I have a homosexual question and incest question?

[Angrboda]

Jonathan Haidt probed some related questions in his experiments.

• Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it ok for them to make love?

If you're like most people, your response is "absolutely not," but you'll find it more difficult than you think to come up with a justification. "Genetic defects from inbreeding." Yes, but they were using two forms of birth control. (And in the vanishingly small chance of pregnancy, Julie can get an abortion.) "It will mess them up emotionally." On the contrary, they enjoyed the act and it brought them closer together. "It's illegal." Not in France. "It's disgusting." For you, maybe, but not for them (obviously). Do you really want to say that private acts are morally wrong just because a lot of people find those acts disgusting? And so on.

The scenario of course is designed to ward off the most common moral objections to incest, and in doing so demonstrate that much of moral reasoning is a post-hoc affair — a way of justifying judgments that you've already reached though an emotional gut response to a situation. Although we like to think of ourselves as arriving at our moral judgments after painstaking rational deliberation, or at least some kind of deliberation anyhow, Haidt's model — the "social intuititionist model" — sees the process as just the reverse. We judge and then we reason. Reason is the press secretary of the emotions, as Haidt is fond of saying, the ex post facto spin doctor of beliefs we've arrived at through a largely intuitive process.

What’s the matter with a little brother/sister action?

See also, Haidt's paper: The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment