THESE PARENTS THESIS : [A] ETHICIST ESSAY

LET'S START WITH the obvious point. Breaking into your phone and reading this document was a very serious violation of your privacy, an act at least as indicative of marital trouble as anything you recorded there.

You don't say that he ever apologized for that invasion, while you have clearly explained to him that keeping a journal has long been how you process negative feelings.

Was keeping this document itself a betrayal, given the purpose it served? Surely not. You're entitled to your thoughts and to your own ways of dealing with them.

Nor was it wrong to keep the journal from your spouse.

Privacy isn't deception, and you don't lose your right to an interior life when you get married.

What about bringing up the journal during counseling ? There was nothing wrong with drawing on contemporaneous notes about how you felt at the time.

Therapy regularly deals in subjective experience. What would have been a mistake was to present those entries as a trustworthy account of disputed events when that's not what they were intended to be.

Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah's analysis continues to part [2].