Is Incest Morally Wrong?
My opinion is that as long as it is consenting adults, then there is no moral obligation to abstain from such an act. If there are no bad ramifications, then the only counterargument I have heard is that it is "icky". Also, if they do end up having a baby and that baby is deformed, then is that still a reason not to have it? Life is better than no life. As long as their life is a net positive, then the life should be worth it, and the act of making the baby isn't immoral.
Comments (61)
It's willful engagement in behavior that is likely to produce an unsafe condition of elevated likelihood for birth defects. "Life is better than no life" would not be a way to justify drinking alcohol during pregnancy or competing in a boxing competition while pregnant. Why would it be any different in this scenario?
:up:
Quoting Hyper
(I'm leaving this thread now :grimace:)
So, 3.5 billion or so people of the opposite gender vanished overnight? That's a thinker. I suppose life must carry on, sure. Even if trapped on a desert island with no reasonable chance of rescue or similar would make one ponder the same: Would it be worth it? Even if a newspaper somehow washed up ashore notifying you of an all-out world war with major cities being destroyed leading you to reasonably believe you might possibly be the last cradle of humanity, it still leaves much to consider.
It's a good reason to prevent conceiving it in the first place. Many lives are much worse than no life - ask the people who apply for assisted suicide. Knowingly risking the welfare of another person in order to satisfy your lust is morally wrong.
If the informed, uninfluenced consenting adults decide to embark on an incestuous relationship, they should begin by the one who least desires offspring being sterilized. That way, if the relationship ends, the one who desires children may still have them with a different partner. No, not his other sister!
Quoting Hyper
Good reason for the act not to be done. The sexual satisfaction of two people who have agency and a choice of other partners who might satisfy them weighed against a lifetime of suffering for one innocent victim with no choices at all is a net loss. A big one!
I don't condemn the act between freely and maturely consenting adults; I do condemn disregard for the consequences to others.
You have to be really careful using principles like that, because as written they provide support for eugenics. IE, people who have heritable conditions having a child together is just definitionally "wilful engagement in behaviour that is likely to produce an unsafe condition of elevated likelihood for birth defects". If having a child is wrong on that basis, you've got a conclusive argument for people with genetic diseases having kids committing an evil act. Moreover, your reason doesn't touch people shagging who're both sterilised.
The irritating thing with taboo subjects like this is articulating why they're wrong without modus tollens impacting all of your other moral principles. As @Hyper noted, this is just lazy reasoning and dogpiling.
Quoting Hyper
A better reason for claiming that incest should not be considered as permissible is that the conditions for consent to it don't make that much sense, the hypothetical scenario in the OP is not representative of the scenarios where incest occurs. It's a bit like saying that murder is permissible since there are conditions in which killing is permissible.
If hypothetically you had two sterile 60 year olds who were separated at birth, fell in love, married and shagged...what's wrong there? But simultaneously that's not what people are imagining when talking about incest.
This presupposes beforehand that there is something wrong with it. We don't worry about "conditions for consent" when it comes to neutral acts.
Quoting fdrake
The prohibition on incest is a form of eugenics, and that's okay.
The argument here that better logicians have made includes a condition, namely the condition that no procreation is possible (e.g. a couple that is infallibly known to be sterile).
Alright, which forms are eugenics are good and which are bad?
I would apply the principle that it is never immoral to abstain from copulation in view of the extreme hardship that would result on the part of the person conceived. Rare diseases and the deformities that can result from incest certainly fall under this umbrella.
Generally, I've found that secular moral systems will permit it (are there exceptions to this?), religious ones will not. If we wish to avoid the issue of producing unfit offspring, we could always just make the hypothetical about gay incest. In any case, we still allow people with inheritable conditions to reproduce even if it gives their offspring a higher chance of getting the condition. Or the brother-sister pair could just wear condoms.
Of course it doesn't. They're not producing conditions that are likely to make an innocent suffer. Quoting fdrake
I wouldn't go so far as evil. They are committing a selfish, irresponsible act with willful disregard for the risk they're imposing for a non-consenting third person - and the community. The analogous fatalaty charge would be 'reckless endangerment'.
Quoting fdrake
However, there are cases of adult siblings pairing up. Unless one partner has some significant undue influence over the other, that's consensual. The run-of-the mill child-molesting parent is not under consideration here.
Quoting fdrake
If they were 60, nobody would notice or care. They're more likely to be in their teens or early 20's, and not necessarily with a history of separation. Still no moral problem, so long as they take effective measures against procreation.
"Never being immoral" isn't the same thing as "being required not to". It's never immoral to eat ice cream, but you are not required not to. Separate ideas.
Would you go further to say that people who would have rare diseases and deformities are committing a moral evil if they have kids?
We are talking about when eugenics is permissible. Never immoral = never impermissible.
So are: Is it immoral? and Should it be illegal?
Think those are separate too. There are plenty of moral things which are illegal (responsible consumption of harmless drugs), and plenty of legal things which are immoral (taking advantage of someone's kindness).
I'm afraid I don't understand. Are you saying eugenics is never immoral?
That's what I said, yes.
I am saying that any form of eugenics which falls under the principle set out is not immoral/impermissible. To give you an example of this, when a couple with a genetic disease that will cause extreme hardship to their (future) progeny decides not to procreate, they are engaged in a permissible form of eugenics.
Cue schopenhauer1 in 3, 2, 1...
Okay yes. And why does that make incest impermissible when there's no chance of procreation? Say with our 60 year old sterile separated at birth story?
My duties to, and roles towards, my, e.g., sisters are plausibly such that I should not be having sexual relations with them; when taken from the Aristotelian position.
I never said it was. I was answering your question about eugenics.
At the very least I would say that is impermissible on account of societal example and norms, but I'm not looking to have that conversation. It would at least require a more nuanced thread.
Quoting Vera Mont
"Legal != immoral != socially acceptable" looks like a whole other thread.
Aye. Which the OP implicitly stipulates as irrelevant (in its case).
If not I guess that would still not make it morally wrong, given mutual consent and lack of coercion, but rather inadvisable. That said an argument could be made that it is morally wrong on account of the effect on family and friends if they knew about it. Of course it could be kept secret.
I think his point is that if the only option is incest, you might. I disagree, and think you'd be obliged not to. But htere we go..
I think two sterilized adults should be able to do whatever they want.
Then why did you drag the legality into this one? The OP question was whether incest between consenting adults is immoral - not whether it should be forbidden by law.
I was merely answering
Quoting fdrake
Plus it's icky... I don't know how natural that reaction is but fear of snakes, for instance, is innate. And if it's innate disgust, I think we should trust nature.
I think it's a proxy against molestation as well. Obviously it's theoretically possible to consent to incest, but it so rarely occurs between two consenting adults that it's used as an identifier something is terribly amiss.
But if you favor eugenics, why limit based upon consanguinity? Why not use more accurate genetic testing?
And I win the argument here for knowing the word "consanguinity."
Quoting Outlander
Adding to this, I would also argue that there is a psychological dimension to this as well; we evaluate the mental health of people's decisions. Outside of religious and elitist ideals of pure blood delusions, when people live close to each other, such as within a family, and form sexual attraction, it generally arise out of issues in forming social normality.
The Westermarck Effect shows that people growing up together forms aversion towards attraction. It's seen both between biological siblings and those who aren't biologically linked. But genetical similarity can also produce attraction, seen in relatives who never grew up together and meet as adults.
So, human's seem to form aversion of incest through the Westermarck Effect, a socially formed programming of their attraction mechanism that prevents incest. And incest that is occurring may happen due to a problem or issue with that process forming properly.
A good explanation for it might be that humans were generally living closer together as a family and the Westermarck Effect formed properly because of it. But civilisation broke up these structures faster than evolution could keep up, and so distance between family members screwed up that programming to properly form. Either families split up, family members were too distant to each other, or other psychological traumas prevented it from forming.
From an evolutionary perspective, incest does not make sense, and so nature has a lot of functions to avoid incest from happening. Many animals have strong scent cues to avoid it, but human's generally form it through social structures and processes programming our brain and chemistry.
But just like many things in modern society, we break against the norms of our species evolution through culturally formed behaviors, and thus we have broken up family structures of our species into a culturally formed structure, dependent on societal behaviors rather than what we developed as animals.
We have less social programming in our modern world to avoid incest. And the latest findings that incest is far more common than previously thought, support that conclusion.
So is it morally wrong? If we're applying our behavior to the conditions of our species, many animals will perform incest if there's no other mating partners available, but seen as how many people there are in the world, we can only conclude that incestual behavior is a psychological defect of failed social programming among relatives; primarily by our modern society standards not aligning with our natural state of evolutionary programming.
It then comes down to if we can apply morality to such a psychological defect, or which defective behavior that we would consider immoral. It could be said that every psychologically deviant behavior that is destructive in society is immoral as every one of them are formed as psychological defects, and in that case incest is immoral. But if we aren't considering psychological deviant behavior as immoral and more of an involuntary mental illness, then it is a form of mental illness formed out of a failure to form our natural avoidances of incest. Just like we have other mental illnesses that's formed in modern society because we're not aligning with what is natural for us as a species, for example how modern society increase our stress levels to such dangerous levels that it produces brain damage.
It is rather worrying that incest is so common in society as it is. The 1 out of 7000 is very telling, but that's only counting the times when incest leads to childbirth. There's such an obvious obscured number in those statistics seen as incest are more common without producing a child. So the statistical number might be a lot higher. But in my conclusion, not that surprising.
Quoting Christoffer
That is just eugenics for the disabled.
That's why I wrote out both paths, not to propose it is, but as a form of question. You either attribute acts in society that happens out of the psychological problems people have as immoral, and in that case you use moral values to judge acts out of the psychological state they're in.
Or you make no moral value apply and accept that there are only different psychological states which produce certain behaviors.
The problem with morality overall is that people want to talk about if an act is moral or not, but all acts comes from the psychology of a person, and that psychology can be defective.
Where do you draw the line between a decision that is psychologically affected and one that is not? Because the fact is, there are no acts that aren't psychological.
So, are you calling psychopaths disabled? ADHD? People suffering from trauma? PTSD? Alcoholism? Stress syndromes?
What about what we call "normal states of mind"? What is a normal state of mind?
If all acts are psychological, then what is a disability? And what can be judged as moral and immoral?
Might the bolded part not assume the answer here a bit?
Across history, there has been a wide amount of disagreement about the shape of the Earth (e.g. flat, spherical, cylindrical, etc.). Such beliefs tied into cultural norms, religion, philosophy, mythology, etc. Likewise, there has been widespread disagreement about the sources of infectious diseases, and these explanations have often been given culturally constructed moral dimensions (e.g. plague as God's vengeance). What people believed about these examples has varied by time and place, and people raised in one culture have tended to believe what others around them believed.
And yet, I don't think we would want to say that the shape of the Earth or the nature of infectious diseases is just about cultural norms. To be sure, our understanding of these is bound up in and filtered through such norms, since education, science, etc. are social practices, and the findings of science can fit into a metaphysical framework. But presumably we'd like to say that there is a "fact of the matter" about the shape of the planet or germ theory, and that this has been what has driven the evolution of cultural norms on this topic.
We don't generally think that "people have believed many different things about this at different times," represents a good reason to assume that most facts are primarily "cultural construction," so I think this appeal can be a red herring. It only makes sense if we assume that "what is good" is obvious. But what is "good" in many senses is often far from obvious, as the history of medicine can attest (e.g. treatments that do more harm than good).
I would tend to go with something like: "culture is a moral phenomenon," in the sense that Hegel lays out. E.g.:
For example:
This right here is an example of progressing from the particular prohibition, the "letter of the law," to the more general essence in question, "the spirit of the law." This is something people have an easier time doing if they live in a society that fosters human flourishing through education, etc.
We might disagree here that "consent" is the only issue at play, but either way we will be moving beyond "what norms are" towards "why they are," which in turn informs "what they should be," and our conception of "what they should be," in the aggregate, shapes what norms actually become.
And I would agree in general with this argument. Except to say that, at a fundamental level, there may indeed be "facts of the matter" which cultural norms - or metaphysical presuppositions - both proscribe and prescribe. So there may be things about reality - facts of the matter - that our presuppositions (of whatever kind) don't allow us to grasp. And also, yes, perhaps there are facts of the matter when it comes to incest-prohibitions, but these would be more like "genetic imperatives," for which there is no trivial translation into a moral vocabulary.
Life created in that way is morally and genetically wrong.
At a moral standpoint, having a child with someone that you are related to will cause the child to get many unfortunate traits that will just cause the child to suffer. Even if life is created, it would not be right as it would live in constant pain as well as the child would not live for very long.
Genetically speaking, having a child through incest is completely against the point of procreating. Sexual reproduction is done so that recessive diseases would be taken out of the lineage and the DNA to become better. It is even makes people want to not have any sort of sexual relationship with family members.
In both cases it would be wrong, but let me know why you think it isn't.
Is it wrong to marry a duck-bill Platypus?
Depending on the disability, yes. If someone has a disability that will basically stop them from living a fulfilling life why would they risk it on passing it on to their children? People with disabilities like this consult doctors in order to see if they are able to have children that won't inherit those genes. It would be morally wrong to put their children through something like that. It's worse to bar someone from truly living their life than barring someone with a disability to have a child that will also have that same disability.
This isn't really challenge (though, i probably would choose to challenge the use of innate here) but do you propose a reason many (significant numbers) of people are naturally not predisposed to be fearful of snakes? I'm one, so i'm genuinely curious here.
Aside from it being 'right' or 'wrong' one might want to consider whether there is anything about incest that makes such relationships problematic. Do two closely related people in sexual relationships have the same, greater, or fewer problems arising in their relationship than people who are not related?
Even if incestuous relationships were unusually happy doesn't mean society would necessarily change the moral code.
Offspring of incestuous relationships are not invariably penalized genetically, though the rate of unfortunate consequences are fairly high:
It's hereditary so you could not have inherited it but more likely you grew over that innate fear (well, more like anxiety).
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/innate-fear-of-snakes-and-spiders-a-survival-instinct-found-in-babies-293462#:~:text=Scientists%20at%20the%20Max%20Planck,could%20have%20learned%20this%20reaction
"(a) A person commits the offense of incest when such person engages in sexual intercourse or sodomy, as such term is defined in Code Section 16-6-2, with a person whom he or she knows he or she is related to by blood, by adoption, or by marriage as follows:
(1) Father and child or stepchild;
(2) Mother and child or stepchild;
(3) Siblings of the whole blood or of the half blood or by virtue of adoption;
(4) Grandparent and grandchild of the whole blood or of the half blood or by virtue of adoption;
(5) Aunt and niece or nephew of the whole blood or of the half blood or by virtue of adoption; or
(6) Uncle and niece or nephew of the whole blood or of the half blood or by virtue of adoption.
(b) A person convicted of the offense of incest shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than ten nor more than 30 years; provided, however, that any person convicted of the offense of incest under this subsection with a child under the age of 14 years shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than 25 nor more than 50 years. Any person convicted under this Code section of the offense of incest shall, in addition, be subject to the sentencing and punishment provisions of Code Section 17-10-6.2.:"
Note the prohibition against sex with adopted relatives, meaning this is not about eugenics, at least not entirely.
Nature encourages diversity and incest does the opposite, not to mention birth defects that could result from it. Even if it was purely for recreation reasons then it would be simply taboo in most western societies because its frowned upon for obvious reasons that others have mentioned here.
You do know that in the deaf community some parents will do genetic testing to see of their fetus has inherited familial deafness (like the parents) and terminate the pregnancy if the child would be hearing, right?
The study (non-replicated - extremely good reason to be sceptical) doesn't give us any empirical facts at all. It makes assumptions, infers certain reason for an, assumed, innate fear or reaction, without actually confirming that this is the case. I don't know how you read papers, but this one isn't particularly sound for the reasons above, and hte obvious reason: There is no such thing as a snake before you are born. It would require some form of magic for a baby (who can't even recognize colours) to recognize an organism, all that entails, particularly given the statistically vanishing likelihood of being hurt by a snake.
The workers conclude that they think there may be an evolutionary reason for the reaction. That is bare. It's not conclusive. You seem to have read an abstract and just run with it.
Aside from this, it's probably unbecoming of someone trying to support a point to literally not engage and hten call someone's opinion 'boring' without any inquiry. That's, to put it bluntly, childish crap.
Your second paragraph is what is actually interesting. You should've led with that. It is however still wrong. Your interpretation is not supported by the original paper, found here: https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_2481375_6/component/file_2637485/Hoehl_Hellmer_2017.pdf?mode=download
And it's not bare if you'd actually be familiar with the research in this area in humans and other primates. I only gave you an example in an accessible format in case you weren't familiar with it. Need more papers after this one? I have another 10.