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Introduction
Sexual objectification is a common theme in contemporary feminist theory. Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin have famously argued that due to men's consumption of pornography women as a group are objectified. More recently, Martha Nussbaum has done some remarkable work exploring the negative, as well as the positive, aspects involved in the notion of objectification. Interestingly, those feminists' views on sexuality and objectification have their foundations in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
Within sexual relationships outside monogamous marriage, as Kant has argued, the risk of objectification is always present.
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...as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one (Kant, 1963, 163).
The loved person, Kant holds in this passage from the Lectures on Ethics , is made into an 'object of appetite'; a thing.1
My purpose in this paper is, first, to provide a focused study of Kant's views on sexual objectification. It is my belief that Kant gave us a coherent theory of objectification. Yet his views on this issue are often blurred and, at times, even sound contradictory. They therefore deserve a close and careful examination. This is done in the next three sections. I then proceed in further sections, to some contemporary feminist discussions on sexual objectification, showing how influential Kant's ideas have been for thinkers like MacKinnon, Dworkin, and Nussbaum. My analysis of these feminists' work focuses on the striking similarities, as well as the differences, that exist between their views on what objectification is, how it is caused, and how it can be eliminated and Kant's.
That Kant's ideas on sex and its dangers find application today in the work of these prominent scholars is an important observation. It shows that we do indeed have an additional reason to take Kant's views on these issues, which have been criticized harshly by many as puritanical, conservative, even incomprehensible, more seriously....