ubiquitin: I think a point that gets blurred in these conversations , is although he doesn’t have a halachic obligation, he may have a moral one.
Your morals or the other fellow’s morals? Who is deciding what is moral? And to further expand on your comment, see my additional points below, in this reply.
If the marriage is over, certainly if he has moved on and remarried a get should be given in (nearly?) all circumstances.
Who decided that the marriage is “over”? If they mutually agree that the marriage is over, then normally your point is correct. A Get must be granted (by him) and accepted (by her.) That would, indeed, be the case in the majority of cases where they both agree the marriage is over.
But there are even exceptions to that. To take an example, if one of the parties halachicly wronged the other party, and that wrong still hasn’t been corrected by the party who committed the wrong, it might be halachicly correct to not yet proceed with the Get. Rav Moshe Shternbuch shlit”a (and possibly Rav Elyashiv zt’l, as well) have teshuvos, for example, where if the wife went to non-Jewish court (arkaos) for marital assets distribution or for custody, in contravention with halacha prohibiting arkaos, and received things that are halachicly unentitled to, not only can he withhold a Get until she undoes what she received and wholly rectifies him for his loss, but he can even remarry while she’s still in breach of halacha. (He even debates whether he can remarry without a heter meah rabbonim; he concludes m’ikur hadin he could but it is proper for him to first receive the heter.)
But suppose another example where one spouse thinks it’s over whereas the other spouse still insists on restoring shalom bayis, we can’t tell the one asking for shalom bayis that it is “over”.
Now granted, he may not be strictly speaking obligated to do so, and pressuring him to do so unwillingly may create a real problem of Get meusah. But that doesn’t change the fact that he is a bad person, who deserves shame.
Now this point I must take strong exception to. If strictly speaking he’s not halachicly obligated to divorce, as you give in your example, then generally speaking he has no moral, ethical or other imperative to do so even if she wants to divorce. Halacha is replete with examples (check the Gemora as well as Shulchan Aruch) of when one spouse asks for a divorce, when the other spouse desires to continue the marriage, where we deny the request for a divorce. The more frequent examples are when the wife wants to divorce but there’s at least one circumstance that comes to mind where if the husband wants to divorce, but the wife doesn’t want to divorce, where we don’t let him divorce her. (This example I’m thinking of is m’ikur hadin m’doraysa, applicable to all Jews not just to Ashkenazim who have Rabbeinu Gershom.)
Ashkenazim have the Cherem Rabbeinu Gershom which prohibits a husband from divorcing his wife even if he wants to, if she does not want to. But all Jews m’doraysa have the reverse example of when the husband doesn’t want to divorce then he does not have to divorce and has the right to choose to continue the marriage. And he may even summon his wife to beis din to enforce her obligations to him as his wife, if she isn’t performing them. The fact that Rabbeinu Gershom extended further where we can deny a request for divorce, in more cases than what are covered m’doraysa, demonstrates clearly that denying a divorce request is often proper.
My underlying point is that this newfangled idea that if one spouse wants to divorce when the other does not, then the one wanting it generally has the right to it over the objections of the other spouse, is wrongheaded and has no basis in halacha. (L’havdil, even among the non-Jews, until fairly recently, courts would routinely deny petitions for divorce if the court believed divorcing was unwarranted despite one spouse requesting it.) Of course, when there’s “cause”, i.e. a spouse is actively committing physical abuse, etc., where halacha states is a valid reason to grant a divorce against the will of the declining spouse, such exceptions are recognized as valid basis’ to grant it even against his will. But those are exceptions, not the rule.