Scholar

Yes, people tend to find the argument very attractive, it was recently explored by Kane B: I have seen other studies that specifically went into the estimated counts of how many animals are likely saved by a switch to a plant based diet by the average individual. I think the arguments from consequentialists are mostly mental gymnastics to avoid the clear conclusion that changing how we relate to animals is a clear ethical obligation. I am not a fan of consequentialism in general though as it is such an epistemically explosive approach that you can justify almost anything or be skeptical about almost anything in relation to what is moral. Most people who are consequentialist contort it to fit whatever their already established values are. In my view the correct approach to ethics is to view it as a discovery of the nature of the self and how it's imperatives relate to itself and the world. The reasons why animals are treated the way they are today is not because we are imperfect moral thinkers, but because we do not recognize the self in animals. Societies moral rules are largely a propositonalized form of it's contemporary subjective drives. If those drives are immature or pathological, what you will observe are immature and pathological moral rules/incentives. In other words, the problem is not that people have not found the right arguments to lead them to the conclusion that we ought to treat animals with basic respect, but the fact that the identity of most thinking agents drives them to construct mental models that will allow them to continue expressing their identity in whatever way currently generates the least friction within their psyche. Most moral philosophy conducted today is a complete waste of human cognition for this reason.

Christian debaters often employ the argument of the ethics of incest against secularists. There is a long history of this, and it is surprising to me that secularists have such profound difficulty admitting that consensual incest is neither wrong, disgusting nor fundamentally pathological. The arguments provided by secularists are functionally no different from homophobes in the past. In this case, Craig asserts that relationships between siblings are more prone to end in depression and suicidality. The first thing to note here is that such evidence simply does not exist. There is no study that looks at the outcomes of incestuous relationships between siblings. There in fact is no study looking at incestuous relationships period. The only studies we have look at incestuous abuse and incestuous incidents in general. And the studies including non-abusive behavior do not support this view at all, in fact when incestuous interactions between siblings occur in a consensual way, the impact on things like sexual confidence tends to be positive in the long run in women, for example. But more pressingly, it wouldn't be surprising if it was the case that incestuous relationships did end up in depression and suicidality, given that such relationships are highly stigmatized and criminalized in many jurisdictions. The effect the resulting shame, social isolation and fear of criminal prosecuting will have on the psychology of individuals is obviously going tend to yield negative outcomes. It's not different from homophobes of the past, including notable psychologist, having pointed at empirical data that homosexual urges and activities come with shame and self-destructive tendencies. The effects of the bigotry are used to justify the bigotry. There is of course many more secular arguments against consensual incest between siblings and cousins that appear to be strong at first, and turn out absurdly contradictory on further inspection, but I think this example is telling because it would be so easy to simply admit: Obviously the solution to consensual incestuous feelings and relationships is not stigma and criminalization, but social support and integration, especially when they are pathological. In relation to our attitudes, we should obviously reject our biological impulses when we know they had a specific evolutionary function that no longer applies in this day and age. This extends to incestophobia as much as it did to things like homophobia or racism. What this whole situation reveals is that bigotry and ignorance is not nearly as simple as it appears to be. It's not the case that the secularists and progressives have transcended forms of sexual persecution and witch hunting. In essence, they function the same when they are confronted with things that are sufficiently repulsive to them. The first reaction is not empathy towards individuals in such a situation, but rationalization of feelings of disgusting and hatred. If we realize this, we can have more empathy with various forms of bigotry, because we can recognize in ourselves the dynamics which lead someone to adopt such views.

I want to stress that we as a society never get to see positive and healthy examples of such relationships because the stigma and criminalization selects for pathology. Not only is every media that depicts incest basically doing so from the point of view of it being inherently pathological and immoral, but so is every case of incest that is brought to the public. Only individuals who are exceptionally irresponsible or abusive actually get exposed through various forms of inquiry. Individuals who are responsible, either do not engage in such relationships, only do so in the short term or maintain secrecy. Furthermore, individuals who develop feelings towards their family members have no framework through which to express or internalize those in a healthy way. This itself drives them towards pathology. There is no valid way to express these feelings, to talk about them, to know how to deal with them. Couples who do choose to maintain a relationship are driven into secrecy and social isolation, to such a degree that we know individuals who become victims of abuse do not reach out to family or police in fear of their relationship being exposed. This means there are various factors, even more so than with homosexuality (given there is a stronger selective pressure here in absence of a drive that is immutable) that highly biases this phenomena towards pathology. We know that pathology emerges under conditions of repression, secrecy and criminalization, it was the case with every other form of sexuality that was stigmatized this way. One of the key issues is that incest is viewed (intentionally) as a monolithic phenomena. We group in incestuous child-predation. parent-child grooming, relationships with significant powerdynamics into the same phenomena as perfectly consensual relationships between equivalent individuals and even those who did not grow up in a familial context. It's all incest, and we somehow evaluate it as if it was one thing we had to determine was either wrong or acceptable. But this is obviously absurd. When we consider if interracial relationships are acceptable, we don't look at how white slave masters raped their black slaves and then think to ourselves "As a whole, are interracial sexual acts positive or negative?", or look at child predation perpretrated by homosexual predators and lump them in with homosexual acts as a whole. Clearly there are forms of incestuous interactions and relationships that are unacceptable. Sometimes the argument of powerdynamics can apply, especially when there is large age gaps or family members are put in positions of authority over others. But the fact that we have people in here who consider the phenomena of adult siblings around the same age being in a romantic relationship to be the equivalent of catholic priest raping children is really everything you need to know about how unsophisticated our approach is. And sadly, predators and groomers benefit from this confusion, from the taboo, from the shame and silence of their victims and the utter inability of us to actually pinpoint and articulate where the actual problems lie.

Sure, "Homosexuality is wrong from my direct experience, and everyone close to me got hurt in the end.". Not that long ago, this would have been a common statement of individuals who engaged in homosexuals acts when they were still demonized. Given that you brought your own experience into this as a way of making an argument from authority, but do not actually get into what happened, I will speculate: If what happened to you was not abuse, I wager the only factors that made it "wrong" were probably either in relation to the consequences the break-up of the romantic relationship had for your familial relationships in general, or it was due various factors resulting from the stigmatization of such a relationship: The shame, secrecy and inter-familial conflict that resulted from the fact that such relationships are considered inherently taboo in our society (no different from interracial or homosexual relationships in the past). To therefore project wrongness onto the act itself, contributing to the demonization of individuals who find themselves in such relationships (be it due to parental neglect, development of codependency and so forth) to me is irresponsible. You are just making it less likely that individuals in such situations are able to get help, because you do condemn and consider them wrong for being in that situation.

There is no bait here. You are projecting your own experience onto everyone else, this is what is happening. Which is equivalent to an individual projecting their "bad interracial" experience onto interracial experiences as whole. We have data on this. When incest happens in a consensual context, even between minors, it has generally no negative impacts and sometimes even has positive impacts on things like sexual confidence in females. But independent of what your own experience is, you should be able to articulate what makes incest universally wrong, meaning that individuals who participate in such relationships are universally immoral for doing so (independent of if they had grown up together, are twins, their relationship being perfectly healthy and maybe even legal etc).

So you are generalizing from your own experience onto everyone? Do you realize that this is as problematic as a victim of homosexual child predation projecting their own experience onto homosexuality as a universal?

The same basically applied to homosexuality when it was illegal. And no, this is not actually true, there are lawyers in germany for example who specialize in cases in which family members (often siblings reunited in adulthood), get criminally prosecuted as other family members report them to the police. Even if this was not the case however, the fact that it is defacto illegal and highly stigmatized means that all the negative impacts of such laws apply to such individuals. I'm not going to look up bigots for you, there is plenty on them to be found. Whenever the topic comes up online you have a majority who views incest as revolting and evil.

No, incest is prosecuted whenever it is discovered which is mostly in the context of other crimes being committed (because it's exceptionally difficult to detect individuals who are in non-abusive relationships and maintain secrecy, and to also prove it in a court of law). Homosexuality was also exceptionally rarely prosecuted outside of abuse when it was still illegal, that doesn't mean that individuals who were in these relationships didn't fear legal prosecution and social destruction if they ever revealed their relationship. What about my framing is trivial? Why is it wrong, and where is the evidence that everybody gets hurt in the end?

Notice how desperate you are to maintain the idea that consensual incest is obviously wrong. You don't even consider the possibility that you could be wrong about this. Your underlying revulsion is so intense that you are incapable of engaging with this topic in a mature way. That is precisely what bigotry is. There is countless of academic papers analyzing the ethics and criminalization of incest, and most of them come to conclude that the way we are handling it today has little rational basis. Ethics boards, philosophers, legal scholars, many of whom are putting their reputation on the line given how controversial such things tend to be.

A lot of things Trump has done over the past months have given me the impression that he could be preparing an actual takeover of the entire government within his term. He has normalized military deployment within the country, he has created a mass dehumanization and deportation apparatus that would would be satirical if it wasn't reality and he seems to be preparing for actual wars with other countries which could give him the ability to call for martial law or whatever else he has planned. It still doesn't seem realistic to me that he would actually attempt this given the severe risk it entails, but it is mindblowing to me that all of these things are happening and people seem to be only mildly concerned about it. What is also concerning is that a large portion of the country would support him. What would it be, 10-20% of the country? That seems enough to actually establish a new political regime. The fact that he could try and potentially be successful itself is concerning.

This isn't true. Decriminalization did not lead to an increase of overdose deaths compared to other regions in the US, and overdose deaths have been declining before recriminalization occured, for various reasons like treatment, less supply and preventative measures. You just got caught up by right wing propaganda. What happened is that drug problems became more visible to the public, and now they can continue not caring about the issues because all the homeless have to kill themselves with drug overdoses in secret. We know that there are better models than criminalization of use. Oregon right now also does not harshly punish individuals for small possession or use. Either way, I am not sure what any of this has to do with the bigotry of progressives. You can make a reasonable case that individuals must be restricted from taking substances that will literally alter their minds and kill them. The irony here is that progressives will defend criminals and drug addicts (even when it might harm them), but treat benign low risk sexual deviancy as if it was the greatest moral horror the world has ever seen. Because functionally their minds are not that far apart from conservatives.

Well, at least we can say we live in interesting times.

Drug use in China is rampant, mental illness in China is rampant. Don't delude yourself that they have a better system than even the US do. China is utter chaos. Either way, it doesn't matter what China does. We have studies showing that deterrence in this respect (criminalizing usage) is not effective. Criminalization seems to increase deaths from overdose and usage according to the data I saw. And morality is important here. Even if there was a marginal gain in harm reduction, this doesn't justify the morally abhorrent reality of imprisoning individuals for their addiction. This is simply evil.

But nothing about this has to do with imperfections of politics. Even with no other policy, criminalizing use itself is unjusfitfiable and a harm-multiplier in every regard. I never said decriminalize drugs. I said decriminalize the use itself. This has several important effects: 1. You don't have individuals fear criminal persecution upon medical emergency. 2. You don't produce further criminals through forcing them into prison environments. 3. Addicts are more likely to seek social help and join addiction recovery programs. Criminalizing use is unjustified because it targets the victims of the crime. If your child starts shooting up heroin, you don't want them to go to prison and become part of organized crime. None of your reactionary ideals will help him either, because evidence shows that criminalization of use itself in the US worsen health and social outcomes. You can flaily around as long as you want and cry about the myopic leftists, the data is clear on this. You just use one extreme example on the other side to somehow validate the most umempathetic and reactionary version of drug regulation.

I don't live in the US, we have arrived in the 21st century over here. To me, putting addicts in prison is absurd. You punish the victims of a crime for the fact that they are victimized, and with your industrial prison complex, you just produce more criminals that way. None of this is myopic. Myopic is to burden the entire society by further pathologizing individuals instead of helping them with their addictions.

I literally have no contact with any leftists, and don't consume any leftist media. How is that group think lol? Sometimes you are very reactionary Leo.

I think you should focus on stabilizing your mind before you focus on such heavy metaphysical topics. Your mind will distort a lot of what you will learn if it is not healthy and well grounded, which is something that might be happening already.

There is still no good reason to criminalize use. You can fine people for small possession, and criminalize drug trafficking specifically. But either way, the analogy to incest would be progressives wanting to decriminalized/destigmatize all forms of incest, including parent-child incestuous relationships and so forth. There are these sorts of types, but obviously there is a middle ground to be struck where we have reasonable policies that target the most obvious and high risk situation without putting undue pressure on individuals who might already struggle in life.

Raping your family members is indeed illegal. What is at contention here is whether or not consenting individuals should be imprisoned and stigmatized for their love and codependencies. We don't put boys and priests in prison when the priest is raping them, because if boys cannot consent, then the priests are the rapists. For siblings, we put both of them in prison. The consent model here is just absurd, it's a cope to justify your self-righteousness towards a sexual minority that you don't like. People also said homosexuality is inherently rape when it was still stigmatized and illegal. And largely, most cases of homosexuality that were exposed to the public indeed were rape or grooming. Therapists even pointed to the fact that homosexual feelings and actions caused tremendous psychological harm to individuals due to "inherent shame for such unnatural acts". All of these arguments are repeated for consanguinamory, with no care for empirical reality or coherent arguments.

Also, the argument that incest laws are similar to drug-enforcement simply does not stand up to scrunity. When we criminalized drugs, we specifically reduce the availability of drugs to potential users, In principle, we therefore reduce the amount of individuals who consume and get addicted to drugs. Incestuous abuse is dissimilar, and has not been shown to be effective at all in reducing abuse, because the laws do not reduce the accessibility predators have to vulnerable individuals. The reason why incestuous abuse is so prevalent is because young family members are accessible and vulnerable to older predators. Incest laws do nothing to mitigate that, and the law has no deterring effect because sexual abuse itself is criminalized already. It's like thinking that you could prevent catholic priests from raping little boys by making homosexuality illegal and imprisoning consenting homosexual couples. It's simply an absurd notion.

Sure, incestuous abuse does occur but the vast majority is between adults and children under the age of ten, or generally between adults and minors. There is no evidence that relationships between siblings, and especially adult siblings, are disproportionately manipulative and abusive. Right now both siblings are imprisoned if both claim they consent to the relationship, which means the assumed victim is imprisoned as well. The idea that incest laws prevent abuse is just not empirical. Incestuous abuse virtually never happens between adult siblings, and it virtually never happens between siblings who are around the same age (even if both are minors). Genetic arguments only apply to having children, which can be legislated separately. Although, to maintain a stance like that consistently would require us to have a more comprehensive eugenics program that would forbid high risk individuals from having children. Additionally, the genetic risks for siblings are not universal. A subset of siblings (who share the same recessive alleles) will have significant risk, while others might not only slightly elevated risk given their genetics. Meaning, if we wanted to establish a eugenics program, we would probably require individuals to get a genetic test before engaging in procreation while mandating steps that reduce risks to potential offspring or forbid it entirely for specific, high risk cases. No, but progressives are uniquely in a position in which they claim to care about minority issues and the rejection of outdated social and moral norms which cannot be rationally justified. The incest taboo is universal because we have a significant biological drive to be repulsed by it (westermarck effect). The incest taboo itself has no good reason beyond the long term effects inbreeding has on smaller population groups (tribal settings). The genetic argument is simply not rational. The westermarck effect already will prevent incest between siblings from ever being normalized or a wide spread issue. The amount of individuals who would choose to be in such a relationship in a society which accepts consanguinamory would likely not outweigh disabled individuals who decide to breed with fellow disabled individuals (which happens frequently due to such individuals socializing together), or simply random pairings of couples who share the same recessive genes. Most importantly however is that the taboo against incest is simply not justified given that incest does not necessitate inbreeding. We can have a taboo against inbreeding without having a taboo against incest. Individuals can be educated on risks and act accordingly. Another argument against the genetic risk is that not all sibling couples will actually have a significantly elevated risk. The way recessive genes work, it will only be a subset of siblings who have a significantly higher risk of various birth defects, whereas some siblings will have slightly or moderately elevated risks (both siblings must share the same recessive genes for the risk to be substantial). While I would recommend any sibling couple to engage in genetic counseling, it is absurd to stigmatize individuals universally independent of if they want to have children or if their risks are even elevated. Royal families are a bad example because they are an example of forced marriages that happened across multiple generations which significantly increased the chance of multiple recessive genes stacking up. In a free society, individuals are highly unlikely to engage in multi-generational inbreeding. Bigotry is not the primary reason for the icky factor, that is obvious. The icky factor is a result of evolutionary pressures that make us avoid multigenerational inbreeding within the context of small social groups (in which we evolved in). The bigotry however is a direct result of this ickiness. Much like homophobia, our personal feelings of disgust (that exist for evolutionary reasons) is what drives the way we treat individuals who engage in such actions. We imprison and consider morally abhorrent individuals even if they are not capable of having children (due to age or being the same sex), and we treat individuals as monsters even if they do not plan to have children. We also treat them as monsters even if their risks are not that elevated and they take measures to reduce them, like sperm selection IVF and early-pregnancy monitoring. Society at large will simply not be impacted by inbreeding between siblings, not even to the degree it is right no being impacted by individuals procreating who have various genetic disorders or are disabled. We do not even imprison individuals for smoking or drinking alcohol during pregnancy. Yes, coercion is an issue, but it is mostly a function of the social roles individuals play. We generally do not criminalize step-family incest even though step-family members are more likely to sexually abuse you. The vast majority of incestuous abuse is a function of opportunity, meaning predators have an easy time preying on vulnerable family members given they have access to them. Targetting consensual relationships between adults does nothing to prevent such cases, and only drives individuals to pathology as they are driven into social isolation. Remember, if a parent and their child have what appears to be a consensual relationship, both have to fear legal prosecution. But for siblings, especially those around the same age, it is absurd to treat them as invalid because of the potential of coercion, especially once they are adults. It is simply not consistent that we imprison both of them on the basis of potential coercion. This means that we must prove coercion in the first place to identify the perpetrator and protect the victim. The incest taboo makes it less likely for couples to seek out measures that will reduce risks of birth defects, they make it more likely that couples become pathological due to social isolation, and they make it less likely for victims of grooming and abuse to come forward given the profound stigma that comes with such relationships. All of this is basic progressive logic that in any other scenario we would apply the same exact way. But suddenly, when it's incest, we become unnuanced eugenicists who think any potential benefit to such taboos outweighs all the suffering we are inflicting on completely innocent individuals.

While he is a robust thinker, I also think there is a bit of flimsiness in his thinking. He generally goes in the right directions but often times doesn't account for deeper arguments. His stance on incest is similar, he will say that there basically are no rational objections but then maintains a stance that he believes it to be wrong due to being an emotivist (which has obvious counter-argument that he himself seems to have brought up, but doesn't connect quite right). I think it was a bit self-serving from Alex to basically struggle with issues and then almost revert his position. He claimed factory farming is the greatest moral emergency of our time but ever since he ran into these issues he basically didn't talk about it anymore and went back to his atheism thing. I think he finds himself in a difficult situation given he struggles with his health and therefore sought arguments that would allow him to maintain a certain level of convenience without being considered morally wrong. But yes, I think there generally is evidence that even a single individual not consuming animals will have a direct impact on how many animals will be killed/factory farmed throughout their lifetime.

I can't tell it by his language, he seems like someone who is fighting illegal migration. The problem with painting them as racist is that people obviously can see he is not a racist, like Tommy Robinson or whatever his name is. He is a guy who is extremely concerned and fears what is happening. You aren't deflating peoples fears by demonizing everyone who voices their fears, it just turns into more and more conflict, as we have observed over the past decade. The labelling people as racist and fascist thing has been tried and it literally didn't work.

I think this is a bit of a carricature of what racism is in the 21st century. It's not about hatred, it's about genuine fear. Have the maturity to recognize that people aren't evil for no reason. People use social media, they are confronted with one terrible case of a migrant doing something bad after the other, and at some point they build a mental model that makes them scared. This is no different from police violence in the US. Most police interactions go perfectly fine, but because there are so many police interactions, and therefore so many are bound to end in disaster because of incompetency, malice or simply dangerous situations, people develop a completely distorted image of what the police is. Then they call for things like defunding the police, irraitonal policies that do nothing to mitigate anything. You have to realize that today is a time of fear and moral outrage. People are shown the negative effects of various social policies or groups, and their view gets distorted over time. And even when it is not distorted, it becomes defined by fear, which opens the path to hatred.

But then everyone is a fascist, including you, given you support fascism in relation to the animals by participating in systems that perpetuate this fascism. You support Leo after all, and he supports this form of fascism. The question is whether or not it would be effective to communicate this to people, or if most would be hard pressed to take such proposition seriously. They aren't less true than your claims are.