[…] to which I allude in the comment, and which I discussed in more detail in my post on “The Brady Bunch Annihilated” (also written, as it happens, in relation to an “Ordinary” discussion) – […]

[…] attempted a more thorough consideration of the incest taboo on its own terms in “The Brady Bunch Annihilated.” […]

Well stated, Mr. M. An especially good point about "it's all rape" being offense to the victims of rape and since my wife is on the board of a big and very active organization called Rape Crisis in our home town, it's a good thing we made that clear.

Well, I see Hegelian logic as the dynamic dissolution of dualisms, but we can leave that aside.

The rejection of the extremes in favor of the relative truth - which might in a different sense be the higher, concrete, or absolute truth - may take a variety of positive forms as well, but philosophical liberalism may not be able to recognize or integrate them. "It's all rape" expresses the perfection of philosophical liberalism, but is an offense to the victims of rape, who experience the crime within your "in between" of life and its human complexities, not at the philosophical or historical extreme. In other words, if it's all rape, then what's rape?

We also have to sustain another distinction alien to the idealization of public reason characteristic of liberalism, in which we presume despite much evidence that the true-as-we-are-capable-of-recognizing-and-expressing-it and the good-for-us will coincide. So, you and I may see human reproduction as the birth of problems - which it undoubtedly is - but the overwhelming tendency of people in general is observably to go ahead anyway and make the best or worst of it.

Interesting. So you're saying that taken to its logical extreme (which could be either nihilistic or fantastical by the way) liberalism ends up having to recognize that there just isn't any way for us to reproduce in a way that's consisted with "right" living. It's all rape. Unfortunately, that becomes a nihilistic justification for borderline reasoning. It doesn't even play both ends against the middle. It plays one end against the middle and then acts as if both ends are being played. What we want to do instead is reject both extremes and then have a dynamic connection to the relative truth that can be worked out well in between. That is better than what I see as Hegelian dualism used in the unconscious pursuit of philosophical unhappiness. But I also sympathies with the notion that human reproduction is a problem no matter what. Lots of great people didn't participate for that reason. But the removal of their genes from the gene pool may also explain why we're so bad off at this point.