Sleeping with a more-than-friend

Dear Moira Lee, 

My older brother and I are really close friends. We’re only a year apart in age, so we more or less grew up with the same interests and hobbies. In high school we belonged to the same friend group and grew particularly close. He’s been my closest confidante, family member, and friend ever since. 

Now in our twenties, my brother and I are both graduate students studying at nearby universities. During our summer break we went traveling through Europe together, and ended up staying a night alone in a French cabin. I can’t quite remember how it came up, but we ended up talking about sleeping together. We both agreed that it would be interesting and fun to try… so we did. We used various forms of birth control to be safe. It was fun, but we decided not to do it again. Our friendship feels even closer now. I wasn’t too concerned about the ethics of our decision, but keeping it a total secret was too difficult. So, I anonymously shared my story on a forum for my university. I got a ton of replies saying that what we did is disgusting and wrong. I’ve been called disgusting, a freak, a criminal against nature, and every name in the book! It’s starting to freak me out. Are they right? 

Signed, a stressed sister

Dear Stressed, 

For starters, I apologize for the online vitriol you’re receiving. Be sure to give yourself some time offline and reach out to your support system (even if you don’t feel comfortable unveiling the origin of the hate). Incest is almost universally taboo in modern society, and people tend to have strong reactions toward instances of it. But you didn’t ask me if what you did with your brother is taboo- you asked me if it’s wrong. And as it happens, I have differing opinions on those two ideas. 

From the sound of your inquiry, your fellow students’ vilification stems from disgust over the taboo nature of you and your brother's actions.  Incest’s taboo status is due in part to the potential harm it can create psychologically and in offspring. But if we take Jonathan Haidt’s objective act utilitarianism approach, it’s difficult to find what is genuinely harmful about your behavior. In objective act utilitarianism theory, we assess the rightness or wrongness of an action through its actual outcome (Bollard, 2024). What-ifs don’t matter. 

Imagine that we follow up with your forum detractors and ask why your behavior was wrong. They may say that you risked creating a child with major birth defects- but you used two forms of birth control. They may argue that it harmed you and your brother’s relationship- but it allegedly made you closer. Insofar as you keep your secret, your friends and family will also remain unscathed. Your haters’ reasoning lies solely on hypotheticals. Imagine now if we were to apply this type of what-if reasoning to all of our decision-making. Simple decisions would grow magnitudes more complicated. Deciding to take your child to the beach could be morally wrong, because they could hypothetically drown. Adopting a dog could be wrong, because it could theoretically scarf down a bar of chocolate in your home. Buying an apple at the store could be wrong, since you might indirectly contribute to unsustainable or unethical agricultural practices. Dwelling on the possible utility of actions (AKA subjective act utilitarianism) just doesn’t make sense in a world as complex as our own, where a one-off decision opens us up to infinite possible consequences (both good and bad). When deciding the morality of a decision, it’s best to appraise the consequences. And in your case, it seems that there were no actual adverse consequences of you and your brother sleeping together. 

It can be argued that your actions are wrong simply on account of being gross or weird- which may be true (no offense), but isn’t a great argument for moral condemnation. So, do your haters really have any standing at all? I think not. Since we’ve ruled out harm, your forum commenters don’t have reasoning based on anything other than intuitive disgust and revulsion. With such a glaring lack of factual rationale, their perspectives on how the world ought to morally operate cannot be trusted. So, my final verdict is a resounding no. Morally speaking, your condemners are incorrect that it was wrong for you to sleep with your brother.

That being said, in the future I’d refrain from sharing sibling sexcapades online.

Column by staff writer Amathia B.