Mr F. said:
Filiecs said:
But is such disgust universal? If it was universal, then why does incest exist? Also, why are there people who are NOT disgusted by it?
Well, this one is easy: Because people do things which universally disgust other people all the time. One may as well ask why rape or genocide exist (Not that I am equating consensual incest with rape or genocide), people just do shit. Because they enjoy it, because they think that it is right, because morality is subjective (Will expand on that in the end of my post)
Except that we do have an answer for why rape and genocide are considered evil, that fit's into a larger frame of morality: Don't cause harm, do to others what you would want them to do with you, your rights expand as far as my body begins, etc.
Rape and genocide aren't even "revolting" in the same evolutionary psychological way that you try to attribute to incest to begin with. People are NOT hardwired to find rape and genocide revolting. The Old Testament urged israelites to rape the defeated enemy tribe's women, and to smash their infants on the rocks. This was the moral commandment of a Righteous God.
Our civilization didn't just arbitarily decide to change this because our guts suddenly started to tell us that it is revolting after all, but because now we understand more about empathy and about the paradigm of the Golden Rule, than we used to.
Mr F. said:
Yes, it is. I cannot remember the term, its been a while since I have studied psychology. To use an example, there is a reason why maggots make us feel ill. They are bad for us, they indicate rot, rotten food, things which can harm us. That is the logic I am using.
Evolutionary psychology is only an explanation for WHy we have certain urges, it doesn't imply anything about what we should do with them.
You might find maggots disgusting, then don't be around maggots. But that doesn't mean that you should exterminate maggots, or even tell other people that they ought to stay away from maggots because they also ought to find them disgusting. [/quote]
Mr F. said:
Entitled said:
Your brain might be hardwired to find incest disturbing, but it's also hardwired to find people who are visibly different from your own monkey tribe revolting.
I disagree.
You are disagreeing with hard science. Look up "genetic attraction". It's a proven fact that we instinctively find faces genetically less similar to ours more repulsive.
For that matter, the famous "uncanny valley" effect also implies that human bodies that are subtly different from yours are repulsive. It's used to explain the fear of skin diseases and the fear of dead bodies (and zombies), but it can also jusify some racism, and even the disgust with old people.
Mr F. said:
Yes, with regards to interracial sex taboos and all of that shit. Yes, with regards to the very concept of race. No with regards to incest, bestiality and pedophilia.
Your failure to make a moral distinction between consensual and nonconsensual sex, is disturbing.
Mr F. said:
Power relationships in families are weird. Every-ones family is unique, yes, but in MOST cases, the parents have the most power and the children have the least. There is a distinct hierarchy present. The same reasoning as to why teachers should not fuck their students applies here. Power relationships, a position of care. It is frowned upon because people are on different levels, that the opportunity for exploitation is HUGE.
We created a specific cultural taboo for incest, and another one for student-teacher relatinships.
At the same time, the media glorifies inter-class romance, that also has a power difference, not to mention rescuer-romance, but even the Nightingale effect, or the Stockholm syndrome (Beauty and the Beast, anyone?) Celebrities having sex with groupies is also often glorified, there is a power difference there too.
Besides, taboos about incest already existed when society didn't give a flying fuck about consent, back when women were the legal property of their husbands, and raping a virgin meant that you then had to marry the damaged goods. People just figured out that there is a connection thabetween Incest and diseases, so they made a taboo against it. Now we have birth control, and we could even measure whether or no there is a genetic risk with any couple, so people are just making up new excuses about "power levels" that they don't really care about in other situations.