The Rise of the Ubermensch.

Incest and our self-defined moral superiors:

There is almost no way to construct a rational, legally based morality that forbids incest between adults. Most of us have a visceral reaction of disgust when we think about incest because the taboos are so deeply ingrained but the incest taboo can not be supported by rational argument alone. Since the Übermensch is defined by his ability to rise above conventional morality and create his own morality, there are no effective limits to the Übermensch; any purely rational morality designed by humans can be changed on a whim and fully rationalized as a new, emerging morality with minimal effort. The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger.


[For an interesting perspective on how Nietzsche's ideas were corrupted by the Nazis, see Professor Barry Rubin's post on The Strangest Antisemite of Them All: The Bizarre Case of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche did not mean to rationalize genocide but when G-d is dead all things can be rationalized by Homo rationalis.]

I have not even touched upon the psychology of incest, especially parent-child incest, which includes the refusal to accept limits and denial of differences. Incest is perverse in psychological terms because it destroys the meaning of words and differentiations. In parent-child incest the difference between generations is denied and the significance of the primal ties between parent and child are denied. Grown children remain the child of their parents no matter what their age which means that a chronologically adult child is still psychologically a child of the parent with whom he or she has incest. Perhaps some do rise above such conventional notions of morality; perhaps we are seeing the advent of the Übermensch, but we should be careful of accepting the continual and continued accrual of transgressions against our bourgeois (ie, Judeo-Christian) morality; at some point, just as termites can destroy a house by eroding its foundation in silence right until the moment, without warning, the house collapses, each small piece torn out of our moral fabric makes the collapse of our consensual culture more likely.

Of course, the doctrine of "do no harm to others" is a Judeo-Christian value judgment.  If one is to ground it rationally, then the argument is that the "do no harm to others" principle is enlightened self-interest since we don't know when we might be one of the "others."

On the other hand, if a person - an Ubermensch - can get away with doing harm, or thinks he can get away with doing harm, or doesn't care about having harm done to him, then the "do no harm to others" rationale is no more rational than the prohibition against incest.