Verified by 
It's a jungle out there -- sexually speaking. That's why the Germans say that when the penis gets hard, the brain goes soft. We're overwhelmed by pheromones, smitten by lust, rendering our ethical brains kaput.
Having spent the past three years researching a book about ethics, I've become a target for people -- friends, mostly, but also friends of friends -- wanting advice about how to free themselves from unforeseen, sometimes embarrassing, moral tar pits. The nurse in my doctor's office confessed to being a shoplifter, my neighbor asked me what I thought of abortion. And just yesterday, minding my own business, I was asked a question at a dinner table full of liberals that stopped me in my tracks, morally speaking:
Is it ever OK to have consensual sex with someone in your family?
The question came from an attractive woman in her late 40s. My immediate response was, absolutely not. The vestigial disgust response toward incestuous relations, wired into our species when mastodons still pounded the earth, waved a red flag across my face. As I was about to give a boring speech about how our disgust response evolved to protect us from potentially polluting moral activities, however, this charming lady confessed that she was in a serious ethical pickle. Years before, she and her half-brother had fallen madly in love. It was one of those requited-but-not-consummated, and never talked about, loves, and after high school the half-siblings had gone their separate ways, seeing each other only very rarely at family reunions. (They shared a mother but had different fathers).
In the past year, she continued, this woman had reconnected by telephone with this half-brother, who lived on the West Coast (we were in New York City). Both of them were now divorced and their phone calls were starting to turn steamy. The brother wanted to meet in Vegas for a long weekend. If she agreed to this illicit interlude, she was sure that things would finally become sexual between them. There was no danger of pregnancy, she hastened to add, due to a hysterectomy. What on earth should she do?
I told her to go to Vegas. The table went silent. No one would be harmed if they kept quiet about it, I said. Giving this advice out loud made me feel strange -- unsavory, bestial, fallen -- other -- but my common-sense self truly believed this was right. We were talking about two consenting adults with no possibility of procreation, thrown together by family destiny and lucky enough to have reconnected in the autumn of their lives. Why would they say no to the chance at love? What taboo would they be bowing to, I asked, and why? It seemed foolish and sad to turn away from such a gift. Naturally, there was an argument to be made for "unheard melodies being sweeter," as Keats would have said, and for not taking chances She and her half-bro could choose to protect the perfection-of-what-might-have-been by not bringing their fantasy to life. But why?
The woman thanked me afterward. She told me that she was going to think about it long and hard. Though a traditional, conservative voice inside me me hoped that she would not follow through - because, somehow, it just seemed safer -- another whisper inside me was pushing for her (and all of us) to think for ourselves. To take each judgment call with what Buddhists term "beginner's mind," appraising it on its own merits. To throw off the chains of hereditary assumption and penetrate the truth of what we truly believe, and why.
David Brooks writes about "The Moral Animal." I prefer "The Ethical Guerrilla." We need to be ethical guerrillas. If not now, when?
