[discoursedrome]

@rustingbridges wrote

to be fair, our society at present has a deeply confused idea of what marriage is for, and this can be seen as a symptom of that

(I don’t particularly care what marriage is for. Expression of romantic love, or child-having, or some package of legal rights, whichever is fine. I’m just annoyed we can’t pick. Do one thing and do it well, y'kno)

and now for the hot ^{read as: unnecessarily disagreeable} take: in a world where the government (and a large tax base) pays the floor healthcare costs of random persons, it’s totally reasonable for them to be interested in banning things that will increase their costs. If these things have sufficiently few supporters and many detractors, guess which way we’re going to go in a democracy?

There’s definitely a legal argument for banning cousin marriage – @mitigatedchaos also touches on that in their reply here, for instance, and they’re not wrong per se. I’m skeptical that this sort of law does enough good to justify the loss of liberty, given that most people have a natural aversion to the behaviour in question and it’s the sort of thing that mainly becomes a problem when a lot of people do it over time, but certainly the state gets up to worse things for worse reasons.

But that doesn’t make a case that it’s less moral than anything with similarly deleterious effects – even from the most interventionist angle it’s, at best, an argument about picking your battles. My objection is that arguments against incest tend to be built around the idea that it’s a unique moral evil in a way that can’t really be supported by arguments from health or genetics. If people want to make pragmatic cost/benefit arguments that’s worth doing, but they need to get down off their high horse on the topic and onto a smaller horse that’s more within their means.

[bambamramfan]

You spend how many hours talking with rationalists and public policy theorists about the nature of morality, evidence based interventions, and not shaming people for having politically unpopular beliefs.

Then someone brings up a taboo sexual activity, and it’s all “well if they had kids that might be bad so it seems proportionate to say anything romantic or sexual they do should be shamed. I mean just think of the medical bills for their hypothetical kids they never considered having.”

The challenge isn’t getting uninformed people to have good principles, it’s getting even thoughtful people to apply them instead of knee-jerk rationalizations.

[mitigatedchaos]

This depends heavily on one’s opinion of the general population and their susceptibility to complex memes that depend on a careful analysis of information.

If one is optimistic, switching to the “it’s okay not to taboo this kind of incest socially, even if we will argue to them not to have kids” seems reasonable.

If one is pessimistic, then tearing away the current taboo won’t result in proportionate response, but rather no response.

An optimal political response isn’t actually available, and the odds that someone will be foreveralone if they can’t be with their cousin are pretty low, just leaving the taboo for now seems prudent, with the time limit of the next generation of genetic repair/enhancement technology.

Also we’ve had experiments with “societies that allow cousin marriage”, and it doesn’t look good.