What is wrong with incest? [ irl ]

kuraiken said:

That's a very interesting article that actually matches very closely my primary reason of why incest is ultimately a bad decision. He does ultimately fail, though. Because while he's right that incest is, without doubt, in the vast majority of cases, a very bad idea that can permanently damage familial relationships, he doesn't explain why a bad choice requires a law.

Sleeping with your long-time friend's boyfriend/girlfriend is a bad idea that can permanently change one of your most important relationships, perhaps one even more important than the one you have with your parents. But there's no law against that bad decision.
Sleeping with your long-time friend and turning a friendship into a sexually loaded one similarily can endanger one of your most vital stabilizing relationships and leave you stranded and alone. It's often a very dumb idea. No laws here either.
If one of your parents male/female friends, who spend so much time with you as you grow up that you have an almost or even actual parent/child relationship (for example because of neglect of your own parents) turns that relationship into a sexual one past the age of consent, that's a really really bad idea. No laws, though.

So even though he's absolutely correct that one of the strongest arguments against the decision to sleep with your brother/sister is the damage it can wreak to an important relationship, it does not explain why bad decisions require laws.

Now the point can be made that, for some magical reason, a familial relationship is somehow vastly more important. While there's an ocean of arguments you could offer against that, let's let the argument stand regardless.
But if so, why is there no legislation against parents who drink, smoke and gamble, whose vast expenditures, moodiness and fits of anger and desperation not only often destroy the parent/child relationships, but also bring them into financial ruin and renders them unable to provide their children with a proper start into their life or even the proper surroundings, often forcing them to be similarily unsuccessful in life.
Where's the legislation in all other areas where bad decisions can, and often do, permanently destroy this most sacred of all relationships? Why are laws not needed here?

So while the author is entirely right in is argument against incest as a decision, he's utterly failed to outline the need for legislation.

kuraiken said:

That's somewhat true, because I do not recognize moral arguments as rational arguments. Moral arguments primarily base on cultural and regional perceptions and arise from specific value systems that aren't universal. That's why it's considered morally right to saw a girl's vagina shut in parts of the world, who argue that it's a tried and true safeguard against choices that would permanently damage her value in the eyes of society and affect her for the rest of her life. Within the context of that existing morality code it makes sense, but when you broaden the lens, the argument falls apart because its consequences (shame, condemnation, isolation) are a product of the same moral code, ensuring that the expectation the code defines create the very problem it attempts to "solve".

I can't agree with your seperation of action and decision. It seems an attempt to classify something that is inherently muddled. Actions can lead to decisions and vice-versa. Emotions are neither actions nor decisions, but can exist regardless of actions or decision.

I don't understand what point legal definition of relationships have, too. Yes, your family has legal definitions that are extended through "rituals" that formalizes a new legal state (marriages, adoptions, etc.) yet using it as an argument to make one thing a special relationship over others just because of legal bindings doesn't make sense. Or to put it differently: what if we make friendships something that can be "ritualized" and registered? What if we simply implement a new law that allows people who know each other to formulize their friendship in order to be legally viewed as two people with close ties that ensures special treatment in the eyes of the law (e.g. the ability to have visiting rights in the hospital when they are otherwise are only for family).
Doing so doesn't change the relationships or the thing itself, just the bureaucracy surrounding it.

The key thing is, however, that you assume that incest cannot ever in any way shape or form have a benefit, while simultaneously assume that the act of cheating on your spouse can sometimes be okay.
Why? You assume that all incest relationships will end in destruction, but that's a generalization. I certainly do agree that the vast majority of incest relationships will end in destruction, but so do the vast number of otherwise unwise sexual relations (e.g. cheating).
You simply assume that there cannot be that incident where a brother and sister actually form a happy, fulfilled relationship with each other that they otherwise might never have found. Similarily you assume that there are however instances where cheating will lead to happiness.
You don't extend the same logical room for outliers that you extend to the cheating example to the incest example.

Ultimately, your assumption is that incest is inherently harmful, but you don't actually come up with an argument why it's inherently harmful.
Like in the argument in the article you posted, and with the part that I agree with, incest is often harmful, but there's a significant difference between often and inherently.
Alcohol, for example, like tabacco, is closer to being inherently harmful, because in both cases you submit a foreign toxic substance to your body that, in the case of alcohol, always destroys some brain cells, and in the case of smoking, always leaves toxic waste in your blood.

I'm also confused by your argument that incest isn't a moral argument anymore when brother and sister do not know they're brother and sister. Technically, the act is the same, the dangers of increased genetic defects (that also exists in all other unions where one part has dominant or recessive genes that lead to disabilities) are still identical, the only difference is the knowledge with which they make that decision.
In other words, you say it's no longer a problem (at least morally) because no one is getting hurt if they don't know they're related.
Which means that what hurts them isn't the act, but the knowledge of being related. I assume you also base this on the premise that this knowledge comes from no prior relation to each other (two strangers meeting) so that there is no existing familial relationship that's being displaced.

But all changes in relationships are the displacement of another relationship.
You base everything on the premise that a familial relationship is the highest, most stable and most valuable relationship of all, yet this is does not necessarily match reality. There are many cases of a familial legal relationship that has no special bonding or benefit (abusive parents, distanced children) so the validity of your agument depends entirely on the assumption that family is universally the closest and most valuable relationship.
But that's not a logical premise based on the evidence of this world, but rather a belief-system based opinion.
Despite chemical-compelled instints of protecting one's offspring, moral and social code, proximity that encourages empathy, there are countless cases of abuse, violence and murder in families.
Perhaps its not some legal universal magical string that makes some familial ties so valuable, but the individual relationships as they are formed by individuals, making each of them context-specific and unique?

Ultimately, your argument that incest is "inherently" and always harmful seems to depend entirely on your own personal belief of the value of families and its embellished idea, a belief that does frequently match reality, but also is frequently contradicted by countless examples in which other relationships prove far more valuable, stable and positive than a familial one.