Answer the question: What is the ethical principle that can be applied in the scenario to come up with a sound decision for both parties?
Scenario:
A couple sought treatment from a therapist following the husband’s discovery that his wife was having an affair. The couple explained that they had agreed from the outset of their relationship to have a sexually open marriage, with the provision that each partner would be fully informed of the other’s sexual exchanges with outsiders and that outside sexual relationships would never become “emotional.” In this case, the husband became irate and cited his wife’s affair after learning that she had pursued sexual relations with the same man on several occasions over 6 months and had weekly phone conversations in which they discussed their personal lives. In initial sessions, the wife professed remorse for violating the couple’s prior agreement and agreed to suspend the outside relationship. However, as treatment progressed, she expressed increasing despair over her lack of emotional fulfillment and disclosed her ambivalence about staying in the marriage. In subsequent sessions, she gained awareness of, and was able to articulate, both shame and enduring resentments of the couple’s own emotional and sexual relationship. Although the husband then tentatively agreed to a monogamous relationship at her request, he subsequently expressed resentment over the altered terms of their explicit marriage contract and renewed his attacks on her emotional infidelity. After several months of sorting through conflicting individual and relationship needs in therapy, the wife filed for divorce. -Margolin, 1982 From Treating Infidelity: Clinical and Ethical Directions
Answer the question:
What is the ethical principle that can be applied in the scenario to come up with a sound decision for both parties?
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