@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.
Speaking as someone who is definitely very pro-cousin-marriage (in the sense of anti-shaming-cousin-marriage), and probably very pro-incest in general relative to the norm even here in Wacky Offbeat Ideology Tumblr –
– I think you’re being disingenuous here about what the actual concerns of the anti-cousin-marriage people are. Which is totally understandable, because they’re being disingenuous about what their actual concerns are. I will be super obnoxious, and say “often they don’t even consciously understand what their actual concerns are, because they don’t like thinking about it.” But even so.
I’ve hashed out this argument with people many times, and in each instance when it was possible to drill past the “ew incest” factor and find something real, it always comes down to concerns about large-scale society-wide behavior. This is not about persecuting a few sad cousin-lovers because their predilections disgust us. This is about maintaining a Rule because of an unspeakable belief that the Rule is holding back a destructive tide.
People tend to gravitate towards the thought that, if consanguineous relationships become acceptable, they will proceed to become very popular very quickly.
And it’s not like this is a crazypants belief. There are a lot of things that make consanguineous relationships attractive! Absent taboos and the Westermarck effect, your relations are likely to be substantially more attractive to you than the average potential mate, if only because of how much likelier it is that you’ll have a bunch of stuff in common. (See: the absurdly common situation where people end up tragically falling in love with their long-lost bio-siblings, bio-parents, or bio-children.) And if family ties have any social power at all, as they do even in modern America, a cousin is a much more reliable ally than a stranger. In societies where cousin marriage is a thing, it’s super-popular for a reason.
Liberals/leftists in particular see horrific visions of rich families incestuously intermarrying, never ever ever letting any of the money outside their own ranks, and becoming a blood caste. Which is, y’know, pretty much the thing that happened amongst most rich people through most of history. Including most of American history.
So, as you of all people should be willing to recognize, you have to face up to the issue squarely rather than ducking around it by asserting that the facts are maximally-convenient. Maybe the taboo against cousin marriage is in fact having very strong effects; maybe it’s all that stands between us and a storm of genetic disease and class stratification. Is that enough to justify persecuting and shaming people for their love?
*****
(Also: default ethical principles like “the person with more votes wins” pfffffffhahahahaha.)