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Editor’s Note: This is the first installation of a reboot of the Amateur Ethicist column. This is a site of moral inquiry open to all Harvard Community members. Please send your submissions to this link.

I am a freshman active in two student organizations. There is a genius guy who is my superior in both of these organizations. Even though we have very little in common personality-wise, I am absolutely obsessed with him. I am constantly trying to impress him, and sometimes we'll make eye contact for too long, which makes me think he likes me, too. I feel like something is forbidden about it because he's my superior, and I'm also not totally sure I'd actually want to date him, to be honest. What should I do??? —Signed, Dubious Debbie.

Yours is a question of forbidden desire. Why do we desire? And what makes a desire forbidden?

The ancient Greeks saw desire as a kind of appetite. The hungry desired food; the thirsty desired water; the curious desired knowledge. The same was true for sexual desire: to long for another person was to desire them because they possessed something you lacked.

This concept of desire gave shape to certain relationship structures within Greek society, many of which we have fortunately abandoned. Still, our present-day understanding of desire is not too different. Our feelings of attraction often stem from qualities we find in others that we want to cultivate in ourselves.

There is something Greek about your obsession. You call your crush a “genius guy,” which makes me think that you see him as more knowledgeable and confident than yourself. You repeatedly try to impress him, and I wonder whether your efforts are a product of this perceived asymmetry. Maybe he embodies certain virtues you wish to attain, and it is this perception that makes you desire him.

The Greek model can also help us understand your uncertainty. You say that you don’t know if you would actually date him. Perhaps what you truly want is to be like your superior, even if you think that you want to have him instead.

Regardless of this uncertainty, it is still true that you are experiencing some form of desire, and there is nothing wrong with that. Because we often lack control over the things (or people) we desire, it would be unfair to blame you on the basis of those feelings.

Whether you should act upon those feelings is a separate matter.

Because he is your superior in not one but two student organizations, it is fair to say that your crush has power over you. Some will argue that such a power asymmetry precludes the possibility of genuine consent. Suppose he is your comp director and asks you out for a date. Even if you do want to go on this date and agree, it might be difficult for you to discern whether your agreement to date him was motivated by attraction or a desire to succeed in the comp. That he has control over your future in both student organizations might pressure you to choose in one direction. That might hinder your ability to practice consent freely.

I believe that this line of thinking — what philosopher Amia Srinivasan critically refers to as the “power differential, no consent” rationale — can be sensibly applied to certain cases: An unpaid intern and their powerful boss; an ambitious graduate student and their dissertation advisor; a young actor and a successful Hollywood director.

In other contexts, however, applying the principle is more complicated. Is any difference in power sufficient to eliminate the possibility of consent? Many oppressive systems structure our social reality. It seems implausible to decree that only individuals with the same amount of power (however we might define that) date each other. When is a power differential big enough to render dating forbidden?

While I do not have the answers to these questions, my advice for you is this: Don’t act on your desire unless you are willing to navigate a relationship with an embedded power asymmetry. (You might even find pleasure in that asymmetry. Maybe you start dating him, comp is over, and suddenly you find yourself no longer desiring him — I won’t be the judge of that.) At the end of the day, though there is a clear power differential between you and your superior, only you can judge whether that difference will limit your capacity to consent — anything else would be a paternalistic infringement on the exercise of your freedom.

Of course, this reasoning is all contingent on your superior liking you back. If he does, then he shouldn’t act on those feelings, especially in light of his pedagogical obligations, as Srinivasan reminds us. But to be perfectly honest, he probably doesn’t like you. I, too, spent my freshman year thinking that another man at this school liked me solely because of our periods of prolonged eye contact. Indeed, staring can be a way to express romantic interest, and many times I struggled to know whether he was looking at me with that intention. (He wasn’t, I later learned.)

So don’t assume your superior likes you simply because of his gaze. It might be that he is playing power games with you, in which case you will hopefully desire him no longer. It is also possible that your crush is simply a socially awkward person. He is a Harvard student, after all.

Andrés Muedano ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Philosophy concentrator in Adams House. He can be reached at ethicist@thecrimson.com.