Sexual Objects

Warning: this is an intensely philosophical post that most of you may wish to skip.

A couple of recent articles have touched on the issue of "sexual objectification." The philosophy around right sexuality is something that I've had an interest in for decades, ever since I first encountered Catholic theological arguments in a Comparative Religious Philosophy class. They're very interesting, well-reasoned, but from the beginning they struck me as missing something. This concept of "objectification" has also bothered me for a long time, as it also seems to be missing something.

Before I get into my new thoughts on the matter, let me put the articles in front of you. First, and most important, here is a brief account of Kant's theory of objectification (which goes way beyond sexuality, to embrace the entirety of moral philosophy). It's a longer piece, but I can't usefully excerpt it as the whole argument is needed for the following discussion.

Second, here is an account by Dennis Prager on why sexual objectification is perfectly normal in human males.

It's really the Kantian argument I'm concerned with here, but I think it has much broader application.

So, Kant makes exactly one exception to sex as being morally wrong -- and not just wrong, but intensely wicked because it leads to the objectification of the self as well as the other. That one exception is marriage. Here's the argument on why marriage is permissable:


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I think at this point that we would find this argument totally implausible, but especially the conclusions that:

A) In granting sexual rights to a person, you must necessarily grant rights to yourself as an absolute unity (meaning to your whole person, for your whole life), and,

B) This requires granting a thing-like property status to yourself that would permit your spouse to force you to return to them should you leave, and vice versa.

Kant treats all this as a set of iron laws of right, which no human government could alter or abolish. But if objectification is so wicked in general, and requires you to grant slave-like property rights to yourself even in the condition of marriage, why permit marriage at all? The force of this problem is what convinces Professor Raja Halwani, in the first linked article, to decide that sexual attraction is per se morally wrong.

But there is a reason why some sort of exception has to be made, and it is obvious: if no one has sex, human life and all civilization ends.

Objectification as a concern leads to all sorts of absurd philosophical conclusions, including the conclusion that sexual desire is morally wrong in and of itself. (Two more come from Halwani's article: "Is it possible to have sex without objectification? Of course. Prostitutes do it all the time. So do many long-term couples. They have sex with people whom they do not desire. And with no desire, there is no objectification." That implies that prostitution and loveless long-married sex are both morally better than sex between a loving couple, surprising conclusions indeed.)

Let me propose a natural theological alternative position: God would not condition the survival of the human race on a moral evil. If objectification is indeed necessary to sexual desire, and sexual desire necessary to the survival of the human race, then we must not think that it is wicked. I suspect that Kant's entire moral analysis -- the whole of Kantian ethics, and not just his sexual ethics -- could perish on this rock.

But not everyone is inclined to natural theology, or to theology at all. So let me give a Neoplatonic version of this argument. A point that Plotinus makes is that it is impossible to think about the self without objectification: in order for me to think about myself, I have to divide myself into a thinker, and the thought-about. The thought-about part is severed from the thinker, who notices what the thought-about part is doing as if they were separate things. This is exactly what we would call a subject/object distinction.

In thinking about anyone else, then, I must (and you must) make them an object of thought. Objectification is therefore not merely necessary to the survival of the human species, it is necessary to thought.

Can't you think of them as an object that is also a subject? Remember that the force of Plotinus' argument is that you can't even do that in the strict sense when you are thinking about yourself, when you obviously know that you're thinking about an object that is a subject. Creating an object of thought freezes it, for a moment, as it was when you assembled all of the information you have and fused it into a single object of knowledge to consider. If we must do that to think about ourselves, a fortiori we must do it to think about another. Thus, objectification in this strict sense is necessary to thinking about anything -- to thought itself, in other words.

If it is necessary to thought, it is necessary to the kind of reasoning we do in order to do moral philosophy or ethics at all. Another way to say that is: Without objectification in this sense, there is no moral philosophy, and without moral philosophy there is nothing that could declare objectification to be wrong.

Kantian ethics declares rationality to be the source of morality. A bar on objectification of persons -- and especially of the self -- means disabling the necessary condition for legislation of the moral law. Nothing could be worse, for Kant, than to see the moral law abolished. Thus, objectification of the self and others in at least some senses is not only not immoral, it is a necessary condition for morality.

Is it the same sense? Philosophers love to split hairs like that, and maybe some will feel inclined to do so here. Yet it does not seem to me that hair-splitting is worthwhile here: it is the other, and a part of the self, as an object of thought is intensely focused-on and experienced.

This kind of objectification cannot be wrong, as avoiding it would disable a necessary condition for knowing that anything was wrong (because it would make it impossible to think about the other, or even the self). It also cannot be wrong, as the survival of the species depends up on it.

Prager's much less philosophical analysis ends up being the more sensible and humane, even though I don't think he grasps why the argument against objectification must be wrong. He is able to see that it is wrong, though, from its consequences: "If your husband denies these assertions, he is lying to you because he is afraid that you will react angrily or that he will hurt your feelings. He may also be lying to himself -- after all, he, too, went to college and reads liberal opinion pieces on misogyny; and he wants to be an 'enlightened' male."

Certainly holding to an assertion that forces us to lie to ourselves (and our spouses) entails a contradiction on Kant's terms, and such contradictions are proof of an immoral maxim for Kant. But there is a much deeper problem with that. The real issue is the idea that objectification as an act of thought is wrong, when in fact it is necessary to thinking at all.

Now, many philosophers (especially feminist philosophers) who use the word do so in a different sense than Kant or Plotinus. They think they are expanding on Kant's language, I believe, saying something that is in a way original but in a way an outgrowth of his basic ideals of respect for all rational beings. Doing so is itself a fallacy; it would be better to make an argument against the actual behavior that is problematic. There are no problems with coming up with arguments against sexual assault, harassment, and the like without falling back on the concept of objectification. If the objectification theory is as flawed as I believe it to be, arguments that use its language end up weakening the program against these abuses. This is because they give rise to counterarguments (against the objectification language) that could give the impression that the whole ethical argument has been defeated. In fact, defeating the objectification argument does nothing to show that (for example) the rights-based argument against sexual assault is invalid.

Well, I am proposing a serious rejection of a major part of Modern ethical thought here. I suppose that's enough for one day.

13 comments:

Eric Blair said...

I saw some other people taking apart that Halawi guy's argument at the site it was posted on.

The more you expound on this stuff, the more I think philosophy actually stopped somewhere around 500AD. Maybe even earlier.

Grim said...

I think there was some useful stuff going on right up until the 1400s. But the Moderns made a huge set of mistakes, like a Cataclysm, and lost so much in the process.

On the other hand, I think the mistakes had to be made -- they followed from some major shifts in the natural sciences, and if your physics changes, so does your metaphysics. But that new physics didn't work either, and the new "New Physics" doesn't actually work either. An ancient/medieval metaphysics based on form and matter ends up making more sense (even of contemporary physics and chemistry) than anything that was based on Newtonian thinking, or anything since.

Ymar Sakar said...

It's the Left destroying American virtues, not Kant. People mistake dead people as somehow being problematic, when in fact that is the lead to the solution instead.

Philosophy in live humans is the issue, not the dead philosophers.

An ancient/medieval metaphysics based on form and matter ends up making more sense (even of contemporary physics and chemistry) than anything that was based on Newtonian thinking, or anything since.

GOP politics ended up making more sense, but it was useless to welfare people. Humans discern value through profit and usefulness, not through scientific curiosity. Which is why philosophers often dead end themselves in the public eye. They forget that while the highest IQ members of high IQ societies might care about the truth or the method to find the truth, the vast majority of humans care for something more material and open ended in immediate profit.

Ymar Sakar said...

As for the main topic of this thread, this has more to do with politics, beauty, and ethics than it has to do with metaphysics.

Dad29 said...

You may wish to lay hands on the book Christ and Reason by Fr. G. Rutler (Christendom Press). It's out of print, but copies are available at Amazon, IIRC.

Rutler begins with analysis of Kant (he demolishes him, actually) and then proceeds through a number of others, ending with Tyrell. In VERY (and likely un-fair) brief, Rutler shows that Kant ignores The Fall and grace. Either error has consequences, both are cataclysmic.

Ymar Sakar said...

If objectification is indeed necessary to sexual desire, and sexual desire necessary to the survival of the human race, then we must not think that it is wicked. I suspect that Kant's entire moral analysis -- the whole of Kantian ethics, and not just his sexual ethics -- could perish on this rock.


Kant's moral imperatives are un enforceable, except by a corrupt society or state.

Kant's ethics needs God or something equivalent, for it to work, for only a higher level entity can judge human thoughts on the same ethical plane as human laws that judge human behavior.

I also forgot what I used to think about Kant, so bypassing that topic.

As for sexual desire, there's a blog post written by a couple that belongs to the LDS organization. One of them is female and heterosexual. One of them is male and homosexual. And because the organization prohibits homosexual promiscuity as well as lustful desires in the mind/heart as breaking Jesus of Nazareth's sermon on the mount concerning adultery, they decided to have a family, produce kids. So a feminist or homosexual female once remarked that he had a fake sexual relationship. He replied that she had a fake family, since she had to adopt children if they wanted children. In the post, written by the husband, he reported that their sex lives were more fulfilling than many equivalent straight couples they socialized with. I suppose that's found out by girl talk, but nonetheless.

Kant had a point that impure thoughts would lead to impure actions, thus impure thoughts had an ethical quality and judgment assigned to it. But it is not for humans to assign such a value, since humans cannot read minds or hearts accurately.

What Kant didn't want to get involved with is the concept of what Love is. Love, in higher dimensions and as reported in the Book of Raziel, is the ultimate creative force, the binding force that fuels creation in the universe. It was through God's love that souls were created, for angels as well as humans. Having his creations also spread progeny to the ends of the earth might be the same way a human creates an ant farm and looks upon it, or a business or a family or adopts a pet. They like to cooperate and do things with their subordinates and peers. They want peers instead of subordinates. They want to be praised and respected by their family and peers. They wanted to be obeyed by their subordinates, they want the loyalty of their subordinates that comes from love, not coercion or fear.

For humans to understand the Alpha and the Omega is much like a dog trying to understand their human master. They can get close, but there are so many things they lack the capability to grasp. But to a human master, that is not merely a burden but the whole point of the relationship of animal mastery. Getting humans to chase after sheep and cows would be rather inefficient, dogs are dogs precisely because they have a purpose and use. In so far as the angels once judged humanity, God judged the angels, and humans will judge the angels in the end. As humans treated animals, so shall their judgment be in accordance to thoughts and actions. Treat your inferiors the way you want your superiors to treat you.

Dogs are not valued because they shit fertilizer out and make a mess, because of their physical bodies. Dogs are valued because of the higher dimensional virtues, which exist independent of humanity.

Grim said...

As for the main topic of this thread, this has more to do with politics, beauty, and ethics than it has to do with metaphysics.

Metaphysics often has priority over ethics. For example, the natural theological argument is only of interest if your metaphysics includes God.

The Neoplatonic argument is a metaphysical argument, in that it is an argument about the structure of consciousness. Since consciousness is our tool for investigating everything (including physics as well as ethics), arguments about consciousness are metaphysical. But they have ethical consequences: both Kant's argument about objectification and my Neoplatonic counterargument are metaphysical arguments about the workings of consciousness with ethical consequences.

Grim said...

Rutler begins with analysis of Kant (he demolishes him, actually) and then proceeds through a number of others, ending with Tyrell. In VERY (and likely un-fair) brief, Rutler shows that Kant ignores The Fall and grace. Either error has consequences, both are cataclysmic.

You're right, I haven't read that book. The claim that Kant ignores these things in his moral philosophy is plausible, though: I certainly can't think of him allowing much room for grace in his treatment of those who violate what he takes to be the iron laws of morality.

douglas said...

Subtitle: "Why sexual desire is objectifying- and hence morally wrong"

So it's interesting, but I go right to the foundational elements to see if the structure is sound (as any good architect or engineer should!)- "...hence morally wrong". Why so? How is it so settled that the subject is superior to the object? Particularly as it is that one does not preclude something/someone also being the other, perhaps even simultaneously? From what has this ranking or valuation been adduced?

I think Prager is getting at this very thing, but gets a bit off track by making an effort to point out it's normalcy, to which I expect that any feminist would respond 'of course it's normal, but it's wrong!. I think they need to be forced to explain why it's wrong.

"Prager's much less philosophical analysis ends up being the more sensible and humane, even though I don't think he grasps why the argument against objectification must be wrong." Perhaps, perhaps not, but he isn't writing to demonstrate that (or not), he's writing to be persuasive to the average person. He's a pretty smart guy, though I do think it would be fair to say he's more concerned with the pragmatic, and I've been listening to him since the eighties when he started here in L.A. on Sunday nights doing a show called "Religion on the Line" where the format was a discussion amongst a Priest, a Rabbi, and usually a Minister (though on occasion another religious leader), moderated by Dennis. It was a great show, and probably had something to do with my being interested in the big questions.

From Dennis' piece:
"4. Every normal heterosexual man who sees a woman as a sexual object can also completely respect her mind, her character and everything else nonsexual about her. Men do this all the time."
What's interesting to me to note about this is how quickly a physically attractive person can become quite unattractive precisely because of those other attributes- to me it's pretty substantial evidence that the objectification does not stand in isolation from other factors at all, or it might even be correct to say it dissolves the idea of objectification for a more wholistic sense of how we perceive others, object-ness being but a portion.



Grim said...

Why so? How is it so settled that the subject is superior to the object? Particularly as it is that one does not preclude something/someone also being the other, perhaps even simultaneously? From what has this ranking or valuation been adduced?

I had thought the article did a reasonable job of trying to explain that issue while also making its point, in a limited space. Still, I can say more about it.

What Kant argues is that the root of the power of the moral law comes from recognizing that rationality -- which is thought, i.e., the business of a subject -- is unique in nature in its causal powers. Everything else in the universe appears to be determined by things outside of itself: for example, the ice melts not because it wants to melt, but because the sun shines on it. There is only one thing in the whole universe that seems to determine itself, and that is a rational being. The subject, the thinking being, seems to be able to determine at least some of its own actions.

This fact, Kant thinks, gives rationality a dignity that stands above everything else that is. And it is wrong, he argues, to treat another rational being as if they were not a subject. To try to force them, as if they were an object, is to deny the dignity that their rational nature is due. (I would like, here, to say, "For example, to enslave them." It turns out that Kant was OK with slavery, as long as it was inflicted on the right sorts of not-so-rational-in-his-opinion people. Which is too bad, because it's the most obvious example of how this would work.)

But what is even worse, for Kant, is to treat one's self as an object. To allow yourself to be determined by things acting on you from outside, instead of making a rational determination for yourself, is to throw away the dignity of subjectivity (or, as he would put it, humanity and personality). To let yourself sleep with your neighbor's wife simply because you felt an intense animal attraction to her, for example, is not self-determination. It's being acted upon by scent and sight and smell, as if you were merely an object being driven by outside causes.

So that's why. It's not a silly argument. It's persuaded some of the best human minds for two hundred years and more. :) I just think it's fundamentally wrong.

douglas said...

Sure, but as I see it the problem is that we cannot avoid being objects in certain ways and at certain times. If I get cancer (and to keep the argument simple let's make it a form not brought on by behavioral factors), it's not because I'm a rational being and therefore in that view a subject, it's because despite that fact, I am also an object which is subject to the laws of nature. Kant's problem is he seems to be seeking a 'purity' of the subject (as in not being an object), but that's simply impossible. We can make choices about how we react to those things to which the object-we are subjected, but not the fact of whether or not the entire we (object and subject) are subjected to the laws of nature (like cancer).

I'd differentiate from this:
" To let yourself sleep with your neighbor's wife simply because you felt an intense animal attraction to her, for example, is not self-determination. It's being acted upon by scent and sight and smell, as if you were merely an object being driven by outside causes."
Where we have the ability to direct and control our object selves (our drives, our nature), and elect not to, that is by definition a choice and thus under the purview of our subject-self. So at once we are in some ways and at some times mere objects (the cancer scenario), at other times objects that are also subjects (how we react to things like cancer for instance)and perhaps Kant would say at our best pure subjects, but I'm not sure I'd agree with that last bit if that's even a fair supposition. If we were even able to be pure subjects, is that any kind of achievement? To my mind it's a greater thing to be subject to our own objectness, and at the same time rise to be subject in rational control of at least a portion of our own existence, particularly when the force of nature upon us is it's strongest, and the challenge to our ability to be rational and the subject the greatest.

Grim said...

Kant's aware that, for example, we as human beings have to eat. He adopts an Aristotelian approach to that set of problems in the beginning of the Doctrine of Virtue. That's where you get most of his commentary on sex, too.

However, he accepts what is really an ancient Greek argument (and ignores Aquinas' refinement of this argument) about the purpose of sex. Sex is for procreation; we can use our rational nature to see that this is its purpose by looking at nature. Sex for that purpose is thus an exercise of reason. Sex for other purposes, or in non-procreative manners, is always wrong. Indeed, since it is abandoning the conclusion of our reason to pursue animal desires, it's not just wrong, it's an intense kind of wickedness.

Aquinas' refinement of the Greek argument identifies three goods in sexuality, not just one: and this is a major improvement. (The three are procreation, pleasure, and the unity of man and wife into one flesh -- a kind of mystical union in which the male/female division in the species is overcome). I said at the beginning that I think this argument is missing something too, but I have not in twenty years been able to decide just what: something bothers me about it, but I'm not sure what it is. I've discussed this elsewhere at length (in multiple places including here).

douglas said...

Hmm, so did he also hold that eating for pleasure beyond what was needed for sustenance was also wicked? That seems consistent the sexual restriction. Obviously I've a lot of reading to do to get any deeper into this in any meaningful way, but thank you for the discussion.