CAROLE PATEMAN :Kant & The Marriage Contract

Sexual passion is a passion degrading to the somebody in Kant's view. He views cozy passion as a desire to use some other person's conjure upual organs for personal (i.e. sensual) gratification. Since Kant views all parts of a person as interdependent to the whole person, he views finish as the use of another person for one's own self-interests. Kant does solicit that sex combined with love, in people of developed aesthetic taste and moral sense, is a moral positive that comes from finish but it does not effect the degrading aspect of intimate passion:

Because sexuality is not an sway which one gentle existence has for another as such but is an inclination for the sex of another, it is a principle of the degradation of humanity, a starting time of the preference of one sex to the other and of dishonoring it so as to satisfy an inclination. The inclination a man has for a pistillate is not directed to her as to a human being; rather, for the man the humanity of the fe manful is indifferent and only her sex is the object of his inclination.

The sex act reduces a some(prenominal) male and charrly to the status of a thing. The sort out of personality for both women and men is violated when it comes to sexual passion for its own sake. When it comes to the female person, Kant views women as inherently infer

Of course, the vindication in Kant's mind for this accusation by Pateman is that he viewed women as naturally (physically) and politically or civilly inferior to men. He argues they are much better off immersion into a mutual wedding ceremony lease than to be left on their own in nature where they would become the unprotected feast of physically and sociablely more powerful men.

When it comes to the marriage trim back, Kant views it as a mutual use of the two parties involved, the only mutually agreeable manner in which they can engage in sex without violating their right of person "In the doctrine of right it was shown that the human being cannot make use of another person to get this pleasure apart from a special point of accumulation by a rivet establishing the right, by which two persons disgorge each other under obligation" (Gregor 178). Because of the natural and social weakness of women compared to men, Kant views the marriage contract as the only agency of redressing this unalterable inequality. Women, it seems, cannot voluntarily redress this inequality in any(prenominal) other way than through the forming of such a contract.

Gregor, M. (edit. & transl.). Immanuel Kant: The Metaphysics of Morals.

This apology by Kant is why Pateman (171) informs us that William Thompson labeled the marriage contract a "moral miracle" because a woman's innately vulnerable blot in nature is given equality via the formal entering of the marriage contract between her and a man. Perhaps Pateman's harshest reflection is saved for the obvious contradiction in his views on the marriage contract as instituting equality between the man and woman while still acknowledging that the will and rights of the husband are independent over the will and rights of the wife. As she argues, in the marriage contract "?it is the husband who has use of a person, not the wife. Kant's marriage contract establishes the husband's patriarchal right; he possesses his wife's body, which is to say her person, as
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