Scholar

That would be morality. When you look at the negative consequences of something and conclude that you ought not to do that for that reason, you have engaged in a moral calculus. Inbreeding of course is a seperate issue from pure incest. Although even with inbreeding it is hard to argue that people ought to be prohibited by law from having children that way. There is a cost to freedom, and the higher the freedom in any given society, the more responsible and mature society must be to avoid the negative consequences.

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.

You are mislabelling what is wrong here though. When abuse happens in a homosexual relationship, that doesn't make the homosexual relationship wrong, that simply makes the abuse wrong. So, whether or not it is common, it is not the incest that is the immoral thing, but the abuse. But you are constructing your hypotheticals in an inappopropiate way. What you described is wrong for several reasons that have nothing to do with potential, but inherent, known risks and inability to understand. A child firstly, cannot conceive of risk, so of course it is wrong. Secondly, there is not merely potential of risk, but absolute risk (meaning, we know there is a bullet in the gun and there is an actual risk involved, which is not the case in relationships). If two consenting adults engage in an incestious relationship doesn't mean that there is a risk involved (even though I don't know if for such relationships that did not have prior grooming, between adults, is actually significantly risky in that way). Whether or not a risk is involved will not depend on whether or not it is incestious, but whether or not the individuals are dysfunctional in relation to their psychology and how they relate to others. So, the risk isn't inherent to incest, it doesn't make sense to attribute it to that thing. But a teacher holds inherent power of the student, this is not necessarily the case in a relationship with two consenting adults that happen to be related. Teachers and students are a bad example because we are talking about minors vs adults, college professors and their students would be a better example, which I would not really consider wrong at all to engage in. Consenting adults should have the right to engage in relationships that are risky, there is nothing wrong with that. With professional relationships there are different arguments because of standards of care and so forth, and potentials for compromise of their duties. This is why I said, the only argument between parent and child you can make that is good (assuming both are adults and have not been groomed) are duties the parent might have to the child. Which, I personally find are not very robust arguments. Again, you are identifying what the actual problem is and then saying it is the incest that makes it problematic. It would be equally wrong whether or not the individuals had a blood relation or not. The thing that makes it wrong is the abusive of power. You can even have relations with significant power differentials. I would wager that, if you have more or less same aged adults siblings engaging in sexual relations, if it wasn't such a taboo and require a certain type of psychology to engage with, you would see that relationships between 30 and 20 year olds would have a higher likelihood of abuse. We don't even know what the numbers here would look like, because incest is illegal. I guess you could look at countries where incest is legal and if there are in insane amount of cases of adult consenting family members who end up in super abusive relations. But either way, people have a right to engage in these risks, in ending up in abusive relations. It might be stupid, but it's not immoral. Adults should be given the choice to evaluate these things themselves, even if the likelihood for abuse as calculated by some statistic were to be 90%. They are not children, they are not playing russian roulette, they are making choices about who they want to engage in romantic relationships with. If you want to prevent abusive in relationships, educate people, treat the root cause, instead of morally condemning incest. It's not necessarily wrong. But with minors, we decided they cannot consent, and the only reasonable way to legislate this is by having clear, defined lines. With consenting adults the whole game changes, because they do have the ability to consent, and can make bad choices if they want to. People make all sorts of life choices that are incredibly stupid. Smoking is probably far dumber than engaging in incest with your family members (assuming it was legal and had no taboo associated with it). Obviously in a society in which incest is a taboo and illegal, the only cases when it will happen will be exceptional, meaning as a result of sociopathic behaviour and the like. This is the problem with children: Children cannot engage in informed consent, therefore they cannot consent to the risk of harm that could fall upon them for the act they were to engage in. Adults are capable of informed consent, so they are capable of consenting to even a significantly high risk of abusive relationships. In fact, adutls can consent to abusive relationships full stop. There is nothing immoral about it. How insane would it be to put people in prison because they are in an abusive relationship? You put the person to prison if they abuse someone, that's it. There is no evaluating whether or not a relationship is potentially abusive, we don't do that with adults and then call them immoral for engaging in such "potentially risky" relations. Contemplate this: If we found that, interracial relationships lead to an 80% chance of an abusive relation (which is probably significantly higher than what would be the case with sibling incest if it was legal and acceptable, and I wager even if it wasnt, and in fact I wage even between parent and child adults), would we call interracial relationships immoral, or prohibit them by law? No, of course no. People can take that risk if they want, they have every right to try and be one of the 20%, or even the 80%. Now, if someone does do something abusive, they should be persecuted at that point. But we can't be doing this Minority Report shit and punish or condemn people who engage in risky behaviour, especially because we then include those 20% who aren't even engaging in it. This doesn't make sense to me whatsoever, I think you misread the studies, or they got it wrong. But I am not that interested in this to make sure.

Yes, I noticed myself that I have gone through changes, people in my family have noticed too. Thank you for notifying me that you also noticed this change. It could be just the LSD. And I am not closed to the possibility that the LSD caused some spiritual changes in me that did allow me to connect to this entity. I have had a very significant aligning of my life purpose over the past months. But all of that is very speculative.

I don't think any of these are wrong whatsoever. Abuse is wrong, that's as simple as it is. Many things have potential for abuse, that doesn't make them abusive. It just means it requires more care and maturity to engage in such relationships. I agree that most incestious relationship, in practice, will be dysfunctional. And today, most relationships might even be abusive, simply because of the taboo, the type of individuals engaging in it will in most cases be abusers. But in regards to consenting adults engaging in these relationships, even if they are dysfunctional, they are not immoral. People have a right to do dysfunctional things, they always do. The correct approach is not moral condemnation of the act, but an attempt to help these individuals. Child parent relations would be wrong when the child is a minor. And you can make a case for the duty of parents to their children making it wrong even between adults. Grooming a child to engage in incest by the time they are adults is also wrong. But these things aren't wrong because of incest, but because of abuse and inappropriate relationship explotation, or simple pedophilia. I don't understand, we have an incest taboo, and you made the case that animals do not actually avoid incest in nature. So how can humans and animals not have a difference in incest avoidance?

Of course not, why would it be wrong. I don't quite understand what you are saying here. No difference in what?

Well by your logic we shouldn't engage in sexual relations at all, as the buddhists try to do, it just detracts from achieving unconditional love, no matter towards whom it is geared. In fact, this is why spiritual traditions argue for the dissolution of all familial bonds, so that you can have a pure love for reality itself. What you call unconditional love, meaning platonic love for family, actually prevents you from loving reality unconditionally. Either way, none of that really makes incest wrong, it would just be like most things human beings do, not an act that maximizes unconditional love. Your stance hinges on whether or not lust towards parts of reality will diminish your love towards it. Which would just mean lust is bad, full stop.

You are taking OP way too seriously. And I am not sure what else to do but repeat what I said to you before.

That's amazing motivated reasoning. By the way, unconditional isn't love for family. Love for family is one of the most conditional types of love that exist, considering it solely applies to these individuals because they happen to be your family. Unconditional love necessarily is universal, because if it lacks conditions, then it cannot apply to just a limited set of things. And consider this: By your logic, if I grow up along a person and develop a platonic love to them such that they are basically equivalent to a family member (which is what you mean by unconditional love), and I then developed romantic feelings for them, somehow this would sabotage the unconditional love? This is just silly. While this might happen, and I agree with incestious relationships it probably would happen in most cases, it is not some sort of spiritual reality we are talking about here. Of course you could have that type of deep bond to someone and then move it to romantic love and elevate the relationship. Whether or not someone has a closer genetic code is irrelevant in that regard. And either way, people do things that undermine unconditional love all the time, and we don't have some sort of inherent aversion to it. So the argument seems to just be an attempt to make your personal morality fit your spiritual believes. I could sit here and argue for why homosexuality is anti-spiritual because our souls recognize that we undermine the greater unity of the divine by seeking relationships that will not lead to the creation of new life through pure spiritual union, that it undermines the greatest type of "unconditional" love we are capable of, the love for a child. You can do these types of mental gymnastics with anything.

I would assume that there are probably a vatiety of strategies in this regard, and how the psychology functions. It could be that the psychology of animals adapts to certain contexts. This is why holding animals in captivity and doing tests on them might not be the best idea, because who knows, maybe if an animals gets the stimuli that it is restricted to one habitat and cannot expand, it will switch on some gene to cease distinguishing between kin and non kin. It's just very speculative a that point. I do think it is related to cognition, our higher complexity requires the inherent aversion. And I do suspect it is inherent, because I don't remember ever being told that I ought not to be attracted to my sibling or cousins. I do not even have a taboo around incest, I could not care less, yet, I feel zero attraction to any of my family members who I have grown up with. It's complete asexuality in that regard, or rather a sexual aversion. Now, I am sure the taboo plays some role, but I doubt it is sufficient to cause something like this, because usually you can break down social constructs and your psychology might adapt, I don't see this being the case here. I don't think there is that much harm genetically speaking of an animal procreates with a sibling, or probably even parent, every other generation or so. I do think they are instincts, but with humans it's complicated. We are so adaptive, I think even if there is an instinct, you could raise someone to get attracted to their family members, all of them, if you just raise them that way. So there might be a tendency, but it's obviously not a static thing. Sure, but the question is whether it is wrong or not, not why we think it is wrong.

Yes that's what I wrote in the response to Carl. Cats aren't that social it seems. You have to keep in mind, you probably want an instinct that is socially contextual, so that the animal doesn't avoid the kin even if breeding with them might be benefitial due to a lack of other options. But evolution is complicated and there are lots of negatives and benefits to everything. You also have to consider if an animal tends to be monogamous, how much time and energy it invests in offspring, how much offspring it has over it's life time and so forth. Sometimes higher complexity doesn't benefit a species, so it might be better to not have the ability to discern kin from non-kin in that way because it could influence other behaviors in negative ways. Who knows.

Cats who live in the wild with normal social hierarchies? But I don't know if cats are particularly social, do cats live in packs?

He is implying that homosexuality is wrong because it is not natural or conducive to evolutionary function. This is a stupid argument, end of story. There shouldn't be a need for discussion here. I don't even understand what you are asking in the second paragraph. I don't have time to read the study, but my assumption would be that only animals who form strong bonds and community like structures will develop and aversion to incest by means of recognizing kin that they grew up along. And by aversion I mean that they would probably prefer to have sex with animals that they did not grow up with. Animals who don't have such social structures probably don't need to develop such aversions or preferences, and I suspect with humans there could be further mechanisms due to our higher social bonding. Maybe due to our more sophisticated psychological nature and mating rituals, we would more easily get attracted to our close relatives if we did not have such aversions. I don't know how many animals that have higher social complexity are likely to engage in for example in parent-child incest, or that they are as likely to engage in that as they are in sexual activities with other animals. So, it's a tricky question because they might just reduce everything to either being inbreeding or not, rather than having a more indepth analysis on whether or not some animals avoid it while others do not, and if certain types of relational inbreeding are avoided. With most animals I assume this isn't even relevant because they are unlikely to ever mate with offspring for multiple generations, which is what would be needed to cause any significant harm to the genetic line. But humans are also special. Who knows how we would behave if we didn't have anti-incest instincts, lol. Either way, none of that is even related to whether or not incest is wrong. But thanks for the article, I adjusted my assumptions.

You are missing the point. OP doesn't care about what is natural, he is stuck in bigotry. It's as simple as that. The whole natural argument is just so he can justify his views, if he was a proponent of natural living he wouldn't be on this forum. I am pretty sure animals avoid incest if they have the opportunity to, the same as human beings. But none of that is relevant, because this is all a basic naturalistic fallacy. This isn't even worth discussion, this is like basic shit you should have learn in your high school philosophy class. This should, in fact, be self evident. The reason why I brought up incest is because it would be a discussion that could elevate and inform people on ethical thinking.

It's my name combined with my impeccable rationality.

I love how my name triggers people so much. None of this is ironic. And no, I meant precisely what I said.

The person with a brain is to say.

You can tell the lack of consciousness on this forum considering that much of the energy is spent on helping people get to the status quo of moral progression rather than being the ones who challenge and question the current moral paradigm.

You guys are getting baited hard. What is this quality of conversation, lol. Would have been more interesting if he said incest was wrong, then we could have at least had an interesting moral discussion about moral intuitionism that applies to most people.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/07/opinions/israel-hamas-gaza-not-war-crimes-spencer/index.html On whether or not Israel is committing warcrimes.

You are moralizing. Your moral outrage closes your mind. Your own fear prevents you from seeing the obvious, because you have closed your heart to the suffering of one side on the basis of abstract moral evaluation. This blindness is the root cause of the conflict. You are the Israelis, you are Hamas. Your mission is to realize this, so that you can approach this topic from a position of truth. If the western countries had not ignored the germans suffering after World War 1, it might have never come to World War 2. Never again, they say, yet they never seem to learn. Your mistake is that you allow your moral righteousness and outrage to cloud your vision. He did not condemn anyone, because he seems wise enough to realize that condemnation will not help. He is one step ahead of you, my friend.

How racist a country will be depends on it's development and other factors, like collective fear and so forth. Israel as well as Palestine are both in fear, and so they will both be susceptible to hate. One of the major flaws of western society today is that it does not seek to understand racism, it simply uses it as a term of judgement and moral condemnation. It uses it so that it can blame someone, not realizing that it is afflicted by the same blindness that the people they point fingers at are as well. Remember, the greater your judgement of others is, the more blind you become to your own selfishness, because you will have to face your own judgement if you were to recognize your own evil.

@Karmadhi Funny, the video I linked with Arnold basically addressed this very issue.

You have to be careful with such conclusions, these types of videos exists in palestine too. And they also exist here in the west, against jewish people. You are just not presented this information because depending on your bias you will only be fed things to confirm your own bubble.

Tiktok is what happened to them, this is what it was designed to do. Create division and idiocrify society.