Jay,
Most humans find some form or other of incest to be immoral. This of course
has presented anthropologists (and Freudians) with something to deal with
for a long, long time. Some have considered it to be probably the first
example of a "moral" imperative (e.g., Claude Levi-Strauss, possibly
Durkheim although he raises other issues, definitely Louis Henry Morgan,
most certainly Freud). Malinowski's tale of the young Trobriand man who
had committed suicide by jumping from a palm tree because he had been caught
having sex with a member of a forbidden category plays the central orienting
image in his classic work on "morality": "Crime and Custom in Savage
Society". Nevertheless, the only basis upon which anyone could form a
judgment that it does harm is genetic: Inbreeding within the range of first
cousins increases the probability that recessive genes will be dominant to a
factor of 3:1. Of course no one really knew this for sure until after Mendel
and given the complexity of the human genome it's hard to tell for sure
which genes affect who how. Levi-Strauss pointed out in Elementary
Structures of Kinship that it would take a breeding population of at least
500 over a period of at least three generations to gain the experience of
the deleterious effects of reproduction within the "first cousin or closer
range." Such a condition did not exist at all in human history until the
advent of horticultural adaptations (approx 15000 ya). This
notwithstanding, the incest taboo is found in one form or another in all
human societies, even those that do not have and could never have had such
levels of aggregation (Eskimos). Incest is, to the best of my knowledge,
the only universal moral structure. Even murder is not sanctioned so
severely and even today it generates a deep "moral" repugnance. Butler's
attempts to link it to patterns of male domination, while intriguing and
provocative, are not much more than that and lack any real basis in the
ethnographic record.
On the other hand , almost as confirmation that the recognition of the harm
of recessive genes is not the basis for the incest prohibition, first
cousin marriage was the preferred, the most morally approved form of
marriage in many if not all societies that recognized lineages, either
patrilineages or matrilineages. Cross-cousin marriage specifically and very
rarely parallel cousin marriage.
How can your excursus on the moral imperative: not to do harm, square with
the fact that the oldest and most universal example of a moral code cannot
be attributed to any possibility that the act in question could be
recognized to cause harm to anyone. If harm is simply whatever is defined
to be harm, which seems implicit in your discussion, then isn't your
position hopelessly circular? And such a position would also fail to
account for the specificity of the incest taboo as well as its preferred
transgression.
Paul H. Dillon
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