Arrested Development and Philosophy (4 page)

8.
Plato,
Republic VII,
pp. 514-518.

9.
Plato,
Apology,
p. 30c.

10.
Episode 26.

11.
Episode 1.

12.
Episode 5.

13.
Episode 45.

14.
Episode 36.

15.
Bertrand Russell,
The Conquest of Happiness
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 18.

16.
Ibid., p. 18.

17.
Ibid., p. 19.

18.
Ibid., p. 20.

19.
Ibid., p. 21.

20.
Ibid., p. 17.

21.
Ibid., p. 113.

Chapter 2

KISSING COUSINS

Incest, Naturalism, and the Yuck Factor

Deborah R. Barnbaum

George Michael thought that Maeby may be his cousin, which may be a problem. Or maybe not. Can moral philosophy help us figure it out all these maybes?

Maeby is George Michael’s first cousin; George Michael is Michael’s son, Lindsay is Maeby’s mother, and Michael and Lindsay are brother and sister. At the end of Season 3, it’s revealed that Lindsay was adopted, which means that Maeby may not be biologically related to George Michael. But then again, she may be, since Maeby’s birth is cloaked in a bit of shadow (at least it is right now, as I’m writing). Maeby’s grandmother, Lucille, referred to Maeby as having been “made in a cup,” which doesn’t eliminate the possibility that Maeby is George Michael’s first cousin (in the naughty biological way). What it does tell us is that George Michael’s and Maeby’s relationship is a bit mysterious. The “high cost, low quality mini-mansion” might not be the only thing to come crashing down if George Michael and Maeby get together.

Throughout Seasons 1 and 2, George Michael believed that Maeby was family—the biological kind—and that he shouldn’t be kissing her, or doing much of anything else with her. George Michael believes hooking up with his first cousin is morally wrong. It’s incest, a big no-no (despite the fact that in previous centuries, cousins married all the time). But what makes incest morally wrong?

As we’ll see, there are a couple of philosophical reasons for thinking that incest is morally wrong, but ultimately both are as flawed as an attempt to make millions selling the Cornballer.

The Argument from Naturalism

One argument against incest is that it is “unnatural.” We’ll call this The Argument from Naturalism. An
argument,
in the formal sense, has both premises and a conclusion.
Premises
are just those claims offered as evidence for a conclusion. A
conclusion
is what we infer from premises. There are two things to look for in an argument. First, we want to know if the conclusion logically follows from the premises (if it does, then the argument is valid). Second, we want to know if the premises are actually
true
(if the premises of a valid argument are true, we call the argument sound).

Here are some activities that might fall prey to The Argument from Naturalism: incest, riding a Segway, and Buster’s love for “Mother.” The Argument from Naturalism, applied to these three Bluthy things, looks something like this:

In each case, the conclusion follows from the premises. So the argument is valid. But all of you cousin-lovers out there will be happy to know that validity isn’t enough for a good argument. The premises need to be true as well.

The first premise is typically defended by pointing to examples in the world. Most people manage to walk if they need to traverse 20 yards at a time, the Segway is a manmade device, and incidentally, it makes Gob look like a complete goof every time he hops aboard to putter along only slightly faster than if he were walking. Gob’s riding a Segway is clearly unnatural. In our first example, then, the first premise looks true.

But what of Buster’s love for “Mother?” Most people—most normal people—don’t live with their mothers into adulthood, don’t have a fanatic devotion to them, and don’t sublimate their desires by dating their mother’s “best friend and chief social rival”—women with the same age, address, social status, and name as their own mothers. Buster’s love for his mother is unnatural. Similarly, it might be argued that incest is unnatural. Perhaps, like the Segway, there is something that just looks odd about incestuous relationships. Perhaps there are few incestuous relationships in nature, and genetic disorders are more likely to be passed on if close relatives have biological children. (Of course, this is also true for folks over forty who decide to have children). These facts support the premise that incest is unnatural. (They might also show that having children over forty is unnatural.)

The second premise states that if something is unnatural, it’s morally wrong. Why should we believe this? Defenders of the argument might point to the value of nature—its beauty, its harmony, its perfection. While humans have done a lot to mess up this planet (George Sr., we’re talking to you!), those things that are “natural” are somehow unblemished. As such, the claim goes, if it’s natural, then it’s morally acceptable, and if it’s “unnatural,” then it’s morally wrong.

If you want to object to this argument, you’ll have a pretty easy go of things. Both the first and second premises have considerable flaws. Luckily, there is a lot to learn from examining the flaws in the argument. When considering the first premise, we need to ask what is meant by the term “unnatural.” To understand what is unnatural, let’s try to define what is natural (the opposite of natural will be our definition of unnatural). Among possible definitions of the term, we could list:

Incest is found in nature, so Definition 1 won’t help the incest-hater claim that George Michael’s hooking up with Maeby, in what seems to be an incestuous relationship, is unnatural. This is one of the greatest challenges confronting the defenders of the Argument from Naturalism who adhere to Definition 1: All it takes is one incestuous relationship found in nature to derail the argument. Edgar Allen Poe married his cousin, as did Jerry Lee Lewis (Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!). And of course, thousands of cousins have married in earlier centuries. Unless we deny that humans are a part of nature, it looks like our own history shows that incest
is
found in nature, and in lots of cases.

Those who adhere to Definition 1 might respond by saying, “It is true that there are examples of incest in nature, but those aren’t really natural.” If this is the response, though, the incest opponent is either equivocating (using two different senses of the term
natural
), or he is simply denying the evidence.

Those who adhere to Definition 1 must defend not only premise 1, but also premise 2. The claim “that which is found in nature is beautiful, harmonious, or perfect, and thus is moral” is not uniformly true—and not by a long shot. Birth defects, tsunamis, and seals with a taste for mammal blood are all found in nature. But we’re hard-pressed to say that these things are beautiful, harmonious, or perfect, let alone moral.

Definition 2 says something is natural if it isn’t altered by humans. Does that help defenders of the argument? George Michael’s hooking up with Maeby is
an action that involves human beings
, so it doesn’t make any sense to say that only actions unaltered by human beings are natural! George Michael and Maeby are human beings, after all—and naturally so.
All
of their interactions involve other human beings (namely, each other!). We certainly don’t want to say that every time they interact they’re behaving unnaturally. This would make every thing we do with other people unnatural and immoral—including reproduction in the old-fashioned way.

We live in an environment that has been altered by human beings, an environment replete with yachts, model homes, and Frozen Banana Stands. Given that we’re immersed in an environment that has been altered by human beings, it’s hard to distinguish actions that are “natural” and those that are “unnatural.” Take, for example, Maeby’s mysterious origin. If she was “made in a cup” for $130,000, it’s possible that she was conceived using in-vitro-fertilization (IVF). One IVF method would involve taking an egg from Lindsay, taking some sperm from Tobias, fertilizing the egg in a Petri dish, and then implanting that fertilized egg in Lindsay. Some people will argue that IVF is unnatural and thus morally wrong. But is it any more “unnatural” than birth control, perfume, deodorant, caesarian sections, ultrasounds, or antibiotics? All of these actions involve “alteration by human beings.” Advocates of the Argument from Naturalism will be forced to claim that using antibiotics (or deodorant, perfume, and other things that make us smell fabulous) is morally wrong.

This leaves us with the third definition: Something is natural if it is most common, most typical. According to this definition, it’s not that the unnatural is never found in nature—it’s simply that the unnatural is unusual, it isn’t the norm. And what isn’t natural, according to premise 2, isn’t morally right.

Those who object to the Argument from Naturalism don’t have much to say in response to premise 1 if defenders of the argument adopt Definition 3. It’s easily and empirically proven that some actions—kissing someone you believe to be your cousin, riding a Segway, fanatical devotion to your mother—aren’t typical. But the perils of using Definition 3 emerge when premise 2 is analyzed. Let’s have a look at this in our trusty old argument form.

The big problem here is obvious: something can be both unusual and uncommon, and still be completely moral (or at least not immoral). If it were immoral to be unusual, then it would be immoral to have a high IQ, to be exceptionally generous, or to have your hand bitten off by a seal. Clearly, though, these things are not immoral. Likewise, it would be immoral for a Bluth to be caring, insightful, or compassionate. But actually, we think Michael is morally good to the extent that he manifests these traits.

People who use the Argument from Naturalism often engage in a philosophical sleight-of-hand (illusion!) known as the fallacy of equivocation. This is the fallacy committed when a single word or phrase is used with two different meanings in order to draw a false conclusion. Many jokes in
Arrested Development
rely on instances of the fallacy of equivocation (
The Man Inside Me
, anyone?). When someone uses “unnatural” to mean “atypical or unusual” or “not found in nature” and then switches the meaning in the middle of the argument to “morally wrong” that person commits the
fallacy of equivocation.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) offered a critique alternately called
Hume’s Law, The Fact/Value Distinction,
or the
Is/Ought Distinction
that undermines the Argument from Naturalism. Any argument that moves from a claim that some fact
is
true in the world, to the claim that something
ought
to be true in the world, is philosophically questionable. You’re reading this book. It doesn’t follow that you
ought
to be.
Arrested Development
got canceled. It
definitely
doesn’t follow that it should have been.

The upshot is that the Argument from Naturalism isn’t a sound argument. Both premises suffer from problems (so the argument, though valid, is not sound). Is there another way to keep George Michael away from Maeby, given that the Argument from Naturalism doesn’t work?

The Yuck Factor, and the Wisdom of Repugnance

Among human beings, there’s almost a universal response to incest:
Eeww! Gross! Yuck!
Might this visceral response tell us something about what’s morally right?

There’s no formal argument behind this reasoning. But there is nonetheless something philosophically intriguing here. The philosopher A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) argued that moral claims don’t actually mean what we think they mean. Ayer’s position, called
emotivism,
is that moral claims simply express our emotional response to a particular action or state of affairs. Saying, “It is morally wrong for George Sr. to steal from his shareholders,” is nothing more than an expression of disgust for George Sr.’s actions. There is no way to logically prove that stealing from shareholder is wrong; all we have is our emotional reaction.

The near-universal
Yuck!
response to incest may be an example of emotivism. George Michael and Maeby may not be on the edge of doing something that is morally wrong; it may be that hooking up while everyone believes them to be biologically related is merely the type of action that would result in a response of “Yuck!” But so what? “Yuck!” is not a philosophical argument; it doesn’t prove a thing about morality. The emotivist tells us that moral claims are personal reports of deep admiration or disgust, nothing more.

Contrary to Ayer, Leon Kass offers a defense of the yuck factor as a means of telling us what is morally right and wrong, what he calls the
wisdom of repugnance
. Kass presented a lengthy and impassioned essay against human cloning in 1997 (when a sheep named Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned). One of Kass’s objections is that we all recognize that some aspects of cloning humans are simply offensive or grotesque. Imagine women giving birth to offspring who are genetically
identical
to themselves (are they giving birth to themselves?), or giving birth to individuals genetically identical to their own mothers or fathers (can I be my mother’s mother?), or parents attempting to create genetically identical children to “replace” those who have died. Kass considers what this visceral response might tell us: