Printable View
Oh, I didn't say it was an argument against legalisation, I said it was something that worried me, which is different entirely.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweets America
this suggests that harm is something which can be empirically measured, but sadly life isn't as straightforward as that. How do you know if something you are doing is causing someone harm, or will cause someone harm in the future?Quote:
Originally Posted by SweetsAmerica
so how can the judges and courts measure harm empirically? they are only humans, too? I suppose they probably can't and this is why they are often over-protective as in "better safe than sorry". In general, I agree with this principle, but we should not delude ourselves that it was based on empirical measurements or logic.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFifthElement
Ok, then I think I misunderstood. Sorry. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFifthElement
I really don't see which kind of harm it would do if my brother and I decided to sleep together, or my father and I, or even my dog and I (but here it's more tricky cause I cannot ask my dog for his consent, so let's drop that example). The only harm would be a moral one. I agree that it would certainly cause disgust in my family or for other people. It would cause questionning and incomprehension, because we all have been raised with the idea that it was wrong. It would make me feel strange to sleep with my brother too, but if I detach myself from the world I am in, I don't see anything wrong with it if we're both ok with that and if it makes us happy.Quote:
this suggests that harm is something which can be empirically measured, but sadly life isn't as straightforward as that. How do you know if something you are doing is causing someone harm, or will cause someone harm in the future?
But if you consider all the moral harm things would do, you wouldn't do anything. It's not bad though, it's just another way of doing things and put morality first. This attitude is as honorable as any other one, it is just not the one I would choose.
If we worried about moral harm, homosexuals would not sleep together cause it would harm the religious ones, and the religious one would not say anything bad about homosexuals cause it would harm the homosexuals. I would not move to the US cause it would make my family sad...etc.
My attitude here is one of openness, that's all. Trying not to judge. There is a moment when I say to hell with what people think, because this is MY life, My body, My choices, and those are the liberties I am trying to have.
Wow, what a raging debate. Sorry i had to miss this last night. I had a personal emergency and couldn't get on to lit net. And what's a debate without Virgil sticking his two cents in. :D :p
There are a number of points to respond to, but so many that it will be impossible to respond to them all. First, I think Wikipedia has a very intersting entry on incest. You can read it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest. But let me pull out some highlights.
Quote:
Virtually all societies have some form of incest avoidance.[1][2] The incest taboo is one of the most common of all taboos. Most modern societies have legal or social restrictions on closely consanguineous marriages.[3] Although not universal, incest constitutes a cultural taboo in most current nations and many past societies,[4] with legal penalties in some places. In some societies, like Ancient Egypt, brother–sister, father–daughter and mother–son relations were practiced.[5][6]
Which family members constitute those covered by the incest prohibition is determined by the society in which the persons live. Some societies consider it to include only those related by birth or those who live in the same household; other societies further include those related by adoption, marriage, or clan.[7]
Quote:
Some researchers hypothesize that humans have a kin recognition ability that functions in part to enable incest avoidance between close relatives, thereby protecting the gene pool of the family or tribe from excessive damage by inbreeding; and, that this kin recognition system may form a biological basis for social and psychological prohibitions against incest. [12]
Inbreeding leads to an increase in homozygosity (the same allele at the same locus on both members of a chromosome pair). This occurs because close relatives are much more likely to share the same alleles than unrelated individuals. This is especially important for recessive alleles that happen to be deleterious, which are harmless and inactive in a heterozygous pairing but, when homozygous, can cause serious developmental defects. Such offspring have a much higher chance of death before reaching the age of reproduction, leading to what biologists call inbreeding depression, a measurable decrease in fitness due to inbreeding among populations with deleterious recessives. Recessive genes, which can contain various genetic problems, appear more often in the offspring of procreative couplings whose members both have the same gene. For example, the child of persons who are both hemophiliac has a nearly 100% chance of having hemophilia.
Quote:
Psychology
Presumably because of the genetic harm done, animals inbreed only in extremely unusual circumstances: major population bottlenecks and forced artificial selection by animal husbandry. Pusey & Worf (1996) and Penn & Potts (1999) both found evidence that some species possess evolved psychological aversions to inbreeding, via kin-recognition heuristics.
Evolutionary psychologists have argued that humans should possess similar psychological mechanisms. The Westermarck effect, that children who are raised together during the first five to ten years of life have inhibited sexual desire toward one another, is one strong piece of evidence in favor of this. In what is now a key study of the Westermarck hypothesis, anthropologist Melford E. Spiro demonstrated that inbreeding aversion between siblings is predictably linked to co-residency. In a cohort study of children raised communally (as if siblings) in the Kiryat Yedidim kibbutz in the 1950s, Spiro found practically no intermarriage between his subjects as adults, despite positive pressure from parents and community. The social experience of having grown up as brothers and sisters created an incest aversion, even though the children were genetically unrelated.
Further studies have supported the hypothesis that some psychological mechanisms cause children who grow up together to lack sexual attraction to one another. Spiro's study is corroborated by Fox (1962), who found similar results in Israeli kibbutzim. Wolf and Huang (1980) reported similar aversions in Taiwanese "child marriages", in which the future wife was brought into the family and raised with her fiancé. Such marriages were notoriously difficult to consummate and led to decreased fertility of the marriage. Lieberman et al. (2003) found that childhood co-residency with an opposite-sex sibling (biologically related or not) was significantly correlated with moral repugnance toward third-party sibling incest.[12]
One thing to keep in mind is that the wiki entry conflates all types of incest into a general term, while we are particularly speaking of sibling incest, even something less dubuious as cousin incest. For me, the key paragragh is the one on psychology which I'll requote here:Quote:
Laws against adult incest are sometimes questioned on the grounds that such relations do not harm other people and so should not be criminalized. Some legal systems no longer criminalize adult incest. The French Criminal Code removed its incest prohibition long ago, and other countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, Japan, Israel, Argentina, Brazil as well as a few other Latin American countries and several U.S. states have followed suit. In most countries where the crime of adult incest has been abolished, acts of incest involving a minor are still punishable.
From time to time proposals have been made for the repeal of incest laws, for example, the proposal in Australia by the Model Criminal Code Officer's Committee in the November 1996 discussion paper "Sexual Offences against the Person". This particular proposal was later withdrawn by the Committee due to a large public outcry. Defenders of the proposal argue, however, that the outcry was mostly based on the mistaken belief that the committee was intending to legalize sexual relations between parents and their minor children.
The basis of my argument rests on this: that brother/sister love is fundementally different than romantic love and to cross the two would be a perversion that would have essentially destroy the family unit and therefore undermine society. Now, you can pull that apart and say what consititutes the family as the basic social unit, but centuries of cultural formation has built it and to destroy it would be chaos. Moral laws are by nature evolved to sustain society. And people are civilized to establish moral boundaries. Civilization equates to moral boundaries. Something like sibling incest requires a moral boundary.Quote:
Evolutionary psychologists have argued that humans should possess similar psychological mechanisms. The Westermarck effect, that children who are raised together during the first five to ten years of life have inhibited sexual desire toward one another, is one strong piece of evidence in favor of this. In what is now a key study of the Westermarck hypothesis, anthropologist Melford E. Spiro demonstrated that inbreeding aversion between siblings is predictably linked to co-residency. In a cohort study of children raised communally (as if siblings) in the Kiryat Yedidim kibbutz in the 1950s, Spiro found practically no intermarriage between his subjects as adults, despite positive pressure from parents and community. The social experience of having grown up as brothers and sisters created an incest aversion, even though the children were genetically unrelated.
As to the specific case, I still doubt that these adults had no notion that siblings could not do this. They are using it as an excuse to get out of criminal prosecution. Two years does strike me as a harsh penalty for this, but then again I'm not sure what the right penalty is. Certainly changing the marriage laws to accomodate this perversion :p is out of the question.
And I will second that :thumbs_upQuote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Without boundaries family unit will not function sucessfully.
Absolutely. The philosopher that seems to be completely ignored by modern educational systems is Edmund Burke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke). Your statement above Aimus is the heart of Edmund Burke's ideas.Quote:
Originally Posted by AimusSage
Quite right.Quote:
When it comes to incest there might be more than just cultural conditioning that makes people think it is icky and yuck and other such exclamations of discomfort. (although culture certainly helps)
Ditto for me. If siblings don't know they're siblings, then they are not at fault. However, once they are aware of such a transgression, they have to understand that they should no longer continue. Hey one of western culture's founding works of literature is Oedipus Rex, who is personally disgraced and ashamed from unknowlingly having incest with his mother. And he is quite right to feel so. It is a moral transgression of incredible magnitude. And let me spell out again what that moral transgression is: the crossing of romantic love with family love.Quote:
Originally Posted by vheissu
Thanks Lote. And let me second your post, which i wanted to highlight on its own:
That is a magnificent outlining of why such laws exist.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lote-Tree
Personally, I'm not going to go into the law ramifications of incestual relationships. However, I believe that if it is indeed love, then why repress it?
I'm for love of any form, if it is the warm loving kind that we are all fond of. :)
just to tease you two guys and pick up on the most harmless point Lote mentioned:
how would you guys go about making sure that nobody has casual sex? if it were to be illegal (as Lote said it should be), would you send police officers snooping around ppl's homes, checking on them to see if anyone's having casual sex? ;) I can't really see how this idea goes together with the freedom you value so highly :D
As I said I have thrown that in to give you handle ;-) and you duly picked on it and disregarded the rest. Just as I predicted ;-)Quote:
Originally Posted by SleepyWitch
Erm same goes for incest. How can you police that?Quote:
if it were to be illegal (as Lote said it should be), would you send police officers snooping around ppl's homes, checking on them to see if anyone's having casual sex? ;)
Would you ask every sister and brother that they had sex?
It's nonsense isn't it?
It's not the application of law that is important here. Its the moral ground.
Can you see the difference?
You can't have Absolute Freedom.Quote:
I can't really see how this idea goes together with the freedom you value so highly
Society and civilisations arose by moderating Freedom.
Oh I would not make that illegal. I grew up with the notion that casual pre-marital sex was wrong. Of course it occured and I took part, but it was not something I went and told my parents. I did not go to my mother and say, "hey mom, guess what I just did for the first time today." :p :lol: Today I'm frankly shocked at how parents let their children live together with an unmarried lover. I would not approve of my children doing it.Quote:
Originally Posted by SleepyWitch
yep, I guess I can, or at least I try to.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lote-Tree
well, if you want to talk about morals and separate them from the application of the law, that's fine with me. but in that case, you have just underminded your own argument. there are many things that may be immoral but not illegal, e.g. drinking, smoking, lying, adultery, rudeness, exploiting the developing world etc. all of these are immoral but legal. so you've got kinda hoisted on your own pedard?
I didn't say that it was.Quote:
Originally Posted by SleepyWitch
This is the danger in only reading part of the discussion, what I said about the law was :
andQuote:
Originally Posted by TheFifthElement
to which Sweets said :Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFifthElement
which leads you back to where you started, but in answer to your statement the judges and the courts don't measure harm. They don't make the law, they merely implement the laws enacted by the government of the country in which they're in. If there's a fault it lies with the legislature, not the judiciary. Looking at the judges is just looking in the wrong place.Quote:
Originally Posted by SweetsAmerica
Sweets, I have no problem with your choices, but one thing you can't choose to do is live in a moral vacuum, and the truth is that we all judge including you, and including me, for example:Quote:
Originally Posted by SweetsAmerica
which is in itself a judgemental comment, not critical, but definitely judgemental.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweets America
I think the problem I have with your statement that it is 'My life, My body, My choices' is that, yes, it is true that you can choose to do anything, and humans have the ability to do a great many things, but included in that is a question 'just because we can do something does that mean we should do it? This is where morality comes in, and as a species (as all human societies appear to have laws/rules of some kind) we have chosen to say that somewhere we must draw the line. You can choose to sleep with your brother, that is true, but you must also accept that by doing so, if you do so in a country where it is illegal, you are breaking the law. You must also accept that whilst you may not understand the reasons why it is illegal, there may well be very good, very justifiable reasons why it is illegal. Just because you or I don't know what it is, doesn't mean it isn't there, which is the point I was alluding to in the beginning. It is difficult to debate because the reason we might not see the harm now, is because by making it illegal the harm that it causes is simply no longer visible to us. It is also difficult to draw the line by saying, it's okay so long as the two people don't have children. Biology is a tricky thing, what if there was an accidental pregnancy - the answer would be that either the baby is born, or the State forces abortion. Who would find forced abortion palatable? If the baby is born then so is the next one, and the next one. Where does it end?
This probably illustrates the problem with all laws. Either society deems that all things can be done, or it imposes limits. As soon as limits are imposed, because of the nature of such things, those limits will be imperfect. Some will want the line drawn here, others over there. It'll never be 100% right for everyone.
so, I'm 26, my bf is 27 we are not married and live together and if you were my dad you'd not allow it? ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Oh...I thought you meant between a nun and a monk in which case I would've said -- but never mind
Policing brother and sister incest. It can't be done. It would be silly.Quote:
Originally Posted by SleepyWitch
How does any of the above equate with the Trust that is required in a family unit for it to function?Quote:
there are many things that may be immoral but not illegal, e.g. drinking,
smoking, lying, adultery, rudeness, exploiting the developing world etc. all of these are immoral but legal. so you've got kinda hoisted on your own pedard?
Do you have a Trust between your drink and yourself?
Do you have Trust between your smoking and yourself?
Yes. But it is also selfish.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFifthElement
No man or woman is an Island. We part of the main.
Our choices have consequences. Not only to ourselves and the society we live in.
There can be no absolute freedom.
Freedom needs to be moderated or else everything falls apart.
This " as long as it does not harm anyone..." ethos is flawed. It is short-sighted and selfish.