Sexual Use and What to Do about It

Alan Soble counters the large dilemmas presented by Immanuel Kant in his article “Sexual Use and What to Do about It”. Soble makes very strong points when he is both agreeing and disagreeing with Kant in his article. The “sex problem” that is discussed by philosophers is a battle of what makes sex immoral and harmful to humanity. The root of the objectification of the body, and luring someone under false pretenses, into sexual activity is viewed as harmful to both the person doing the objectifying and the person being objectified. Soble outlines “Kant’s sex problem” and Kant’s solution, Soble also gives his own solutions, and in learning both I feel the solution is in externalism.

Immanuel Kant defines his second formulation of the Categorical Imperative as knowing the value of a person. It is demeaning to use a person without his or her consent for self-gratification, especially sexually. Kant describes this as using a person simply to serve a means rather than an end, simply put rather than being a concrete loving act with the end of creating new life sex treated as only “scratching an itch”. The idea that Kant, “must take on the other’s ends for their own sake, not because that is an effective way to advance my goals in using the other,” is a way of saying that a man must care enough about the other person treat them as fairly and justly as he wants to be treated (Soble 228). To Soble the “Kantian sex problem” is at the root rather or not all of Kant’s requirements can be met at all in sexual activity¬¬. As Kant lays out all that goes into the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative he describes taking on one another’s ends, but also what it means to make a person simply an end to one’s own needs.

Two people enter...

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...sexual act is can be looked at as similar to today’s society. The idea of sexual desire being a mutually entered into activity as part of marriage is the ideal, along with the consenting unconnected use of one another for sex. Soble also presents valuable solutions to “Kant’s sexual problem”, however his solutions are simply ideas. There is no way to wholly reform the sexual world. There will always be people out there who let their sexual desire over power their mind and morals.

Works Cited

Soble, Alan. “Sexual Use and What to Do about It: Internalist and Externalist Sexual Ethics.” The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings. Ed. Alan Soble. Fourth ed. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littefield, 2002. 225-58. Print.

Stacey, Matthew. "Kant on Sex and Marriage: What Kant Should Have Said." Thesis. University of Guelph, 2009. Matthew Stacey, 2012. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.