Sports agent Myron Bolitar is poised on the edge of the big time. So is Christian Steele, a rookie quarterback and Myron's prized client. But when Christian gets a phone call from a former girlfriend, a woman who everyone, including the police, believes is dead, the deal starts to go sour. Trying to unravel the truth about a family's tragedy, a woman's secret, and a man's lies, Myron is up against the dark side of his business where image and talent make you rich, but the truth can get you killed.In novels that crackle with wit and suspense, Edgar Award winner Harlan Coben has created one of the most fascinating and complex heroes in suspense fiction Myron Bolitar a hotheaded, tenderhearted sports agent who grows more and more engaging and unpredictable with each page-turning appearance.
"Having spontaneity in a relationship is good, but if your guy or girl is always canceling at the last minute to do something that 'just came up,' that's a deal-breaker," matchmaker Bonnie Winston told Insider. "It shows they do not respect your time, your plans and your interests. For example, if the person blows you off without much notice for something like a sports thing with their friends, that's a deal-breaker."
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"Not being close to or on the same page concerning spending money is a deal-breaker and many cannot get over the strain of finances," Winston said. "Additionally some people feel being consistently cheap with everything, bad tipping, or rudeness to waiters is a deal-breaker as it indicates that someone is just not generous in other areas."
Although it seems like a simple thing to note as a deal-breaker, many people ignore the signs when there's a lack of interest from their partner, and according to Winston, it may not always be as simple to spot as you think.
"If one partner makes the other partner feel unattractive, divvys out criticism of the way one dresses, comments on weight, or other things like that, it can come off as if they are not interested," she told Insider. "Likewise, if one person always talks about themselves and never shows interest in you, your life, your job, your friends, or your family, that can, and probably should be, seen as a deal-breaker."
For many people, lack of ambition or drive in a partner can be a huge turn-off. That doesn't mean that it's a deal-breaker for everyone. But according to relationship expert and dating adviser Jeffery L. Miller, it should be.
She continued: "Emotional abuse can be extremely damaging. Some examples include extreme control, like tracking your whereabouts, demanding that you don't spend time without them, and telling you that you are no good, worthless, and nothing without them. It can break someone down to the point that they don't believe they deserve any better and therefore continue to stay in an abusive relationship. If this is happening in your relationship, it should be a deal-breaker."
If you are with someone who is dealing with addiction, it can be tempting to stay with them. And while support from a partner can help people overcome addiction, if it's taking a toll on you and they aren't seeking help, it could be time to leave, Ho told Insider.
Using the tools of decision theory, we may define a measure of deal-breaker strength along these lines. We can ask how great a risk of eating animal products a person will take. The greater is this risk, the smaller is the deal breaker. The decision in the above example can be represented as follows:
Let us write S for satisfied and M for moral. The presence of animal products is a deal-breaker for the agent if she prefers \(S \& M\) to \(\lnot S \& M\), and prefers \(\lnot S \& M\) to \(S \& \lnot M\). If she is certain the food is non-vegan (\(p = 1\)), then she prefers not to eat it; but if she is certain the food is vegan (\(p = 0\)), her preference is reversed.
Before continuing, I would like to compare the analysis proposed above with a similar one suggested by Neil Manson, which also distinguishes stronger and weaker deal-breakers. The extent to which these analyses are incompatible is not entirely clear. But in any case, as I argue below, my proposal seems preferable, because it offers a deeper explanation.
Among non-fundamental global deal-breakers, we may distinguish weaker and stronger: X is globally at least as strong as Y if and only if every situation in which Y is a deal-breaker is also a situation in which X is a deal-breaker, i.e., \(D_X \supseteq D_Y\), where \(D_X\) and \(D_Y\) are the sets of situations in which, respectively, X and Y are deal-breakers. For example, the presence of meat may be for many vegans a stronger deal-breaker than the presence of animal products. If a person would not choose to eat animal products in a given situation, then a fortiori she would not choose to eat meat in the same situation. However, there may be situations in which, though she would not choose to eat meat, she would choose to eat, say, cheese. Notice, this gives us only a partial ordering of deal-breakers. In some cases, it may be that neither \(D_X \supseteq D_Y\) nor \(D_X \subseteq D_Y\) holds. In such cases, we may want to compare the relative size of \(D_X\) and \(D_Y\), but this will be difficult if, as seems likely, \(D_X\) and \(D_Y\) are both infinite.
As I say, this global definition may be closer to our ordinary notion. In what follows, however, I will focus solely on local deal-breakers, since this seems closer to what Dougherty has in mind. Moreover, it may be argued that, from the standpoint of moral evaluation, local deal-breakers are more relevant, since the moral evaluation of an action should attend to the particular features of the context in which it occurs.
What should we say about the wrongness in deception when we recognise that deal-breakers vary in strength? The following seems a plausible view. If a person acts in a way that morally requires the consent of another person, and this consent is secured through deception regarding a deal-breaker, then the wrongness of this action correlates positively with the strength of the deal-breaker. Actions which are enabled by deception with respect to strong deal-breakers are more wrong those enabled by deception with respect to weak deal-breakers. Moreover, some deal-breakers are so weak that the associated wrong is not serious. I begin by giving a general account of degrees of wrongness in deception, before applying this to the central case of deceiving people into sex.
This picture fits nicely with the general analysis of degrees of wrongness I have developed elsewhere (Brown 2016).Footnote 5 On this analysis, the degree of wrongness of an action depends on how similar it is to a right (non-wrong) action. How different would the action need to be for it to be right? For a given action A, consider an action \(A^*\) such that (i) \(A^*\) is right, and (ii) \(A^*\) is at least as similar to A as any right action.Footnote 6 The more similar \(A^*\) is to A, the less wrong is A.Footnote 7 Suppose, for example, A is an action of wrongful deception about a deal-breaker. Then \(A^*\) may be an act that is as similar as possible to A except it involves no deception. The relevant dimension of similarity here may be the amount, or level, of deception involved in the action. It seems natural to say that the amount of deception involved in A depends on the strength of the deal-breaker. The stronger this is, the more deception is involved, and hence the more dissimilar A is from \(A^*\), and the more wrong is A.
First, one might say deception invalidates consent only when it involves a sufficiently strong deal-breaker.Footnote 10 This would be to reject Premise 2. However, this may seem to misunderstand the widely accepted information requirement for valid consent. The reason why valid consent entails informed consent is that a person cannot validly consent to something if she does not know what she is consenting to. A person cannot, for example, validly consent to participate in risky drug trials if she does not know the risks. But if a person is deceived about a deal-breaker, even a very small one, then she does not know what she is consenting to. Alice, for example, does not know that she is consenting to have sex with a Republican. It seems difficult to maintain, therefore, that her consent is nonetheless valid.
Second, one might say non-consensual sex is seriously wrong only when it results from deception involving a sufficiently strong deal-breaker. This would be to reject Premise 1. However, one might reasonably be reluctant to say that non-consensual sex is sometimes only a minor wrong. As Dougherty point out, non-consensual sex is taken by some to be the definition of rape (Dougherty 2013, 721), yet surely rape is never only a minor wrong.
In my formal analysis, deal-breakers will be propositions. Let \(\varOmega \) be a finite set of states (finite for simplicity). A proposition X is a subset of \(\varOmega \). Let A be a set of actions. For each \(a \in A\), let there be a value function \(V_a : \varOmega \rightarrow \mathcal R\), where \(V_a(\omega )\) represents the value of performing a in \(\omega\).
An immediate consequence of these definitions is that if X is a deal-breaker favouring a over b, then \(\overlineX\) is a deal-breaker favouring b over a. And the strength of the former is inversely related to the strength of the latter.
Thus the ratio r represents the lowest probability such that the agent may assign this probability to X without preferring b to a. We may therefore use r as a measure of the strength of X as a deal-breaker favouring a over b. The smaller is r, the stronger is the deal-breaker.
Clearly, on the above analysis, whether a proposition is a deal-breaker depends on what I called the ex ante probability function. X may be a deal-breaker relative to one probability function P, but not relative to another \(P'\). In this way, the analysis concerns what I earlier called local deal-breakers. These deal-breakers are localised to particular circumstances, represented here by particular ex ante probability functions. 2ff7e9595c
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