@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.
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.
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.
This is an argument that we can’t have nuanced or moderate norms, because people will only listen to extremes.
It’s also an argument that our concern is “someone being forever alone”, and not “having the freedom to choose whatever they want romantically so long as its consensual.”
I’m not particularly invested in defending the rights of cousin-daters, so much as I am utterly flabbergasted at how people would never use this sort of logic in a serious debate, let alone tolerate it from their ideological opponents, but bring it up in taboo situations to justify feelings of ickyness.
It’s the damn Electoral College argument all over again. Yes, you are clever. All of rattumb is very clever. You can come up with nominal arguments against anything. Are they good arguments? Should they be taken as the same weight as the default ethical principles like “the person with more votes wins” and “let people do what they want.”)
Like imagine you wanted to date someone of the same sex, and a conservative was using the arguments of the form presented in this thread, as reasons you can’t. How upset would you be.
You haven’t noticed how opening the floodgates on gender many decades ago is already leading us in this direction? There is no stopping point - which might be okayish once we hit the Transhuman era and most of the negative consequences are removed, but before then there will be consequences and not all of us support atomistic individualism.
At issue is that rightists cannot tell what isn’t a risk and leftists cannot tell what is a risk.
Homosexuality is not contagious and isn’t particularly harmful. It also doesn’t make children. It doesn’t even really alter the dynamics of the straight dating market much. However, it would be a problem if it hit 20-40% of the population because as a species we depend on reproduction. (So if the situation were different then I would have a different opinion. But it isn’t, so gay marriage promotes membership in society, family, etc.)
But I will hold the line on polygamy, which is really the harmful polygyny when normalized, and we can see what happens in countries where it is common. I will hold the line on cousin marriage, which not only increases genetic risks but undermines nations. And of course, the taboo must be held on pedos.
These things have consequences far beyond the individual, and if your response on cousin marriage is “oh we’re going to make it legal but don’t worry, no one will use it anyway”, then why make it legal in the first place?
The ideological tools used to break down the barrier will prevent us from doing anything about it, like banning cousin marriages from producing children. On some level you must know that.