated women of various shapes and sizes, various skin, hair and eye colors, etc., and have been attracted to all of them. Here’s what’s controversial among my friends: I want to prioritize dating women of color. I’m after a cross-cultural relationship. I believe very strongly that one of the main ways to combat racism is through relationships. Part of me thinks that I will always be somewhat disappointed if what ends up becoming one of the most important relationships in my life is with another white person. If someone is a woman of color, that checks a box for me in a real way. … Here’s my question: Despite my well-meaning antiracist principles, is this preference (as friends have suggested) wrong, insensitive or somehow itself racist?”
In his response, the Ethicist noted: “Your devotion to self-improvement is impressive. Like a dish of quinoa and kale that you may once have forced down and now actively enjoy, a woman of color could, you think, raise your game, supplying something like antiracist roughage. You’d be using your erotic ecumenism to level up. Where your shallower classmates have hookups, your dates would be teach-ins. … Treating a relationship like a seminar can lead to trouble: What happens when you’ve finished your fieldwork, read through the syllabus and are ready for a new instructor? If the model is, instead, a healthful dietary regimen, will you allow yourself cheat days? … Play, rather than work, may sometimes be the better approach in the romantic realm. Although you’re not objectifying your hypothetical partner, you are, just a little, instrumentalizing her. That’s not to say you aren’t entitled to pursue this campaign of strenuous self-optimizing. Just be transparent about your box-checking ambitions. Perhaps some prospects will be grateful for your offer to put your privileges at their disposal while you embark on your journey of uplift. But — how to put this? — I suspect that most would rather be your honey bun than your grain bowl.” (Reread the full question and answer here.)
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As a Brown woman, I find the letter writer’s vision of antiracism entirely misguided. It both objectifies and instrumentalizes any hypothetical partner. Any self-respecting woman of color, thus approached about this agenda, would decline to participate. Failure to understand this is a clear indication that he has a lot of work to do before jumping to the unwarranted conclusion that he knows what the work is. His lecture about the merits of his plan is, in itself, a huge red flag. Of course he can date whomever he wishes. But his self-centered focus on personal improvement is incredibly offensive, as is his idea that this kind of partnership would be, on his part, a charitable act. — Rebecca
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Karl Marx criticized the capitalist system in large part because it objectifies human relations. Within capitalism, people aren’t appreciated for their intrinsically unique individual worth, and their value is reduced to the roles that they play in the system, as workers, but also as business owners, whose humanity is also diminished. Similarly, the letter writer speaks as if he’s filling a role in some academic virtue industrial complex, where signaling, and signaling only, determines worth. I would think that any dating target of his should run far, far away. — Michael
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I think that the letter writer’s mission is noble. I was born in the South to a white father and a Hispanic mother with an accent. I always felt out of place at a homogeneous white school. I had very curly hair and a “tan” year round. Not to mention the horror when a friend called my house and couldn’t understand my mom when she picked up the phone. I married a white woman of European ancestry to ensure my children would have nice, straight hair and fair skin. I achieved my mission, but now that I’m older, I wouldn’t have done the same thing. My advice to the letter writer: prioritize finding a partner you loves and one you can share a life with in peace. — J
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Holy wow. The Ethicist was gentle on this letter writer, but I will be more blunt: He is tokenizing and objectifying potential mates and relegating them to the status of tool in his antiracist toolbox. That’s not fair to them, or to the work of antiracism. I would hope that in this letter writer’s zeal to educate himself, he learns that it is not the job of people of color (or women, L.G.B.T.Q.+ people, disabled folks, etc.) to take on the burden of being a signifier of his antiracist bona fides. He may not see it that way, but I bet his partner, eventually, would. And he can do the work of antiracism with a white partner and children too; in fact, having white children whom he can raise with antiracist values may be even more of a service to the cause. — Shasta
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I think this is a fascinating discussion. When I was younger, I used to imagine that the way to fix racism was to force everyone to marry outside of their race of origin. At some point I grew up and realized that it’s in the nature of humans to marginalize or even enslave other humans, so this would never work. Seems to me that this young man would do best to date lots of women from all over — he might well meet a soul mate of a different race or color. At the same time, it occurs to me that people have been arranging marriages for many generations. Is this so different? Arranged marriages, mind you, when arranged for political purposes, seldom resulted in love. Can one “arrange” a marriage for oneself? I’m sure it’s been done before. In the end we all carry ideas of the perfect mate into our partnership searches whether we publicize them or not. My worry in this particular case would be that this young man is sufficiently idealistic that he may not be prepared for the messiness of a real relationship with whomever he chooses — his friends might be responding to this idealism more than the actual idea of his choice of mate. — Carol
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I‘m a psychotherapist who often works with clients who are trying to marry the “right kind of person” for whatever their agenda is (same religion, financial prospects, etc). While I applaud anyone using their head in romantic issues, some swing too far at the expense of the heart, which I will here name physical and emotional attraction. I encourage the letter writer to remain open-minded in his goals, but also to fellow genuine attraction with real curiosity. Who knows where it might lead? There is no reason a partner of his own race can’t reliably work alongside advancing social causes, although it might take more imagination. — Joanne
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