THE CASE FOR INCEST

The case against incest is summarised thus:

• An absolute moral lawgiver (God) who outlaws it.
• The biological ramifications of inbreeding.
• Coercion and psychological abuse.

But as we advance as a smart species, these cases lose their credibility.

Firstly, not everyone believes in an absolute moral lawgiver in our pluralistic society. We already talk about no absolute morality. Hence, we don’t have a unified moral lawgiver or religion. By this, anyone who follows a non-theistic idea has no reason to be bound by his (or her) decrees. If you don’t believe in the idea of God and absolute moral order, what stops you from being in an incestuous relationship? Inbreeding? OK.

Climate change bros swear all the time that the earth is overpopulated. They have taken a ‘scientific’ guess that having fewer kids is the answer. Of course, you don’t have to live by Greta’s decrees. But won’t you consider that it is just the perfect reason you need to bang up that relative without being careful about offspring? Think about it. Thanks to technological advancements, you can decide to lay off having children. Think vasectomy or oocyte preservation, and you have the perfect solution that allows you to have an incestous relationship without fear of birthing genetic errors. If you make up your mind to honour the globe and not have kids, what stops you from being in an incestous relationship? Abuse? Alright.

Incest is mostly spoken of in terms of force and coercion like a father to daughter, or a mother using some traumatic manipulation to have her son. Yet, all these are simply taken care of by the liberal rationale of consent and the care/harm moral matrix. The liberal rationale goes like “as long as they both consent to it, and they are not hurting anyone, then they can get to it.” So if it is consensual, and you have been thinking of getting to it without fear of being judged, just invoke this rationale. There is no case against you.

No one can bind you by reason of their God or religion. You can go ahead with your incestous relationship once you delete the fear of inbreeding. And once it is something you both want, why not go for it? In essence, if all three cases don’t apply to you, nothing stands in your way of having an incestuous relationship.

But that is not what I have come to say. I have not come to encourage incest. But it was necessary for my agenda. And here is my agenda; that if you are immune to these cases, yet you are disgusted by incest, I want to find out why.

In chatting with a friend, he observed that disgust at incest is not innate but learned. If that is true, what case then do you have against incest? Come at me with everything you have while I sit in a corner and wonder if atheism can justify human rights.