Resolves YES/NO to majority vote of poll I will hold around market close. If the poll is 50/50 I will resolve to PROB=50%.
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Aren't you testing here for “what do people believe what OTHER people will answer“ or “what do people think what most OTHER people will predict what the majority will answer“ etc.?
That seems like an entirely different question?
(E.g. if you had a question on “are you a better than average driver“ the rational answer to give would be something else compared to “I will hold a poll and you need to predict if most people will say they're a better than average driver.“ This is a well established phenomenon, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority)
@JonathanMannhart In this market you're betting on what people will answer in the poll. The poll will likely be more representative of people's actual beliefs though.
@Alyxes You could also just not have children with them, then there's no genetic problem.
In every instance of a bad incestuous relationship, it's always something other than the incest which is the bad-maker.
Adult father sleeping with his 12-year-old daughter? Pedophilia.
Adult mother seducing her son but waiting until his 18th birthday? Grooming.
A brother and sister having sex and conceiving a child? Increased risk of birth defects.
Separate the incest from all of these other harms. Imagine twin brothers, separated at birth, who meet for the first time as adults and enter into a gay relationship. No pedophilia, no grooming, no risk of pregnancy. Is this relationship bad? If so, explain why.
@NBAP I think it is sometimes not entirely unreasonable for a society to have a taboo against something which is acceptable 5% of the times it happens, if the other 95% are bad enough
@April (Though I do think really people ought to be able to set the taboo aside and not bother the hypothetical twin brothers.)
@April I agree. But I think when we ask “Is X bad,” we almost certainly must be asking “Is X intrinsically bad?”, rather than “Is X frequently coupled with intrinsically bad things?”
@NBAP what about gay twin brothers who weren't separated? As in, they grew up together, reached adulthood, fell for each other, and entered a relationship. I don't think you can mutually groom, can you?
But it still seems very different from the separated at birth example. Do you bite this bullet and say it's fine, or can you explain that there's some "non incest badness"?
@Fion That's probably fine, too, yes. Provided, of course, that the dynamics of the relationship do not include any elements that would also be problematic in a non-incestual relationship (domestic abuse, for example).
Even if they fell for each other before adulthood (but above the age we think it's appropriate for teens to begin entering into sexual and romantic relationships with their peers), I don't think that's intrinsically any worse than if the same relationship developed between non-siblings.
@NBAP I think there's something pretty confused about your comment, though I don't know how strongly it bears on your point.
> Every instance of X being bad is actually bad for some reason other than X...
> Separate X from all of these other harms. Is X still bad? If so, explain why.
You're demanding an explanation that can never be fulfilled for any X, since if you could explain why a thing was bad, you could separate that cause from the badness of X.
@BenWeinsteinRaun Yes, in a sense. Ultimately, there are some things that are just intrinsically bad, rather than instrumentally bad. Suffering is an example of an intrinsic bad. When I said we should investigate whether the incest is bad or whether something else is bad, what I meant is whether it was the incest resulting in some more basic harm or if it was something else resulting in some more basic harm.
@NBAP Your third example at least remains confusing to me; are you saying that increased risk of birth defects isn't a more basic harm of an incestuous relationship? That seems kinda weird, since the increased risk of birth defects results from the incest.
(Separately, I think harm-only ethical systems are substantially meta-ethically confused, and object on those grounds too, but we can set that aside for now)
@BenWeinsteinRaun I don’t think birth defects are intrinsically bad, no. I think further explanation is required to explain why a given birth defect is bad.
@NBAP Right, but it's more basic than incest, and caused by the incest; I understood your earlier comment to mean that more basic harm, rather than "something else causing more basic harm", was allowed as a reason for something to be bad.
@BenWeinsteinRaun It can result from incest, but it needn’t. Many things can cause effects which are bad, but if we can prevent those effects then the thing itself is not bad.
@NBAP I then return to my first complaint: that you're asking for an explanation that's not possible to give for any X, except for one that you see as directly intrinsic. "It's not the having-your-children-die that's bad; it's the suffering".
@BenWeinsteinRaun If the resulting bad cannot be prevented, then it is inseparable from the cause and the cause is, in effect, also bad.
@NBAP what exactly do you mean by "cannot be prevented"? "cannot be prevented in principle"? "cannot be prevented by the typical person under typical conditions"? "cannot be prevented using current technology at any price"?
In the first case, I think the suffering caused by one's children dying could be prevented in principle, so that objection stands. If the second, then I think the risks from incest aren't feasible to totally eliminate (since e.g. no contraceptive method is 100% effective).
So I imagine you must mean something like the third, which seems kind of ad-hoc to me but I guess is fine? It probably means, e.g., that some things that aren't bad are only morally permissible to do if you're a billionaire.
@BenWeinsteinRaun The example I gave on this point was a gay couple. This separates the incest from the risk of birth defects.
@BenWeinsteinRaun No, I think there’s probably an acceptable amount of risk. Non-siblings also run the risk of giving birth to children with birth defects, and I think that’s fine. Many activities carry some risk of harming someone, but provided that reasonable precautions are taken to minimize the risk, I don’t think those activities are bad.
@NBAP Cool, that makes sense as a coherent position to me (though I remain in disagreement on the top-level point for the meta-ethical reasons I mentioned)
@BenWeinsteinRaun That’s totally fair, but this probably isn’t the forum for us to hash out moral welfarism (or realism, or whatever particular metaethical commitment you object to).