view the rest of the comments
Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
I get what you're going for here. But another caveat to add would be that the people in this sort of relationship shouldn't have children. They might be able to get away with that for one generation, but if incest runs in the family then it won't take long for things to start going south
Which is in my 1st sentence.
Whoops, misread that
Do you think people with autism, downs syndrome, or cognitive impairments should have kids?
I see what you're trying to do here and I don't like it
Not the person you asked, but you and everyone reading your comment know that's not a good faith argument.
The reason incest is frowned upon and often illegal is because of the danger it poses to any potential offspring. Many genetic diseases rely on recessive traits that require both parents to carry the recessive trait in order for it to be exposed. If two biological siblings have a child, that child would therefore have a massive amount of recessive traits exposed since both parents would share a massive amount of DNA
At a population scale, genetic diversity is critical to survival of a population, and a collapse of genetic diversity through too much inbreeding tends to lead to a very unhealthy population that can be easily wiped out through disease. This is much less of a risk with random incest today thanks to how much humans move around these days, but the flip side is that there is some risk of this from so called "super surrogates" who have genetically fathered hundreds or thousands of kids. The likelyhood of these kids meeting and reproducing can be quite high, which can therefore noticably reduce genetic diversity in a population, and ultimately reduce the health of a population
I wouldn't call the argument a bad faith argument. Perhaps there is a line somewhere, but ultimately, his argument is that "two people who have an increased chance of passing on genetic disorders can't have children/have a relationship".
For most people, when asked this question outside of the incest framing, would argue that the state has no role to dictate that line. The slope is too slippery and screams too much like eugenics. It's only within the social taboo of incest do people think that argument is acceptable.