What Should We Do? (Part One: Incest and Meta-Ethics)

Have you ever been torn about what to do in a situation? Here’s one: Jack has fallen in love with Sally. When he is with her he feels butterflies in his stomach and when he is away from her she’s all he can think about. But there’s just one problem: Sally is Jack’s sister.

(the sun cannot express or feel moral judgements, this is an artist’s depiction)

What should Jack do in this situation?

Very likely we all feel that:

1. Nobody should engage in incest.
2. Therefore, Jack and Sally should not engage in incest

But why should nobody engage in incest? Asking these kinds of questions are what some refer to as “practicing philosophy” and many people rightly question the use of this activity. Harry is one of those people:

fun fact: harry and john are both patients in a mental hospital but think they are at a college house party

HARRY: “What do you mean ‘why shouldn’t anyone engage in incest?’ Because it’s fucking disgusting John. Don’t you have a sister??”

JOHN: “Okay, I feel that, but is disgust always a correct indication of what is right and wrong? Like, I was reading a book about Hitler the other day and it was talking about how he described Jews as cockroaches and seemed to feel a genuine, powerful disgust towards them. In that case, we feel like his disgust was a really really bad guide for him in regards to what he should and shouldn’t do, so why, in the case of incest, should we trust that our disgust is a good guide?”

HARRY: “You’re overthinking it, dude. That is a completely different situation. Nothing good came out of the Holocaust, but incest is like basically guaranteed to result in deformed babies whose lives are totally ruined from the start.”

Did you catch that? If morality is what we should and shouldn’t do, Harry just came across a standard for how we should decide what we should do (the technical term for this is “meta-ethics”)! Namely, that we shouldn’t do things that only cause harm.

the orange circle represents meta-ethics, the blue is ethics, and the dark void is what happens when you ask “how should we decide how we should decide what we should do?” and can’t come up with a good answer. but who knows, maybe beyond this picture, somewhere out there in the void is another habitable planet called “objective morality”

This is different from saying we “shouldn’t do bad things”, because sometimes being bad is fun and fun is good! This is just saying, if there were something that caused no benefit whatsoever at all in any way, wasn’t fun, in fact, was rather boring, and made everything much much worse, we shouldn’t do that thing.

To put it in other terms,

QUESTION: Which is better?

A) The worst possible suffering for everyone.

B) Not that.

q :ɹƎMSN∀ (flip the page to see the answer key!!)

Notice how John zeroes in on this to challenge Harry’s intuitions about incest.

JOHN: “Okay, I agree with you that deformed babies are bad and should be avoided, but what if John and Sally both had a genetic condition that made them completely infertile? And what if, like, they were both super in love, mutually. Like soulmate, Romeo-and-Juliet-type situation. Don’t we feel that love is really beautiful and rare and should, like, therefore be allowed if not encouraged in any situation where it isn’t harming anyone else?”

I agree with John. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a brother and sister genuinely loving each other and expressing that love, even though it is intuitively gross to me.

If I were to argue that Jack should not pursue his feelings toward Sally, I would therefore cite the social penalties that would be imposed, the genetic deformities that would make their children's lives harder, and the problematic power dynamics that would call the consent into question if one of the siblings grew up older than the other.

What I would not cite is the inherent badness of incest as such. Why does this difference matter? I think John would find my arguments far more convincing than someone who simply told him he was a disgusting freak.

In what other areas do we make bad arguments for good positions? How could we improve the world if we convinced more people to stop doing things that only cause harm, and to start doing good or at least better things instead?

Conclusion

Life’s really hard and there’s a lot of decisions we have to make. We could take each problem as it comes and decide in the moment based on our gut feelings or we could come up with some broad standards ahead of time, like “I want to do whatever causes the least harm and the most good for everyone, including me” and then use those standards as helpful guideposts when we are in powerful emotional states and limited timeframes.

We should occasionally evaluate the standards we rely upon to make sure they are actually what we want. A person who reads the undeniable endorsements of slavery in the Bible might change their standard from “I want to do whatever the Bible tells me to do” to something else. A person who discovers the depression and dissatisfaction of a merely material life might change their standard from “I want to do whatever brings me pleasure in the moment” to something else.

We’ll all likely go through this process many times in our lives, hopefully learning from each trial along the way and getting better over time.

What if there was a way we could learn from the mistakes without having to actually make them ourselves? Well, that’s what literature and philosophical texts are good for. They allow you to read the minds of people who lived tens to thousands of years ago and who tried their best to grapple with many of the same problems as you.

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

Books are by no means the only or even the best way to learn how to live though.

There’s also friends and family who have all lived unique lives and exist as a free source of insight and inspiration whenever you might need it. I love it when I ask “How was your day?” and someone gives a passionate rant or eulogy. They don’t even realize how valuable what they’re saying is, in fact they usually apologize for giving us a fresh perspective on life and the world.

And that’s all that this is. I hope you can think of me as a friend sharing some of what I think to be true so that you can use it to help yourself or others in some way. If you ever need someone to talk to, you can always reach out to me and know that when I ask “How was your day?” I’m not just being polite. (:

What Should We Do? (Part Two: Compassion)