ABSTRACT
Kant’s views on sex, women, and marriage would best be forgotten by anyone who wanted to take Kant seriously. Kantian ethics has been the object of feminist criticism because it presents the requirements of morality in terms of principle-based impartiality, because of its view that persons have moral standing in virtue of their rational nature. 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. Although his central examples are of property, Kant uses the same form of argument to introduce the legal institution of marriage. The ways that Kant imagines equality being restored to sexual partners are not available when the inequality is inherent in the relationship. Although on Kant’s view sexuality creates a morally impermissible relation between the sexual partners, it is neither desirable nor possible to forbid sexual activity.
