should incest between brothers and sisters be legal?

[Zee.]

It's unnatural. I mean, we all know the genetic deformities that come of it. That should be your answer right there. If it goes against nature, which it does, it is - to me, wrong.
But i'm talking about instances when they have children...

And even if they didn't - it's just.. icky.

[atiguhya padma]

Incest, if it produces offspring, is wrong. Simply because, genetically it is unfair and irresponsible for brothers to father their sisters children, as this creates all kinds of genetic problems. In fact, in the Muslim community, where first cousins frequently marry and inter-breed there are a higher percentage of genetic problems in children than in the general populace.

Take out the reproductive element, however, and the 'wrongness' of incest becomes less obvious. In fact, other than possible psychological problems that might occur with incestuous relationships, I cannot see where non-productive incestuous sex is wrong. In fact, I'm not even sure that psychological problems would necessarily arise in such relationships. I once knew this girl who kind of hero-worshipped her brother. One day she told me how she had seen him almost naked in the house, and as she told me this, I knew that she had at some point developed a crush on him, maybe even still did. I never really thought of that as anything to be ashamed of, or to keep hidden. But it was certainly a feeling to be careful about.

[Zee.]

Its not just irresponsible but it's like I said.. unnatural. Children or not.

[kandaurov]

Point well taken, padma, and I understand how you're trying to undermine the moral (more like visceral?) argument. But the original question must be answered, and it concerns legalisation. How do you monitor whether it is for reproduction or pleasure? If you were to legalise incest when not practiced for reproduction purposes you would be creating a dangerous precedent which would most certainly result in the birth of many inbred children.

[Zee.]

Incestural ( I don't even think that's a word.. ) relationships of any kind, children or not...

wow.

I don't think there should be any hesitation about this matter.
The whole idea makes me sick.

Put aside culture, religion, personal.. whatever it may be, we all know what can come as a result of it. It is, like i've said quite a lot in this thread -
unnatural.

[kandaurov]

Well yes, it's supposed to make you sick. Like I've said in the other page, there's a powerful stigma attached to incest. But I think we should be able to discuss incest; indeed, we should be able to discuss anything; otherwise we are full of dogmas instead of thought-through opinions. Taboos go against everything I believe in, and what I believe in is that everything is debatable, and that if you're right on any matter at all, than you should be able to prove it with logic and arguments.

All I'm saying is that we won't go very far if we roadblock some roads just because they're slippery.

[Virgil]

I not going to get back into this repulsive argument. This was my case in post #79 earlier in this thread:

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.

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]

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.

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:
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.

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.

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 is out of the question.

Let me reiterate and highlight my main argument:
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.

[kandaurov]

Well Virgil, since you've stated your opinion so clearly earlier you really don't have to get back into this argument. Your point is well taken. You might feel strongly about it, but certainly we're allowed to have this debate, right? If only to confirm your suspicions. Hell, I myself would have voted "no". Just trying to keep an open mind and see how opposing views defend themselves.

[optimisticnad]

Well Virgil, since you've stated your opinion so clearly earlier you really don't have to get back into this argument. Your point is well taken. You might feel strongly about it, but certainly we're allowed to have this debate, right? If only to confirm your suspicions. Hell, I myself would have voted "no". Just trying to keep an open mind and see how opposing views defend themselves.

The last sentence - within this context - i'm sorry - but it has to be the most bizarre thing I've read in a long long long time.

[kandaurov]

Opti, I respect and to some extent understand your opinion. However, this has to be the first time my having an open mind has been criticised just because the subject matter is "gross", or, which would be far worse, taboo.

You know what, this is really not worth it. I can see this is a sensitive issue to some people and I'm not here to pick up fights. I'm not posting here anymore, no point being mistaken for a sick pervert when all I want is us to be able to debate every possible issue. May this be a lesson to me. Virgil, you're a good man, Opti, you're great fun. Forgive me if I offended either of you in any way.

[Niamh]

In fact, in the Muslim community, where first cousins frequently marry and inter-breed there are a higher percentage of genetic problems in children than in the general populace.

I think you will find its not just some muslim communities that marry their first or second cousin (think its third cousins that is taboo), but a lot of western countries (alot of christian countires i might add) have done this in the past, especially amongst the gentry. (see mansfeild park by Austen for an example.) And i'm sure there are still people that do. I worked with a guy who had been seeing his cousin for a couple of years. A brother and sister on the other hand, i dont think is right and definitely NOT and parent and child. There has just been a big incest case over here.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...breaking32.htm

[optimisticnad]

You know what, this is really not worth it. I can see this is a sensitive issue to some people and I'm not here to pick up fights. I'm not posting here anymore, no point being mistaken for a sick pervert when all I want is us to be able to debate every possible issue. May this be a lesson to me. Virgil, you're a good man, Opti, you're great fun. Forgive me if I offended either of you in any way.

you've not offended me at all. i hope i haven't offended you either. i just feel quite strongly, as do you. it's great that you have an open mind but i feel like some issues just aren't debatable - like you wouldn't tell someone 'oh i'm trying to keep an open mind about what Hitler did.' Now how wrong does that sound? That's how i feel about this topic, it's like you telling me to you'e keeping an open mind about mass genocide. wrong. and there's no logical reason against it is there? there's moral, as with this issue.

[atiguhya padma]

There is a huge gulf between the moral issues revolving around Hitlers activities and the question of incest. I can't believe the two can be considered equivalent.

[Taliesin]

you've not offended me at all. i hope i haven't offended you either. i just feel quite strongly, as do you. it's great that you have an open mind but i feel like some issues just aren't debatable - like you wouldn't tell someone 'oh i'm trying to keep an open mind about what Hitler did.' Now how wrong does that sound? That's how i feel about this topic, it's like you telling me to you'e keeping an open mind about mass genocide. wrong. and there's no logical reason against it is there? there's moral, as with this issue.

I call Godwins law on your post.
I am afraid you just lost the debate.

For my two cents, I myself don't really feel that I am in the position to throw stones at other peoples sexual habits - the argument that it feels icky is a question of aesthetics and not ethics.

The argument that it can produce children that have genetic problems is plausible, however, what if they don't? Why not criminalize having children between relatives if that is the problem and not the all incesters - plus, the incest law in UK apparently also covers step-brothers and -sisters and homosexual incest - in that case it seems absurd.

The argument that it can be difficult to be fully consenting with a person who is a relative - well, if they are both adults and have agreed to it, then it is their problem and theirs only - if it messes up their heads then too bad - regular couples manage to mess each other up too. It is not the business of others.

The argument that it destroys the social system. Well, I have been hearing a quite similar argument against gay civil union laws here which probably explains why this argument especially annoys me (together with the "icky and unnatural" argument".)
Well, first, as Virgil cited, people tend to have a high natural aversion against incest - which means that only a tiny per cent will ever do it. Which means that they really wouldn't be much noticed anyway.
Call me naive, if you wish, but somehow I think that what forms ones' family as the cornerstone of society is the love and other warm fuzzy feelings and towards each other - and not what some other two people somewhere else are doing in their beds.
I wonder if sex between relatives would be decriminalized, would it decrease the feelings you have for your family? Would you suddenly feel that all your family relationships are suddenly a total mess and would need to go to a psychiatrist because a few folks somewhere are doing things the way you find distasteful?
Somehow, I think not.

[Amundsen]

hmmm. And what about legal murder? Stalin or Hitler as a saint? Burning books? Watching executions in TV? Or I can be your new god? Incest isn't good thing. That's my opinion. I don't force you take my opinion but in judging what will be good and what will be bad be wise, very wise. Incest with you brothers and sisters.