If there is one sort of consensual sexual relationship that remains stigmatized in our more “open” and “sex positive” and “no kink-shaming” society, it is that between closely related family members (siblings, parent-child, cousins, and even second or third cousins). Interracial relationships are normal (which is a surprisingly recent development), gay relationships have become (relatively speaking) normalized, asexuality is not all that looked down upon (or, if we’re honest, even thought about very often), and so on. But consensual incestual relationships are not. Is there a good reason for continued disapproval of consensual incestual relationships?
Just as preface to this: it is not uncommon for the word “incest” to be used to imply non-consensual sexual assault of family members, but for this article I am going to mean “incest” or “incestual” to mean strictly consensual relationships between adults, unless otherwise noted. It should also be noted that it may be difficult to escape the power dynamics at play in parent-child incest, and so I will be primarily discussing sibling or cousin incest.
It seems to me that any argument against the legalization, or even normalization, of incest will boil down to “I personally find it disgusting, and so it should not be allowed and/or society should disapprove of it.” Even among people who consider themselves progressives or sex positive, incestual relationships are still free game for heaping with shame and disgust. Something I find interesting about this is that, when I was a kid back in the 1990’s, this was the way people thought about homosexuality – someone being gay (or even defending homosexuality) was seen as shameful and disgusting. Now this attitude would be considered the epitome of bigotry (I’m sure a lot of 90’s kids are very glad that Twitter wasn’t around back then).
And so, the question is: what are the arguments for keeping incest illegal and/or shameful? The obvious one is that there is the higher potential to conceive offspring with genetic abnormalities. This argument, I contend, does not work for several reasons:
- Not all (and in fact most) sex is not for the purpose of procreation. Most of the time people have sex, if someone gets pregnant this would be an undesirable outcome, regardless of the health of the child. This, too, could be the case for incestual sex. There are ways to prevent pregnancy (and, if you are of a more progressive lean, there are ways to terminate pregnancies as well). The upshot being that incestual sexual intercourse itself should not be outlawed or shamed because of one potential, but avoidable, outcome.
- Not all sex has to be penis in vagina. Not all sex even needs to be heterosexual sex. In other words, if you are anti-incest because of the potential for incestual relationships to conceive children with genetic abnormalities, but you are pro-gay, then why not at least allow for gay incestual relationships? Or even heterosexual incestual relationships that only engage in oral sex, anal sex, or other forms of sexual acts with virtually zero probability of conceiving a child? Additionally, not all romantic relationships even need to be sexual relationships (e.g., relationships between asexual partners).
- If our primary (or only) reason to be against incestual relationships is to prevent sexual intercourse that may result in children with genetic abnormalities, then why not apply this to non-incestual relationships as well? Why not test everyone to see if they pass some threshold of potential to conceive children with genetic abnormalities and then prevent those people from procreating? I think you can see where this is going: eugenics. And so, to be hyperbolic (but not entirely incorrect), if your only reason for being against the normalization of incest is because of the potential to birth children with genetic abnormalities, then you have a eugenicist mindset.
- While the inbreeding depression is real, and the risks of genetic abnormalities increases as the coefficient of inbreeding increases, one incestual relationship in a lineage does not necessitate that other relationships in a family must be incestual. The biggest risk comes from regular inbreeding within a lineage, not necessarily the odd case here and there.
- If you are of the leftist ilk who buy into critical disability theory, then shouldn’t you celebrate the existence of people with genetic abnormalities? Or, at the very least, not want to prevent their existence because of their disabilities?
Another argument might be something along the lines that incest is “not natural” in some way. This is, of course, a fallacious appeal to nature, while also ignoring all the other unnatural things we accept in our daily lives (e.g., you are currently reading this on a computer screen while, presumably, wearing clothes). Not to mention that the “unnatural” argument was often levied against homosexuality in the past, yet the majority of people do not buy into that anymore. On top of all this, there is a 2021 meta-analysis that shows that, in fact, inbreeding is quite common in the animal kingdom, meaning that it is, in fact, quite “natural” by the standard of it occurring in nature.
You might think there are religious reasons to oppose incest (I will be primarily focusing on Judaism and Christianity; for Islam, look into the concept of mahram). Leviticus, for instance, seems to be quite explicit in its condemnation of incest. See, for instance:
6 “None of you shall approach any one of his close relatives to uncover nakedness. I am the Lord. 7 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother; she is your mother, you shall not uncover her nakedness. 8 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is your father’s nakedness. 9 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your sister, your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether brought up in the family or in another home. 10 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your son’s daughter or of your daughter’s daughter, for their nakedness is your own nakedness. 11 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife’s daughter, brought up in your father’s family, since she is your sister. 12 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s sister; she is your father’s relative. 13 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother’s sister, for she is your mother’s relative. 14 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s brother, that is, you shall not approach his wife; she is your aunt. 15 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your daughter-in-law; she is your son’s wife, you shall not uncover her nakedness. 16 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother’s wife; it is your brother’s nakedness. 17 You shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman and of her daughter, and you shall not take her son’s daughter or her daughter’s daughter to uncover her nakedness; they are relatives; it is depravity. 18 And you shall not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive.
And
17 “If a man takes his sister, a daughter of his father or a daughter of his mother, and sees her nakedness, and she sees his nakedness, it is a disgrace, and they shall be cut off in the sight of the children of their people. He has uncovered his sister’s nakedness, and he shall bear his iniquity.
There is, of course, instances of incest in the old testament, such as between the offspring of Adam and Eve, or the offspring of Noah after the flood. But this is often hand waved away by saying that these instances were prior to Leviticus:
It is important to distinguish between incestuous relationships prior to God commanding against them (Leviticus 18:6–18) and incest that occurred after God’s commands had been revealed. Until God commanded against it, it was not incest. It was just marrying a close relative. It is undeniable that God allowed “incest” in the early centuries of humanity. Since Adam and Eve were the only two human beings on earth, their sons and daughters had no choice but to marry and reproduce with their siblings and close relatives. The second generation had to marry their cousins, just as after the flood the grandchildren of Noah had to intermarry amongst their cousins. One reason that incest is so strongly discouraged in the world today is the understanding that reproduction between closely related individuals has a much higher risk of causing genetic abnormalities. In the early days of humanity, though, this was not a risk due to the fact that the human genetic code was relatively free of defects.
Source: Got Questions
God’s reason for changing His mind on the issue, according to Got Questions, is because of the potential for genetic abnormalities:
It seems that, by the time of Moses, the human genetic code had become polluted enough that close intermarriage was no longer safe. So, God commanded against sexual relations with siblings, half-siblings, parents, and aunts/uncles (Genesis 2:24 seems to indicate that marriage and sexual relations between parents and children were never allowed by God). It was not until many centuries later that humanity discovered the genetic reason that incest is unsafe and unwise. Genetics was not an issue in the early centuries of humanity, and the marriages that occurred between Adam and Eve’s children, Abraham and Sarah, and Amram and Jochebed were not selfish pursuits of sexual gratification or abuses of authority; accordingly, those relationships should not be viewed as incestuous. The key is that sexual relations between close relatives were viewed differently pre-Law and post-Law. It did not become “incest” until God commanded against it.
Source: Got Questions
This could go down the deep rabbit hole of divine command theory (which seems to be the position of the above quotes) and the Euthyphro dilemma (is incest bad because God condemns it? Or does God condemn incest because it is bad? The above appears to take the position of the former), or even whether the Law was superseded by Jesus or what that means for incest, but all those are whole topics unto themselves. For our purposes here, it appears that (if the reasoning given by Got Questions is to be believed) the reasons for God condemning incest has to do with the argument addressed above: that incest increases the chances of passing on genetic abnormalities to offspring. The responses to the argument given above are unlikely to assuage someone with strong Christian beliefs (i.e., they would think that all sex is for the purpose of procreation, that homosexuality is forbidden, that abortion is morally reprehensible, and so on). Such a position is probably not one that will find any counterarguments offered here to be convincing, and so my only response is that laws and social mores are not in one-to-one correspondence with biblical interpretations. Just look at, for instance, growing acceptance of LGBT issues. Meaning, at the very least, biblical condemnation of incest should not determine whether incest is legal or not, though it may still be socially taboo through the religious lens.
And given this, someone might simply argue that incest just is a taboo (whether for religious reasons or not), and therefore the taboo ought to be adhered to. Put another way, just because the taboo is socially constructed does not mean it isn’t “real” or “important” in some way. Plenty of things, such as money, are mere social constructs, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t important for a functioning society. While it is true that something being a social construct does not make it categorically bad, or something to be rejected, or not useful, there ought at least be some justification for it beyond “it’s the way it is and therefore it’s the way it ought to be” (which is a naturalistic fallacy). Once upon a time this was the case for slavery and racism, for sexism, for homophobia, and so on. Social constructs ought to have some practical utility, even if it is something as simple as the sense of purpose and belonging one acquires from observing a tradition. Or, at the very least, social constructs ought not do more harm than any benefit they might confer. As discussed above, there is little justification for keeping incest un-normalized, and so the mere fact that it is not normalized is not itself justification for maintaining this position.
It might also be argued that incest is, in some way (religious or not) simply degrading or demeaning to anyone who engages in it. People are doing something impure or in some way debasing themselves by engaging in incestual relationships beyond any harm (or lack thereof) they may be causing. This is looking at incest through the lens of the sanctity/purity moral foundation. It would have a similar sort of degradation as someone, for instance, in the privacy of their own home and wearing a condom, having sex with with a raw chicken they bought at the store: while such an act is not causing harm to anyone, there is just something “icky” about it. Such a person has done something impure and degenerate. Or, it may just be that the kind of person who would do such a thing has something “wrong” with them in some way. Similarly for anyone who would engage in incestual relationships.
I wrote an entire post on what I think are the issues with the sanctity/purity moral foundation, so I will not go into that in detail here, suffice to say that I think sanctity/purity is quite often arbitrary, subjective, mutually exclusive (between different conceptions of what is sacred or impure), and potentially harmful. As a result, I do not buy into the argument that incestual relationships are degrading and demeaning. More than that, I don’t think that other people buying into such an argument should be the basis for laws against incestual relationships, though people are free to continue finding incestual relationships disgusting (just as people are free to continue finding homosexuality disgusting, though that should not be the grounds for making homosexuality illegal).
Concluding Remarks
Perhaps one of the thoughts going through your mind as you read this is: “why make a post about this? Is this really a hill you want to die on?” You may even attribute to me sinister or unseemly motivations: “he wants to further plunge society into sexual degradation! Or maybe he is trying to justify his own moral degradation to himself and the world!” My interest in sex is quite minimal, and I have zero interest in engaging in incestual relationships. And as for plunging the world into sexual degradation, I think the sexual behaviors of society rank low on the list of things we ought to be worried about. If anything, humankind’s addiction to sex and porn is a symptom of something worse, not the problem itself. My reason for making this post is mostly because I find the inconsistencies in societal thinking interesting. As I noted at the outset, incest is still, even in our “sex positive” and “no kink-shaming” society, seen as a legitimate target for scorn and shaming. What I mean to show here is that, with the possible exception of strict adherence to the bible, there are really no good arguments for maintaining this view of incestual relationships, much less making incest illegal.