Inspired by this post on !incest@burggit.moe.
What are Burggit’s thoughts on the ethics (not the legality!) of real life incest? Some common conditions for starters:
- Between consenting people
- Between consenting adults
- Between consenting adults of a “reasonable” age difference
- Between consenting adults, no parent/child relationships permitted
Personally, I am torn between 2 and 4. Can there really be a consenting relationship between adult and child (both being adults)?
P.S.: Please let me know if this should be marked NSFW. I didn’t because this is the type of post I like to see when browsing SFW
I see parent/child as being okay if the child is a fully independent adult who’s lived separately, and there was zero push for it by the parent. Otherwise it gets iffy quickly.
I can’t say I’ve put much thought into it, but ethically I don’t really see anything wrong with underage siblings or cousins of a similar age. It might not be healthy or practical in most cases, but as long as nobody is taking advantage of someone else.
My problem with the underage thing is that I’m not sure that they have the emotional intelligence to deal with that when there is no real way to get away from each other (assuming they live in the same household). I also feel it can develop some dependency issues where it makes it hard for the siblings to develop relationships outside of their own family: if all their needs are being met, why would they? Maybe that is naïve, I don’t know.
From what little psychological studies I can find, that is basically true. Normally, underage relationships are illegal outright because one party is older and taking advantage. But even if both parties are underage, it is correlated with less emotional development and sometimes difficulty building other healthy relationships. It isn’t really an “ethical vs unethical” question when you have, say, two twelve year olds messing around. What are you gonna do, arrest them? Whip them? But if you’re some party responsible for those kids (parent, guardian, teacher, whatever) basically you want to keep them off of eachother lol. Hence why separate bathrooms, no co-ed sleepovers, whatever.
It definitely makes meaningful consent more difficult to establish. There isn’t really a bright line with that in the first place, so incest just shifts the “definitely okay/???/definitely not okay” gradient.
allow incest between consenting adults and criminalize pregnancy caused by incest
ZERO CHILD POLICY零儿童政策
Ah, the eugenics strategy.
yeah technically eugenics but most children born out of incest will not be healthy at all
Looking at it from a pragmatic perspective, I see 2 reasons why incest was historically frowned upon.
The first is the risk of genetic diseases, decrease in immune system performance, the likes. Children from incestuous relationships have worse genes, so the easiest way to prevent that was to prevent incestuous relationships to begin with.
Now ofc, we have contraceptives, abortions, hell soon we will have gene editing of both embryos and full humans, meaning there are plenty enough other ways to stop inbred children. From that perspective I see no reason to have any specific laws at all, relationships should be legally treated all the same regardless of the genetic overlap of the participants. A ban on knowingly making and carrying inbred children would fulfil the same use and likely much more effectively.The second issue I see would be that strong bonds like family make it easier to be forced into a relationship. Authority can and does get abused to force sexual relationships, think of the Hollywood scandals to that length for just one example. You sometimes see companies banning relationships with someone’s superiors for example, under the assumption that it is just too likely such a relationship isn’t entirely for immaterial reasons (both down and up, though in the case of incest only down (think parent forcing their child to have sex or get no college money) would be an issue). Historically, given there where already other issues with incest (inbreeding), the interest for a proper detailed handling of those potential issues was low, a blanket ban was seen as acceptable. Given that the other issue is now no longer a problem, I think it is time to address this properly and look into how much regulation is necessary to achieve a reasonably low rate of those abuses occurring.
Seeing that the law doesn’t generally care too much about positions of authority across sexual relationships, and the cases where it does are usually relatively vague (abusing a position as the “breadwinner” should be covered no matter if as a boss or a parent in countries that do cover it), I think you could get away with largely deregulating it and adding laws later as needed. Whether or not you should still keep direct parent-child relationships illegal initially I am not sure, this is very much out of my depth.I’d say it should be legal between consenting adults. However, with the potential birth defect issues that can occur later down the line, there should maybe be some sort of law preventing incest after a certain generation of inbreeding. Maybe after 2 or 3 generations of inbreeding is illegal? I’m honestly torn about it because in general, I think if people are consenting adults, and they aren’t hurting anyone, then they should be able to do what they want. However,; one could argue that bringing a child with various birth defects into the world could potentially be harmful to someone who could not and did not consent. I think if there was a way to deal with/reduce the risks of birth defects after a certain number of generations then I think there’d be nothing wrong with it.
Someone else brought up a good point where if between a parent/child the child should be completely independent living on their own, which is definitely a good point as there is a clear power imbalance otherwise.
Biologically speaking, stopping incest after a few generations makes sense. However I hardly think it would work in practice… like “Ah yeah, well your grandparents were cousins, and your parents were siblings, so you’ve got a whole incest family going on, but that means you two have to stay off eachother, sorry!”
In practice I feel this would be more of a “think twice” mostly unenforced type law, mostly to make people think a little harder about what they were doing and potentially assess the risks. Stuff like this would probably be hugely helped with things like easy access to free nationwide birth control.
There are a few laws kinda like this which aren’t technically enforced, but do make people think twice about doing it by being technically illegal. Also, to be clear, this hypothetical wouldn’t prevent the incest couple from being together or having sex, just heavily discourage reproduction and/or encouraging the use of birth control.
This runs into the precedent it sets for disallowing pregnancies for people with disabilities. Dwarfism is much more likely to be passed from parent to child if both parents have the gene. So should it be disallowed that two people with dwarfism produce a child? One could make many similar comparisons. If we were to legalize incest but making illegal the product of such a union (suppose after X generations, if you prefer), we would have to justify how it is distinct from the such disorders/disabilities.
I tentatively want to say that ethically both incestuous relationships and breeding should be legal for consenting adults. I don’t like the idea of pumping out products of incest, but at the same time, I cannot construct a solid argument against it for precedence issues. The more I think of it, the less I feel I even have a moral reason to be opposed: If two consenting adults decide to have a child who is more likely to have a disability, are they really doing wrong? Antinatalism aside, we actually tend to view as morally good future parents who, for example, decide to not abort a fetus determined to have Down syndrome. It is different to try for child knowing that they are at significantly increased risk of birth defect, but not that different, in my opinion.
Like I mentioned in another comment In practice I feel this would be more of a “think twice” mostly unenforced type law, mostly to make people think a little harder about what they were doing and potentially assess the risks. Stuff like this would probably be hugely helped with things like easy access to free nationwide birth control.
I don’t have any true problems with any 2 consenting adults reproducing. But I think it should be made very clear the risks and resources to provide things like free birth control should be given to reduce such risks.
I (as a disabled person whose parents were told they’d never make it past a few months old) have no problem with people reproducing and giving birth to disabled children, so long as the risks are very clear to the people. I guess education and prevention for those who do not want children is my main concern when it comes to incest. Sort of like, you should know what you could be getting yourself into type of thing.
That makes a lot of sense; I can get behind that!
I would just put the line at non reproductive sex. Anal or oral is fine, but any thing risks pregnancy is illegal. Then again enforcing that would be hard unless we monitored them, which creates another issue.
Personally, I’m fine with it as long as both parties have cosent, though only for people of similar age (siblings, cousins, etc.). For people with bigger age differences (>=10), I’m afraid there will be the so-called “power imbalance”. I also don’t really like age-gap non-incest relationships for this reason. Maaaaybe if they’re old enough (30+ for the younger one AT LEAST) they’ll have enough life experience. Being too young will have a bigger chance of power imbalance due to huge gap in life experience.
And inbreeding, well, my first opinion is hard disagree. But if their gene is far apart enough to be safe, then maybe it’s fine. The main reason is I just don’t want people in incestuous relationship to take more chances of having a disabled kid. Though like what other commenter said, this could lead to disallowing disabled people from procreating. I don’t like to talk about this stuff since it’s a very sensitive topic for disabled people, but personally I’d like to minimize the chance of passing defect genes through alternatives like adoption, etc. I’d like for the future kids to have a better life than what we currently have. Definitely not something that should be passed as law, as I’m very sure it’ll get abused to hell.
As in consent=“freedom from any pressuring influences in the relationship?” I don’t think so. But then again, poor people can’t consent to rich people in a relationship either. We arbitrarily force the idea where we like.
That seems like an overly restrictive definition of consent: poor people being unable to give consent to have sex with rich people is absurd, in my opinion. I just mean it in the colloquial sense.
I’d agree that “can’t consent” isn’t quite right here. The power imbalance does affect the meaningfulness of that consent though.
I’m not sure I even agree with that unless the poor person is very poor.
I think that as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, people should generally be able to have whatever kind of relationship they want with whoever they want regardless of who they are, and that includes incest. The prohibition on incest that exists in most of the world today is an unjust violation of peoples’ rights to self-determination and bodily autonomy.