India, Nov. 15 -- It may be the oldest human story - the story of desire, not always moral. Orion's pursuit of the Pleiades comes to no good in the Legend of the Seven Sisters, a story as old as the history of civilisation. and told all over the world in different iterations. That story of desire, however, ends with the protagonists illuminating the skies as familiar constellations. The latest story of desire to capture our imagination - involving a lynchpin of the Artificial Intelligence boom, trillions of dollars of investor wealth, and geopolitical ramifications - may not have such a fairytale conclusion. At the heart of this tale is the desire of Jensen Huang, the co-founder of chip giant Nvidia, and the ethical questions posed by his conduct. To begin with, is having an extra-marital affair morally wrong? The teleological ethicists would say that unless the affair causes harm to anyone or has bad consequences it is not morally wrong. The believers in deontological ethics would contradict this by maintaining that the morality of an action, an affair in this case, is independent of the consequences. In this case, the breach of a social - deemed sacred by many - contract between the married partners would be enough to judge an extramarital affair as morally wrong. Neither view fully resolves the question. While the first excuses any sufficiently discreet affair, the second reduces morality to the breaking of an arbitrarily constructed rule. Perhaps the more important question, then, is about the person having an affair, and not the affair per se. Then, Aristotle stated that the goal of human life is happiness, a subset of human flourishing. If that's true, should happiness emanating from sexual desire have such moral underpinnings to begin with? Perhaps. Because human flourishing is defined, and there is some consensus there, as an activity in accordance with the best and complete virtue. The Greek philosophers were quite clear about the presence of many different virtues for many different groups of people. A king's virtue, for example, need not be the virtue of a common blacksmith. A queen's virtue, in their worldview, is to be chaste and tend to the loom and distaff. That is what Hector, the heroic, ill-fated crown prince of Troy in The Illiad, tells his wife Andromache. And what Penelope does, as Christopher Nolan's latest adaptation of the other Homeric epic, The Odyssey, has depicted. Virtues continue to exist under separate categories for men and women. Indeed, if Jensen Huang were a woman, the narrative of this affair would have acquired an extra vocabulary surrounding the F word. Feminism. But coming back to the ethics of anaffair, even philosophically speaking,there are entitlements, and a sense of being owed some more, that come to menalong with power. How they use thoseentitlements defines them. Both Achilles and Agamemnon are great warriors; only one moves with an impunity that has no scope for reflection and remorse. Agamemnon meets an un-warriorlike and ignominious fate - killed by his wife in the royal bathtub upon homecoming after the Trojan War - matching his conduct and denying him a heroic legacy. What is important, however, is that even Achilles, one of the greatest heroes in Greek mythology, is forced to course correct when he deviates from the ethical path over passion. His loss of self-control at various points during the Trojan War - Agamemnon taking his prize (a Trojan woman), death of Patroklos on the battlefield, and final battle with Hector - threatens his place as a hero. Unlike Agamemnon, however, Achilles regains self-control, as demonstrated during his secret meeting with Troy's King Priam. Self-control is, arguably, placed at the highest pedestal in the hierarchy of aretai (virtues). No wonder Zeus, the god of gods, is seen as a lesser being owing to his complete lack of self-control in the face of desire. Perhaps, then, the problem with anaffair is one of self-control. Allowingdesire to overpower oneself, abandoning self-control, is where the pursuit ofhappiness deviates from the pursuit of human flourishing in the classical sense. Indic philosophy proposes a similar idea by pitting the self-control of Ram against the lack of it in Ravan. A leader's mastery over himself is the fountainhead of his mastery over other people. Whether we like it or not, many ofour contemporary ideas hark back to the classical mores, especially in terms ofsex and desire. Despite taking pride in being one of the most individualistic societies in the world, Americans still fight theirelections around family issues. The sanctity of marriage is projected as supreme during election campaigns even today. An intact marriage, or the appearance thereof,indicates self-control. The self-controlled man, as classical texts teach us, is better at performing the essential tasks that his superior position - as a legislator - demands. Same goes for business leaders because their decisions can impact the material realities of many other human beings' lives. Voters and shareholders are almost identical in treating private discipline as evidence of public reliability. In such a socio-political context, the desire of Nvidia's former CEO is bound to be seen as immoral, in line with what has happened in the case of other powerful men's affairs. A consequential man does not have the luxury of leaving inconsequential ramifications from his most private actions. In this particular case, the involvement of a Chinese businesswoman, Alice Huang, complicates the issue further. US intelligence officials believe that she was recruited to gain and share information about Nvidia's chips, essential in powering AI data centres. Whether she is a Chinese spy working to undermine US export restrictions is still not clear. But the ethical question does not involve her nationality. It involves only the lapse on the part of a man whose actions have disproportionate repercussions. Given Jensen Huang's stature, his private affairs could never have been seen as just private. In the end, it must be underscored that desire is neither moral nor immoral. It is ancient, and as ancient stories tell us it is also nearly impossible to be rid of it. However, the chain of actions that desire sets in motion has to bear the burden of moral judgement. The ethical question of Huang's desire, therefore, has little to do with the desire per se. It lies in the potential consequences his desire may have for his family, and a very large number of people in his country and elsewhere....