ABSTRACT
Kant's views on sex, women, and marriage would best be forgotten by anyone who wanted to take Kant seriously. Kant has dreadful things to say about women; his hostility toward sex, the body, and our affective lives generally is famous; and he has strongly conventional views about marriage, children, and the family. There is some temptation to respond by deflecting these problems into the context of theory. Kant wasn't really hostile toward the body—he was arguing against a sense-based empiricism in ethics; and he wasn't really out to devalue our affective lives—his target was moral sentimentalism; and so on. Kant argues that there is something about what happens in human sexual relations that leads to a condition compromising the moral standing of the partners. The feature of sexual activity that Kant most frequently identified as the source of moral difficulty is the fact that sexual interest in another is not interest in the other as a person.
