A society where there is nothing wrong with prostitution and it's just another business is not likely to keep considering incest as too bad. Once sex is for you not the result of deep feeling and relationship, but a quick business act, why not with your brother? Why is that so much worse than with a total stranger? Not everything two concepts that are logically independent are also causally independent.
Divorce and illegitimacy share a similar relatioship. In theory one can consider easy divorce a good thing and illegitimacy a bad one. But as easy divorce became the norm, more and more people decide not to get married at all, but, since it turns out people still want children, illegitimacy increased. All this was of course predicted well in advance, but those who did so were constantly told divorce is one thing and illegitimacy quite another.
Ahh, the slippery slope argument. I was wondering when it would come sliding down some hill into this talk
1. The first problem with it though is that there is no historical reason to believe that once people stop criminalizing or vilifying X, then they'll also stop caring about Y and Z that are at best vaguely or weakly connected.
E.g., if you look at the 1400's and 1500's, when people started charging more or wanting higher wages, the argument could be made and HAS been made that once it's ok for people to care more about lining their pockets than about the price of food for their fellow man, all sorts of evils are sure to follow. And seriously, in Christian Europe, even trying to charge higher prices than the arbitrary prescribed ones could get you at best vilified by the church, and at worst get you dragged before a church or noble's court. And let's not even get into such evil stuff as "usury", where someone profits from the misfortune of their fellow man, at least if you listened to the bishops ranting against it. Surely a society fallen so low as to allow that as normal, would be ok with all sorts of other ways of being antisocial.
But then came this dude called Adam Smith and it turns out that profit is actually a valuable market mechanism, instead of some human failure.
Did we start being ok with all sorts of other evils if we allowed usury and profiteering? Did we start also considering fraud as normal? No, not really. The slippery slope never happened. In fact, as harming fellow humans goes, we live in less harmful times than ever.
2. Actually we have historical evidence that that link doesn't exist.
Prostitution was legal for most of the last millennium, at all levels, and practiced to extremes you wouldn't even dream of these days. They even had whole streets (with such quaint names like, say, "
Grope#### Lane", where the missing word is an expletive for female genitalia) dedicated to it. Or we have such stuff as Emperor Sigismund thanking the city of Konstanz in writing for providing some 1500 prostitutes for attendants of the the church Council of Konstanz.
Yet somehow we don't see them starting to consider boning one's sister as ok too.
And prostitution is still ok in a lot of countries. E.g., it's a legal and regulated business here in Germany. But sex between siblings is still a criminal offense.
So exactly how does it follow that "
A society where there is nothing wrong with prostitution and it's just another business is not likely to keep considering incest as too bad."? And when is it supposed to finally happen, if countries where prostitution is and was legal since the 1200's, still show no sign of starting being ok with siblings humping? Does it take another thousand years for that slippery slope, or what?
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