Abstract
While many interpreters endorse both Kant’s worry about objectifying tendencies in human sexuality and his argument that legal marriage can avert sexual objectification, they at the same time reject Kant’s notorious and spurious claim that sexual acts are moral only if in line with the ‘natural end’ of procreation, while ‘unnatural’ sex would violate our humanity. However, from an exegetical point of view, such a divisional approach is unconvincing. I shall argue that, for Kant, both the problem of sexual objectification and the (as Kant sees it) problem of ‘unnatural’ sex stem from a single root: the specific character of sexual desire and action. Kant’s views about the moral problems of sex result from his anthropological theory of sexuality as part of our ‘animality’, and they cannot be partitioned as easily. Consequently, proponents of Kantian arguments for same-sex marriage need to undertake more radical revisions of Kant’s theory of sexuality.
