Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of Kant’s practical sexual ethic, drawing attention to the way in which his views are informed by both his philosophical anthropology and his understanding of gender. I begin by examining what Kant says about “the character of the sexes,” which is the phrase he uses to describe what we would call “gender.” Specifically, I present the way in which Kant characterizes women and analyze the implications of his account for (a) his understanding of the moral agency of women, and (b) his understanding of gender relations. Next, I examine Kant’s understanding of sexual appetite and explain the ways in which he thinks it involves the objectification of the object of one’s sexual desire. I conclude the chapter with a detailed examination of Kant’s treatment of various sexual vices in order to bring to light the moral reasoning that informs his practical sexual ethic. In this way I hope to identify how and why Kant finds sex problematic, which will allow me in the next chapter to explain why and to what extent he thinks marriage is the solution to this problem.
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Notes
- 1.
Elizabeth Brake (2005, 83–88) disagrees with Herman on this point.
- 2.
Kurt Mosser (1999) raises questions about the sources some feminist critics use in their evaluations of Kant, including Kant’s Anthropology. So, we find Mosser observing that “the Anthropology lectures were given, as we have seen, as early as the 1770s, and it is unclear how much, if any [sic.] revision they underwent” (350). Mosser, also, however, acknowledges that Kant approved the publication of the Anthropology (344). To my mind, Kant’s approval indicates that the content of the work accurately reflects his mature view.
- 3.
It is worth acknowledging that a similar issue arises with respect to Kant’s discussion of race, particularly, though not exclusively, in his Anthropology (A 7:311–320). Bernasconi (2001), for example, is very critical of Kant’s treatment of race. For an example of a thinker who is critical of Kant’s racism and yet finds some value in his moral and political philosophy for developing an ethics of race, see Naomi Zack (2011, 141–145).
- 4.
- 5.
Holly Wilson (1998, 289–290) takes this metaphor to indicate that Kant believed that sexual difference is something that is in the process of evolving, due in part to the way our unsocial sociability motivates our general evolution from a crude state to a more cultured one.
- 6.
The notion of natural teleology also plays an important role in Kant’s account of sexual vices, which I discuss below (Sect. 5.3).
- 7.
Kant claims that women are merely “passive citizens,” since they depend on another to manage their affairs (MM 6:314; TP 8:294–296). See Sect. 5.1.3 below.
- 8.
Robin May Schott (1997, 333) challenges what she takes to be the essay’s “fundamental conception of rationality, autonomy, and freedom.”
- 9.
Helga Varden (2015, 28–30) argues that Kant believes woman can become enlightened and engage in public reason no less than men can. On Varden’s reading of the long passage from which I quote, “Kant condemns men for being ever so willing to make women their ‘dumb domesticated animals,’ for ‘carefully prevent[ing]…these placid creatures from daring to take a single step without the walking cart which they have confined them,’ and for presenting the world as a dangerous place that women should be deeply afraid of” (29). Although I am sympathetic with Varden’s attempt to defend Kant from certain feminist criticisms, I see no evidence in the text to indicate that Kant writes specifically of the way men treat women. Rather, in the text Varden quotes, Kant is remarking on the way guardians (all of whom would have been men) treat those who remain in minority (which would include men and women).
- 10.
Cf. Simone de Beauvoir (1952, 267): “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.” Varden (2015, 15–19) provides an extended comparison of Kant and Beauvoir on gender.
- 11.
I examine Varden’s argument regarding active citizenship in the next section.
- 12.
Cf. Varden (2015, 30): “I tend to think that if he could come back from the dead and see what has happened, including how many female philosophers first proved him wrong precisely by furthering his philosophy, he would smile.”
- 13.
Cf. Beauvoir (1952, 61): “I have already stated that when two human categories are together, each aspires to impose its sovereignty upon the other. If both are able to resist this imposition, there is created between them a reciprocal relation, sometimes in enmity, sometimes in amity, always in a state of tension. If one of the two is in some way privileged, has some advantage, this one prevails over the other and undertakes to keep it in subjection.”
- 14.
Cf. Rousseau (1992, 39): “Now it is easy to see that the moral aspect of love is an artificial sentiment born of social custom, and extolled by women with so much skill and care in order to establish their hegemony and make dominant the sex that ought to obey.”
- 15.
Jane Kneller (2006, 468) takes this remark to be a “desperate attempt to paper over” the authoritarian assumptions motivating Kant’s understanding of domestic relations.
- 16.
Although passive citizens are dependent on the wills of others, Kant thinks that “this inequality is, however, in no way opposed to their freedom and equality as human beings, who together make up a people” (MM 6:315).
- 17.
Varden (2015, 3) argues that Kant believed women to be capable working their way into “an active condition,” thereby being capable of active citizenship, at least in principle. Her argument turns on her reading of MM 6:315, where Kant claims that a state’s laws must “not be contrary to the natural laws of freedom and of the equality of everyone in the people corresponding to this freedom, namely that anyone can work his way up from this passive condition to an active one.” Varden (2015, 26; 40, note 30) translates the relevant portion of the text as “anyone can work one’s way up,” since Kant uses the gender-neutral word Volk for “people.” Although her translation is defensible, I do not think that it warrants her conclusion that Kant believed women to be capable of active citizenship. Immediately prior to the passage in question (MM 6:314–315), Kant gives several examples of passive citizens, all of whom are males who make their respective living by working for another: a woodcutter, a blacksmith in India, a carpenter or a blacksmith in Europe, a private tutor, and a tenant farmer. So, it stands to reason that the “anyone” to whom Kant refers means “anyone of these men who are passive citizens.”
- 18.
Cf. Beauvoir (1952, Volume II, Chapter 12) for a similar point of view.
- 19.
To adapt Mika Mikkola’s phrase from earlier, I think there are sufficient similarities between the positions Kant defends in the Collins Lecture Notes and the positions he defends in his Metaphysics of Morals to take the notes as consistent with Kant’s considered view.
- 20.
Cf. MM 6:419: “The subject that is bound, as well as the subject that binds, is always the human being only; and though we may, in a theoretical respect, distinguish soul and body from each other, as natural characteristics of a human being, we may not think of them as different substances putting him under obligation, so as to justify a division of duties to the body and duties to the soul.”
- 21.
Cf. CL 27:379: “Many visionary moralists think, by weakening and removing all the body’s sensuality, to renounce everything that its sensuous enjoyment promotes, so that thereby the animal nature of the body would be suppressed, and the spiritual life, which they hope one day to attain, might already be anticipated here, and the body approached ever nearer it by a gradual divestment of all sensuality. Such practices may be called mortification of the flesh, though that term was unknown to the pagan world….But all such practices, which include, for example, fasting and chastisements, are fanatical and monkish virtues, which merely emaciate the body.”
- 22.
Cf. Christine Korsgaard (1996, 94): “It is important to understand that what bothers him is not that one is using another person as a means to one’s own pleasure. That would be an incorrect view of sexual relations, and, in any case any difficulty about it, would, by Kant’s own theory, be alleviated by the other’s simple act of free consent.” I think, however, that Korsgaard misreads Kant here. First of all, I do not think that there is relevant difference between treating someone merely as a means and treating a person as an object. Second, Kant explicitly condemns violations of one’s own dignity regardless of consent. See, for example, Kant’s criticisms of the practice of selling one’s own tooth or castrating oneself in order to be a better singer (MM 6:423). In such cases the person clearly consents to these acts, and yet Kant condemns them as immoral. Consent alone, on Kant’s view, does not mitigate concerns about using oneself or another merely as a means. I will return to this idea in Chap. 7 when I develop a view of right sexual relations informed by Kant’s thinking.
- 23.
Vincent Cooke (1991) was one of the first commentators to draw attention to the role of teleology in Kant’s arguments about practical sexual ethics.
- 24.
Kant’s condemnation of concubinage confirms my interpretation of his sexual ethic as informed by his conviction that women suffer from inequality with respect to men. So does his condemnation of morganatic marriages (marriages between individuals of different social rank or class): “a morganatic marriage does not fully accord with the right of humanity. For the wife is not put in possession of all the husband’s rights, and so does not have total possession of him, though he has absolute possession of her” (VL 27:641).
- 25.
Kant makes no mention of someone having sexual intercourse with a member of the same-sex that is not human. Presumably he would also find this to be a case of bestiality. And, regardless, such sexual activity would be immoral, on his view, because it involves two beings of the same sex.
- 26.
According to Dworkin (1987), sex between men and women, by its very nature, is objectifying. During the act of coitus, “this physical relation to her—over her and inside her—is his possession of her. He has her, or, when he is done, he has had her. By thrusting into her, he takes her over. His thrusting into her is taken to be her capitulation to him as a conqueror; it is a physical surrender of herself to him; he occupies and rules her, expresses his elemental dominance over her, by his possession of her in the fuck” (79). Although she does not share Dworkins view that sexual relations between men and women cannot but be objectifying, Catherine MacKinnon (1989, 128) takes sexuality to be “a social construct of male power: defined by men, forced on women, and constitutive of the meaning of gender.”
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Arroyo, C. (2017). Dependency & Domination: Gender & Kant’s Practical Sexual Ethic. In: Kant’s Ethics and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate - An Introduction . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55733-5_5
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