Although they have been common throughout history, prohibitions against incest (sexual relations between blood relatives) have become increasingly difficult to understand and defend.
In part, this is a result of a misunderstanding.
We often think that the primary reason to ban incest is to prevent genetic abnormalities or other harm to children who might be conceived.
When there are so many options available by which to prevent such harm, this reasoning seems less and less intelligible.
Incestuous couples could simply refrain from having children, for example, or use assisted reproduction technology to conceive healthy ones.
The lack of intelligibility does not mean that there is a wave of defenders of incest attempting to break the taboo, although there are some.
But it does offer an opportunity to reconsider why incest is a bad thing for a society to tolerate.
And in doing so we might recognize that the problem to which incest gives rise has infiltrated our society by other means, posing a major threat to the health and stability of our families.
The Philosophical Case Against Incest
In the Supplement to his Summa, Thomas Aquinas discusses questions of consanguinity.
After asking whether consanguinity is an impediment to marriage by virtue of the natural law, he gives three reasons that it is.
Interestingly, none of these reasons makes reference to difficulties with offspring.
Rather, Aquinas holds that incest is contrary, first, to the order of relations that should exist between parents and their children.
A daughter cannot relate in the appropriate ways to her father both as father and as spouse, for example.
Aquinas’s third reason is that incest is contrary to an “accidental” end of marriage: the binding together of humankind and the extending of friendship. Continue reading
Sources
- Public Discourse
- Image: Fair Observer
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