Should Incest between consenting adults be legal?

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In regards to malformed children, the last Hapsburg is a good example of how incest can be bad in a practical sense, especially if one wanted their own offspring to go on.

Incest adds up. Charles II was the product of hundreds of years of cousin marriages. He was actually vastly more inbred than the product of a single incestuous pairing even as close as siblings or parent-child.

I'm gonna say no because what if babby happens

This is the negative, especially if it recurs over multiple generations.

Whenever one asks the question of whether something should be legal, an important consideration is whether it is already legal. It always consumes resources to change an existing regime.

So there are two issues. One of them is the usual issue with a law, which is whether the cost of enforcing it is justified by the benefit, or in this case, the avoidance of harm. Part of that is whether the law actually successfully stops the harm.

The other is how much it would cost to change. Even if one law, or the lack of that law, is preferable to the status quo, does the benefit of changing it justify the cost of doing it?

I'd say, based on not much, really, that it doesn't seem there's a huge difference in outcomes in having such a law or not having it, just based on Rhode Island having abolished outlawing it without any obvious harm. But there doesn't seem to be any benefit, either, so why bother changing it?

It's illegal in all 50 states to some degree, with Rhode Island just not criminalizing the actual sexual behavior. No state sanctions such marriages, and probably none should.

So even if it doesn't always make sense to criminalize behavior like this, it isn't something that should be encouraged. It certainly shouldn't be rewarded by extending the benefits of marriage to it. The incest taboo serves a useful social purpose, and should continue to deter such behavior where the criminal law does not.

(All this sperging about a blatant honeypot topic. Shoot me.)
 
With cousin incest, the heightened risk of birth defects in the child that is made is actually lower than that of women who get pregnant when they're over 40. The taboo is more of a Western culture thing than science. On the other hand, the condemnation of brother-sister relations is almost universal throughout all of human society.
 
Also relevant to this thread is that there is a phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction that can occur when two relatives are raised apart and then meet each other as adults. There are a lot of hypotheses of why this happens; a psychological one is that the bonding that should have occurred when the two people were still babies is missed, and now that both of them are grown up those feelings are misdirected and now the family members want to jump into bed with each other. It's also said to be influenced by the fact that people evolved to choose those genetically similar to them as partners, or the Westermarck effect wearing off. Since adoptive reunions are becoming more common, these situations are starting to unfortunately become more common as well, and we have groups of relatives who want to bump uglies that we don't know what to do with.
 
Also relevant to this thread is that there is a phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction that can occur when two relatives are raised apart and then meet each other as adults. There are a lot of hypotheses of why this happens; a psychological one is that the bonding that should have occurred when the two people were still babies is missed, and now that both of them are grown up those feelings are misdirected and now the family members want to jump into bed with each other. It's also said to be influenced by the fact that people evolved to choose those genetically similar to them as partners, or the Westermarck effect wearing off. Since adoptive reunions are becoming more common, these situations are starting to unfortunately become more common as well, and we have groups of relatives who want to bump uglies that we don't know what to do with.
seems to be a reason to make it more enforced now that there is a more substantial risk of it happening
 
seems to be a reason to make it more enforced now that there is a more substantial risk of it happening
Yeah, but how can you exactly regulate these kinds of things? The only foolproof way to make sure sex never happens is to make sure they never meet at all, which is ridiculously overkill.
 
I dunno. I guess. Like if it makes them happy, sure, but as long as they take their tard babies to the backwoods. Or Ruckersville, Virginia. :ween:
 
Yeah, but how can you exactly regulate these kinds of things? The only foolproof way to make sure sex never happens is to make sure they never meet at all, which is ridiculously overkill.
The sex isn't the problem, just make it illegal to carry an inbred fetus to term with a punishment being the denial of state services to the fetus as was done in china to second children
 
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