Kantian Ethics and Sexual Ethics
Focus on Duty and Reason:
Kantian ethics, developed by Immanuel Kant, emphasizes moral duties and acting according to reason. It's less concerned with consequences and more with the intention behind an action.
A key principle is the "categorical imperative," which includes:
Treating people as ends, not means: This means respecting the inherent dignity of every person and not using them for your own purposes. In the context of sexual ethics, this strongly emphasizes the importance of consent. Any sexual act must be fully consensual, and no one should be treated as a mere object of pleasure.
Universalisability: This is the idea that a moral action should be something you'd want everyone to do. So, you would have to ask yourself, would it be okay if everyone did this action?
Application to Sexual Ethics:
Kantian ethics would strongly condemn any form of sexual exploitation or coercion.
It would emphasize the importance of honesty and fidelity in relationships.
It highlights the idea that people should never be used, but always be treated with respect.
Homosexuality doesn’t seem universalisible, since if everyone were homosexual then the species could not continue and then no one would exist to follow the duty to be homosexual.
However, if the maxim is simply ‘follow your own orientation’, then that does seem universalisible.
Pre/extra-marital sex seems universalisible because no contradiction arises in the conception of everyone engaging in pre/extra-marital sex.
The second formulation of the categorical imperative is important regarding sex for Kant. He thinks that sex which is not within a marriage for the purpose of procreation pretty much involves each person using the other as a mere means to their own gratification. This is a kind of objectification – treating someone as an object, which involves treating them as a mere means.
However, Kant thinks that marriage is a contractual agreement involving the granting of “lifelong possession of each other’s sexual attributes,”. The idea seems to be that if each person agrees to being used by the other, then both are respecting each other’s end and thus only treating them as a means, not a mere means.
Not treating people as a mere means in sexual ethics is arguably a good principle – but Kant seems wrong to think that it only allows for sex that is within marriage for the purpose of having children. Kant thinks sex outside marriage necessarily always involves objectification and mere using of another person, but that seems a bit cynical and pessimistic. Kant doesn’t seem to appreciate romantic connection. He never married, after all.
Hume’s meta-ethics was greatly disliked by Kant and motivated Kant to create his own ethical theory. Kant thinks ethics can be based on reason and that we can and should remove emotion as a motivation for moral decision making. However, Hume claims that moral judgements being motivating means they must involve desire, which is an emotion or sentiment. It’s not enough merely to reason that we should do something because why would we care that we should do what we should do unless we had a desire to do what we should do? Hume claims that we just are the sort of being which cannot help but require desire in order to be motivated to do actions, which means Kant’s ideal of the good will is an impossible ideal.
P1 – moral judgements are intrinsically motivating.
P2 – Reason is not intrinsically motivating.
C1 – Therefore, moral judgements cannot be derived from reason alone.
Rational agents can put their emotion aside. The idea that reason and emotion are in conflict goes back to Plato, who saw human reason as aimed higher than the world at intellectual abstract ideas, in conflict with the body which anchored reason in the mere physical world with animalistic feelings. Kant too clearly thinks something like this and suggests that, as rational agents, we can and should try to separate our reason from emotional influence.
However, Hume claimed that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”. There are everyday examples which illustrate this. When someone criticises your deeply held personal belief, your mind instantly starts thinking of defences. If it cannot think of anything, it starts getting angry and projecting negative psychological motivations into the critic. This looks like your mind has pre-conceived feelings and the role of reason and rationality is merely to provide ad hoc rationalisations to serve our prejudices. Our mind is more like a lawyer than a scientist.
It is our culture which determines our emotional feelings. Kant’s views on sexual ethics are an excellent example of how his supposedly reasoned moral views were really just reflections of and rationalisations for his culture’s views:
Homosexuality is an “unmentionable vice” so wrong that “there are no limitations whatsoever that can save [it] from being repudiated completely”.
Kant even suggests children born outside marriage could be killed or left to die:
“A child that comes into the world apart from marriage is born outside the law (for the law is marriage) and therefore outside the protection of the law. It has, as it were, stolen into the commonwealth (like contraband merchandise), so that the commonwealth can ignore its existence (since it rightly should not have come to exist in this way), and can therefore also ignore its annihilation”
Regarding Kant, there is a difference between the logic of his theory which arguably can lead to fairly liberal views, and his own personal views which were rigidly traditional and conservative. Some argue that this actually demonstrates a serious critique of Kant’s ethics. Kant imagined that ethics could be based on reason, yet when it came to the practical implementation of his ethics to sexual issues, he was just as much a product of his culture as the most unthinking and unreasonable person in it. His reason was a slave of his culturally conditioned passions.