Is incest morally right or wrong? Is incest good or bad for the society?

[An young being]

And should incest be made legal or illegal?

[An young being]

On 11/12/2023 at 0:28 PM, An young being said:

When it comes to incest, my personal opinion is that, it is capable of causing more suffering to the society than what already is, and to some extent to the individuals.

 

19 hours ago, Scholar said:

Firstly, we are talking about morality. Most of the things you listed are immoral because they are a fundamental undermining of someones will. Rape, murder and so forth is immoral not simply because there is a likelihood of suffering occuring, but because the individuals do not consent to such things.

When we are talking about laws, even if something causes harm, we have to be careful not to restrict human beings rights to autonomy. Sexual freedom should have a significant burden to be restricted between consenting adults, because of how fundamental this aspect is to human well being. And furthermore, we have to be as precise as we can be when restricting the freedoms of individuals. Meaning, we cannot just ban homosexual relationships because there might come harm from them to society (if that was the case), we would attempt to actually specifically find the thing that is causing the harm and target that. If we cannot do that, and the harm to society is proven to be exceptionally high, then you might have a case.

But then, still we are not talking about morality but simply about maintaining society.

 

Now, I will propose this hypothetical to you again: If 90% of interracial relationships lead to abusive dynamics, would it be immoral, or should it be illegal for consenting adults to engage in such relationships?

And remember, when we target the specific thing where abuse mostly occurs (which is in child exploitation incest cases), you will probably see that the rest of the cases, because then we are talking only about consenting adults, probably are not significantly more harmful than any normal relationship, aside from the social costs associated with the taboo and the obvious costs coming from engaging in illegal activity. If you want to restrict adults from engaging in these types of sexual relationships, what you would need is actual evidence that these relationships cause a level of harm to society that would outweigh the need for the sexual freedom of consenting individuals. But you don't have that evidence, because all relationships that you do have data on now already require a willingness to engage in illegal activity, which will heavily bias this towards individuals who lack moral integrity and so forth. By nature of how society is constructed you basically are selecting for the most dysfunctional dynamics. I wouldn't be surprised that when homosexuality was outlawed, a significant amount of homosexuality was things like child-abuse.

By this standard alone, we have no right to restrict the freedoms of these individuals, because we have no good evidence, nor really very good reasoning, for it. And remember, what would you consider the necessary harm to society to say that interracial relationships should be outlawed? Is it if a lot of them end up in abusive dynamics? Even if it is 90%, in my view, it would be unjustified to outlaw these things, because again, we cannot use the law for every activity that could potential bring harm to society. And we are talking about abuse here, unhealthy relationships. While this is undesirable, it is nowhere close to things that undermine individuals will fundamentally, like rape, murder and arguably many cases of suicide. If there is no clear violation of the will of individuals, as is the case with rape, murder and so forth, or an activity which cannot be consented to, we need a very high standard to the risk of society, and clear evidence for such claims, to consider outlawing an activity and restricting the sexual freedom of consenting adults.

There should be an awareness here of how significant of a violation to freedom it is when a state starts interfering with your choice of consenting sexual partners. Potential for abusive relationships, even if astronomoically high, cannot be the standard here, it would have to be a significantly higher cost to society, backed up by actual evidence. The only real restriction we make in terms who consenting adults can engage with sexually, is in professional relationships, where you basically make an oath to the duty of care, or the work environment regulates sexual activity in certain ways. Remember, individuals consent to that type of restriction when they enter these work places, and they can at any time leave that type of work place. You cannot simply do this to just consenting adults out of nowhere, becaue of risk of abuse or such things. We don't ever do this. And I guarantee you, being a pornstar is probably far more harmful to someone than being in an incestious relationship under the assumption that you are consenting adults, that the incest does not come with some sort of tremendous social cost via taboo (and even then you can argue when porn did come with that taboo, it was as harmful), and that you are not legally punished for it.

 

And the worst part is even that, you outlawing this and creating a social taboo around this activity might actually lead to a prolifiration of abuse, rather than a reduction. Most incest, in the current societal context, will occur in child exploitation cases. The shame associated around the incest taboo could very well be a primary reason for why victims of such activity are so hesitant to come forth with their abuse and therefore cannot get the help they need.

 

This case you are trying to make is just exceptionally weak. I understand why there is a desire to make this case, but it just doesn't appear sound to me.

And this is just incest, we can discuss something like bestiality some other time. That is an even more interesting discussion because there we go into what informed consent is and what makes sexual activity in humans who are incapable of informed consent so problematic.

 

There is an even more repulsive activity (and I am not talking about pedophilia) that is currently considered completely immoral and illegal, that is exceptionally difficult to argue for why it should be considered immoral and illegal. But if we can't even get past incest, we certainly won't have a productive conversation there. But these are the juicy moral discussions that I think get to the core of moral reasoning, and I think it is benefitial to have them.

 

[An young being]

2 hours ago, An young being said:

 

 

21 hours ago, Scholar said:

Firstly, we are talking about morality. Most of the things you listed are immoral because they are a fundamental undermining of someones will. Rape, murder and so forth is immoral not simply because there is a likelihood of suffering occuring, but because the individuals do not consent to such things.

@Scholar The assumption that someone or their actions are immoral, simply because it is done without their consent is itself a limited assumption of morality. For example, a murder committed on self defence can be done without the victim's consent. That maybe moral. If we are talking about what we believe as a purely selfish intent, such as rape, even that cannot be used to judge whether a person is morally right or wrong. What if he was educated that women are inferior and he grew up without knowing about women, and he saw animals raping each other and convinced himself it was normal? What if you had no free will or limited free will in your actions on an absolute scale?

Morality is always relatively defined based on a mixture of society's culture, beliefs, emotions, traditions, experiences and also science, and is used to judge a person. That's why I don't see morality as an effective way to judge something as right or wrong or good or bad. Instead, I suggest attempting to measure suffering caused by an individual to the victims, to themselves and the impact it has on the suffering of the society as a whole is a more rational approach to judge an action as right or wrong, especially while making laws. The most important point is, only the action has to be termed good or bad and not the individual itself, unless we know through science or some other means that humans have 100% free will.

Morality had great use in the past when there are less rational means to determine something as good or bad. Morality was used to punish people to maintain order, teach people not to behave in the manner they thought is wrong, and despise people who do the wrong things. Even now it has great effects on maintaining the society , but using it to judge a person or the specific action done by the person as right or wrong, no matter if it's incest or rape, is entirely a wrong approach. Instead, methods to measuring the suffering caused by the actions and attempts to reduce it, including the doer of the action, is the right approach, in my opinion. There's no need to put a moral tag on the person who is doing the action or crime.

21 hours ago, Scholar said:

.When we are talking about laws, even if something causes harm, we have to be careful not to restrict human beings rights to autonomy. Sexual freedom should have a significant burden to be restricted between consenting adults, because of how fundamental this aspect is to human well being. And furthermore, we have to be as precise as we can be when restricting the freedoms of individuals. Meaning, we cannot just ban homosexual relationships because there might come harm from them to society (if that was the case), we would attempt to actually specifically find the thing that is causing the harm and target that. If we cannot do that, and the harm to society is proven to be exceptionally high, then you might have a case.

But then, still we are not talking about morality but simply about maintaining society.

Sexual freedom for homosexuality is drastically different from sexual freedom in incest relationships, except maybe in bisexual cases. The reason is, it's not impossible for someone in incestual relationship to have a relationship outside of it, whereas homosexual people cannot engage in sex with the opposite sex. The degree of freedom also matters.

21 hours ago, Scholar said:

Now, I will propose this hypothetical to you again: If 90% of interracial relationships lead to abusive dynamics, would it be immoral, or should it be illegal for consenting adults to engage in such relationships?

what would you consider the necessary harm to society to say that interracial relationships should be outlawed? Is it if a lot of them end up in abusive dynamics? Even if it is 90%, in my view, it would be unjustified to outlaw these things, because again, we cannot use the law for every activity that could potential bring harm to society. And we are talking about abuse here, unhealthy relationships. While this is undesirable, it is nowhere close to things that undermine individuals will fundamentally, like rape, murder and arguably many cases of suicide. If there is no clear violation of the will of individuals, as is the case with rape, murder and so forth, or an activity which cannot be consented to, we need a very high standard to the risk of society, and clear evidence for such claims, to consider outlawing an activity and restricting the sexual freedom of consenting adults.

As I said earlier, it's not immoral. But consideration of making it illegal or not depends on the amount of suffering it brings, based on unbiased studies, including the suffering brought upon by making it illegal. It's not necessary to ban the relationship itself, but the root causes can be studied and identified and those aspects must be treated. If the root cause is the relationship itself, or the root cause cannot be identified for a long period, the consideration to make it illegal for the time period can be taken upon. But this case is entirely different from that of incest. Also, the punishment for rape or murder is severe, whereas here, there is no punishment, but only a limitation in freedom. The case of limiting freedom is a personal choice of the government or society and has both positives and negatives associated with it. It's like choosing between disciplining a child for his own good, or letting him do whatever he wants, no matter how he turns out to be.

Edited December 12, 2023 by An young being

[An young being]

21 hours ago, Scholar said:

And remember, when we target the specific thing where abuse mostly occurs (which is in child exploitation incest cases), you will probably see that the rest of the cases, because then we are talking only about consenting adults, probably are not significantly more harmful than any normal relationship, aside from the social costs associated with the taboo and the obvious costs coming from engaging in illegal activity. 

I agree that these biases play a role in making incest in general illegal or immoral.

21 hours ago, Scholar said:

By this standard alone, we have no right to restrict the freedoms of these individuals, because we have no good evidence, nor really very good reasoning, for it

@Scholar I agree that there is no good evidence, and in that case, we have to run on assumptions or reasoning based on the data that we have now.

My reasoning is that, the bond formed by parental or sibling love is on average more unconditional and leads to happier relationships compared to love out of lust or sexual attraction. One of the reasoning is that, both spirituality and psychological studies point out that happiness created out of pleasure such as lust,pleasure harmones, physical attraction is not long lasting compared to happiness created out of strong relationships, such as parental and sibling bonds or a lust independent romantic love or platonic love. While I am not against romantic relationships or even lust, incestual relationships lead to breaking of the previous superior bonds formed by blood relationships, due to the introduction of pleasure factors. This is evident from the fact that relationships formed primarily out of lust don't last longer and end up in divorces or has high expectations and desires from the opposite party. The introduction of these conditions and expectations in a relationship that doesn't have those, can affect the unconditional nature of those relationships, and hence push the society towards more suffering. 

This is just a reasoning that point towards a direction for studies to look into, and not a ruling.

 

 

[zazen]

I have skimmed through a bit of the above so forgive me for not fully understanding - I may come back later to read the reasoning more thoroughly. But I'd like to say first that for outsiders looking in who aren't aware of Spiral dynamics jargon or into non-duality its thread titles like this that put people off from stage green and above values, discussions or the more spiritual community as they view it as completely unhinged from reality.

We are chained down by our biology though we have a spirit that is beyond the flesh. As long as we exist in this dimension we can't deny form just because we have access to the formless.  Isn't it in our biology to be repulsed by incest? 

The enlightened types like to be detached from the disputes and dichotomies of the common man,  looking down at it all from a lofty place of transcendence. As Ram Dass said, part of awakening can be playing the role of form we are in - that is human. To be human, we've got to get down in the muck where the humanness is happening and accept our humanness. Moral relativity is about understanding different sides but moral legitimacy is about determining and discerning the rightness of a side. Pluralism doesn't always mean neutralism.

It's possible to see both sides of every issue - that's a sign of intellectual maturity.  But just because we can see both sides doesn’t mean we should live our life as though they both have equal merit. If we don’t further grapple with the rightness of a perspective we neglect a whole dimension of understanding by simply leaving it at  “well I can understand this concept (incest) so it must mean its right and okay”. It’s good to understand that all concepts are relative and that none contain absolute truth, but this necessarily means that some concepts are more relatively truthful than others and by extension some actions are more relatively right than others.

None of us live our lives as though all things are the same and all concepts are equally true - men can't have babies and I can't identify as something I'm not. We don’t drink bleach to wake us up, we order a coffee. When we want to go to somewhere we take a specific route, we don’t walk in a random direction and hope for manifestation to do its magic. Our daily choices reflect our reliance on relative truths as a fundamental aspect of our everyday life.

We create a great many theories and get lost in a subjective echo chamber of them. We rationalize around truth rather than be rational about the truth. We twist narratives to fit our sentiments and subjective feelings. Which is what we have currently in the West. We can call it a ignorant intellect - one which fears truth and uses the intellect and cognitive horsepower to avoid it - the truth that though we are boundless in spirit we are still bound to the limitations of flesh and instinct.

A rational society (stage orange and above) is more developed than a less rational one (stage red, blue) but where the rational society malfunctions and starts to appear less developed or more clown worldish to other societies is when they use rationality in this way. Rationality helps us understand different perspectives - moral relativity. The West has indulged this and experimented with it but hasn't progressed to a mature rationality which not only understands but can then discern which perspectives are more valuable than others and which don't deny base aspect of reality or try to disassociate from them but integrate them into a healthy framework.

It gets stuck at moral relativity and subjective games of being able to identify however we wish. Moral relativity is like a windmill going in all directions rather than a compass in a single one. If we get stuck going round and round on the moral relativity windmill we will become dizzy, dazed and disillusioned unable to make sense of the world without directionality.

A post modernism that leads people to indulging the subjective world unhinges people from the biological reality they exist in. We can't debase ourselves from reality, the human body is a form through which the formless lives, the mould of our meatsuits is what allows spirit to unfold, our skeletal structure allows states of being to be. We won't be able to experience the formless without form or states of being without structure. 

Sure, these things have their flaws. Moulds become moldy, structures become rickety, forms become frigid, and base reality becomes a basement of dark ignorance when not used for what it is - a base to jump from to the heights of spirit. But without them we wouldn't be able to unfold spirit in the first place.

Edited December 12, 2023 by zazen

[An young being]

22 hours ago, Scholar said:

 

@zazen, when talking about morality,one of my main points is that, we cannot judge or label a person as good or bad, based on his actions. 

I was speaking against allowing incest with some reasoning on my own, but also stressing not to label or judge the ones involved in incest as bad, and I had shared the reasoning for that as well. That's what my part of the posts are about.

This is the continuation of the discussion from a previous post, I created a new one since it deviated from the topic. Here's the old one:

https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/97756-why-heterosexuality-is-natural-and-homosexuality-a-deviance/

I believe such discussions are necessary atleast in open minded forums like this, ( that's what I believe, lol ),if not in the normal ones. 

Edited December 12, 2023 by An young being

[zurew]

If you can't come up with arguments that are applicapble to all forms of incest (or in other words, applicaple to the whole category of incest) that case you are not making arguments against incest, you are making arguments against specific types of incest.

If you want to make moral arguments against incest - come up with one that attacks a point that is inherent to incest not just inherent to specific types of incest.

[bebotalk]

incest is sick. i don't see why it should be legal. 

[An young being]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

If you can't come up with arguments that are applicapble to all forms of incest (or in other words, applicaple to the whole category of incest) that case you are not making arguments against incest, you are making arguments against specific types of incest.

If you want to make moral arguments against incest - come up with one that attacks a point that is inherent to incest not just inherent to specific types of incest.

Assuming you are pointing at me,my points are aimed at incest for close relations that are strongly bonded, which are parent-child and sibling relationships. My points are not valid or mildly valid for cousins or other types of incest. It's not necessary to be generalized for all kinds of incest, as laws or morality can clearly differentiate between different kinds of incests. They need to be differentiated, as the strength of relation with degree of closeness drastically changes. A fun fact is that everyone is related by blood in one way or the another, since we all came from our ancestors.

Another reason why I ignored cousin relations entirely is because it's not at all a taboo in my state! Around 30% of all marriages here are cousin marriages, lol!!!

[Danioover9000]

   Inspiration for this incest topic:

 

[Devin]

2 hours ago, An young being said:

Around 30% of all marriages here are cousin marriages, lol!!!

First cousins?

[Schizophonia]

There are no good or bad things.
But for genetic reasons you will probably be naturally repulsed by incest and there is an increased risk of complications if you give birth.

[An young being]

43 minutes ago, Devin said:

First cousins?

Yep! Specifically cross cousins.

 

 

 

Edited December 12, 2023 by An young being

[Sabth]

It is wrong. Actually disgusting. Even if it's not wrong it would be disgusting to date your brother. Cousins? I don't know. 

[Devin]

8 hours ago, An young being said:

Yep! Specifically cross cousins.

 

 

 

I've never heard that term.

 

"Benefit: More Children, Stronger Family Ties. They found that both men and women had more children when their opposite-sex siblings married close kin. Brothers in particular reap the benefits when their sisters pair off with cross-cousins.Mar 13, 2017"

https://www.inverse.com › article

Science: Marrying Your Cousin Has Benefits - Inverse

Edited December 13, 2023 by Devin

[An young being]

7 hours ago, Devin said:

I've never heard that term.

 

"Benefit: More Children, Stronger Family Ties. They found that both men and women had more children when their opposite-sex siblings married close kin. Brothers in particular reap the benefits when their sisters pair off with cross-cousins.Mar 13, 2017"

https://www.inverse.com › article

Science: Marrying Your Cousin Has Benefits - Inverse

The culture here in South India is entirely different from the rest of India. In this culture, parallel cousins are considered same as siblings whereas cross cousins are allowed to get married. An example of cross cousins would be a male marrying maternal uncle's daughter. He cannot marry his paternal uncle's daughter.

This type of marriages are mostly arranged with consent, and not out of love, just like kings do in age old days, i.e., formally marry the queen, the main purpose here is to maintain the family wealth within themselves ( so selfish, lol ), and to strengthen the family relationship further. Here, there's also caste issues, i.e., it's difficult to marry outside of a caste, and hence we have less brides and grooms to choose from, unless if it's a love marriage.

[Devin]

37 minutes ago, An young being said:

The culture here in South India is entirely different from the rest of India. In this culture, parallel cousins are considered same as siblings whereas cross cousins are allowed to get married. An example of cross cousins would be a male marrying maternal uncle's daughter. He cannot marry his paternal uncle's daughter.

This type of marriages are mostly arranged with consent, and not out of love, just like kings do in age old days, i.e., formally marry the queen, the main purpose here is to maintain the family wealth within themselves ( so selfish, lol ), and to strengthen the family relationship further. Here, there's also caste issues, i.e., it's difficult to marry outside of a caste, and hence we have less brides and grooms to choose from, unless if it's a love marriage.

I had a childhood friend that often went back to visit his extended family in India, I consider America as having similarities to a caste system, normal people really only marry within their social class, but there seems to be easier opportunity to transition classes than in India. My friend acted like America doesn't even compare to what you have over there though, I'm not sure what region his family was from, his family there was wealthy. That and the traffic always seemed to be what was shocking to him over there.

Edited December 13, 2023 by Devin

[An young being]

24 minutes ago, Devin said:

I'm not sure what region his family was from, his family there was wealthy. That and the traffic always seemed to be what was shocking to him over there.

I am surprised he has only two things to get shocked over here😅, most people here sort of find deep love after marriage, rather than loving deeply and getting married. It kinda works though.

[Devin]

5 minutes ago, An young being said:

I am surprised he has only two things to get shocked over here😅, most people here sort of find deep love after marriage, rather than loving deeply and getting married. It kinda works though.

Most people over here seem to resent each other after getting married, something I think traditions such as yours helps with due to consistent and known expectations.

[An young being]

3 minutes ago, Devin said:

Most people over here seem to resent each other after getting married, something I think traditions such as yours helps with due to consistent and known expectations.

It has its own set of disadvantages though. For example, sometimes money takes more importance over character when choosing a groom. Poverty in previous generations is an important driving factor. Also, the chances for abuses and hate increases to a great extent since couples don't wish to get divorced easily for the sake of their children and social pressure. They have to live with a few compromises.