Duties toward the Body in Respect to Sexual Impulse (Immanuel Kant – Lectures is Ethics)
Sexual Impulse: An inclination directed toward other human beings. It is an appetite for enjoying another human being.
“Human love is goodwill, affection, promoting the happiness of others and finding joy in their happiness. But it is clear that, when a person loves another purely from sexual desire, none of these factors enter into love. Far from there being any concern for the happiness of the loved one, the lover, in order to satisfy his desire and still his appetite, may even plunge the loved on into the depths of misery. Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite: as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.”
“But as man has this desire from nature, the question arises how far he can properly make use of it without injury to his manhood [humanity]. How far may persons allow one of the opposite sex to satisfy his or her desire upon them?”
Question: Under what conditions could the use of the facultatessexualesbe in keeping with morality?
- Man is not his own property and is not at his own disposal (To say otherwise is a contradiction: Persons are beings in which ownership of things can be vested. Persons are not things. A person cannot be at the same time a proprietor and property)
- Vaga Libido [prostitution] (a wandering lust) is the “depth of infamy”
- Concubinatus [sex outside marriage] The persons who surrenders is used as a thing; the desire is still directed towards sex and not towards the person as a human being. The concubinage presupposes a contract, but it does not give a right of disposal over the whole circumstances of the person, but only of a part of the person (organasexualia). But this contract I don’t have the rights over the whole person, but only part of the person. I therefore use the person as a thing (a person is always and ever a WHOLE).
How am I to obtain rights over the whole person? This is only possible by giving that person the same rights over the whole of myself. This happens only in marriage. Matrimony is the only condition in which use can be made of one’s sexuality.
How does this work?
If one devotes not only sex, but their whole person to another (the two cannot be separated), for good or ill, body and soul, andthe other does not yield themselves in the same way, the arrangement is one-sided. But if I have given myself as a property of another, but in turn I take that other as my property, I win myself back again in winning the person whose property I have become. In this way the two persons become a unity of will.
(Adultery and incompatibility to be at one are causes for divorce – this follows from the above reasoning)
CriminaCarnis [crimes of the flesh] – activities contrary to self-regarding duty because they are against the ends of humanity. (Abuses of one’s sexuality)
-Prostitution
-Concubinage
Crimencarnis contra naturam
-Masturbation: The use of sexual faculty without an object
-SexusHomogenii (same sex): The practice is contrary to the ends of humanity because the end of humanity in respect to sexuality is to preserve the species without debasing the person (is this valid?)
-Intercourse with animals
“All criminacarnis contra naturamdegrade human nature to a level below that of animal nature and make man unworthy of his humanity. He no longer deserves to be a person. From the point of view of duties towards himself such conduct is the most disgraceful and the most degrading of which man is capable. Suicide is the most dreadful, but it is not as dishonorable and base as the criminacarnis contra naturam… These vices make us ashamed that we are human beings and, therefore, capable of them.
Questions:
- How much (if any) of Kant’s analysis hold up in the modern world?
- Is prostitution immoral for the reasons Kant gives?
- Is sex outside marriage immoral for the reasons Kant gives? (moral commitments are ultimately personal commitments)
- Can matrimony be replaced by a commitment of two people to give themselves to each other completely, for life? What difference does the societal sanction make?
- Homosexuality: Is sex for procreation the ONLY acceptable relationship?
Why not accept the idea of sex as the desire for physical contact? Alan H. Goldman, professor of philosophy at the University of Miami:
“…I shall criticize the predominant form of analysis [of sex] which I term ‘means-end analyses’. Such conceptions attribute a necessary external goal or purpose to sexual activity, whether it be reproduction, the expression of love, simple communication, or inter-personal awareness. They analyze sexual activity as a means to one of these ends, implying that sexual desire is a desire to reproduce, to love or be loved, or to communicate with others. All definitions of this type suggest false views of the relation of sex to perversion and morality by implying that sex which does not fit one of these models or fulfill one of these functions is in some way deviant or incomplete. The alternative, simpler analysis…is that sexual desire is desire for contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces; sexual activity is activity which tends to fulfill such desire of an agent…”