Saletan on Adult Incest

Here.

One way to characterize Saletan's argument is like so:

He's trying to preserve two "intuitions"; to wit, (a) homosexuality is morally permissible, and (b) incest is not morally permissible.

(Analytic philosophers, clearer than most philosophers on many scores, are lamentably confused about so-called "intuitions" and their role in philosophy; but that's a different complaint for a different time.)

Thing is, I, like many people, don't share the latter intuition.

I'm not in a very strong position to argue against (b); I don't have any sisters, and I don't have any daughters. Perhaps the wrongness of consensual incest would be clearer to me if I did. But I doubt it.

Discussing incest is a little bit like discussing cannibalism. First, there's the ick factor. But, second, people who think the two are morally wrong tend to focus on the obviously impermissible cases--incest involving children, and cannibalism involving murder. But those cases are clear and uncontroversial--nobody thinks they're o.k.

What we need to think about are the clearest cases on the other end of the spectrum--consensual, non-murderous cannibalism, and consensual incest between consenting adults. In both of those cases--putative ickiness aside--it's pretty hard to find a decent argument for moral impermissibility.

But, uh, let's let the cannibalism case wait for another time...

Saletan rightly notes that the reproductive argument against consensual adult incest fails. First, there's birth control. Second, it doesn't rule out incest involving one or more people incapable of reproduction (e.g. on account of age).

Saletan then tries the "social roles" argument--that families involve social roles of certain well-known types, and that sex confuses those roles. That may be right, but here Saletan makes a common error. He confuses finding some kind of argument against x with finding a sufficiently strong argument against x. This often happens when we're inclined against something and flailing around in search of an argument to support our inclinations. Sure, being, say, a brother typically involves a certain type of familial role, as does being a father. Sure, having sex is inconsistent with those roles. But there's nothing there that comes close to entailing that incest is morally wrong. Being good friends with your children constitutes a transgression of such boundaries, but--though some might think it imprudent--no one would judge it to be immoral. Furthermore, this type of argument entails that it is immoral for, e.g., adult step-siblings to have sex. It also seems to fail to rule out sex between biological siblings who do not grow up together, and who do not fill the relevant familial social roles--a consequence that Saletan, it seems, would not welcome.

Peirce says something sensible about such cases somewhere, with his typical go-slow moral conservatism; he says, roughly, that anyone who would give up on the incest taboo on the basis of a little bit of thinking about it is a fool. That's a view I can respect, but only on general fallibilist grounds. I think we have to admit that there are no obvious--at least no obviously good--reasons for thinking that consensual adult incest is morally wrong. Consequently, I don't see any way to defend laws against it. The idea that someone like professor Epstein should face prosecution for it is astonishing to me.